Summer Adjournment

David Johnston Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con)]

My pre-politics career was spent working on social mobility, and I continue to work on it in this place. Like education, housing is important for social mobility. It is important that we help people get on the housing ladder in a way that their parents and grandparents did. Nobody who rents has ever written to me to say that too many houses are being built; they only say that they are unaffordable. If we want key workers for our public services and not to tell people that they have to move away from the area they have always lived in because they want to get on the ladder, we need to build homes.

Constituents in areas such as mine are unfairly characterised as nimbys for having legitimate concerns about the house building that has gone on. There are four big areas in which they have concerns. The first is volume. Across the two district council areas that my constituency covers, more than 15,000 houses were built between 2012-13 and 2019-20. There are thousands more to come. One concern is whether we are getting a disproportionate share of the new houses. The second concern is affordability. The average house price is £335,000—9.2 times the median income in the 2018 to 2020 period—so these so-called affordable houses are out of reach for most people. The number of affordable houses is often driven down on the grounds that the development would not be viable if they were built as intended.

The third concern is infrastructure. We have GP surgeries bursting at the seams, roads that are hugely congested and unsafe, such as the A420, and a crying need to reopen Grove station to connect the people of Grove—some of my constituents have wanted that for more than 40 years.

The fourth concern is the environment. It is not just about what might happen to the landscape or that in a lot of cases the houses built are quite low-quality. I am frequently asked why, given our other climate change goals, we are building homes that we know we will have to retrofit, with lots of gas boilers but not enough electric charging points or solar panels. Why are we still building on floodplains when we have had so many floods in the area?

The proposals that will come in the planning Bill in the autumn are not published yet; I hope that when they are published we can allay some of the concerns. There has been plenty of scaremongering—it is particularly rich coming from the Liberal Democrats, who had a house building target of 300,000 a year, the highest of any party at the election—but there are legitimate concerns about the community’s voice being taken away. I hope that we can address them when the Bill comes before the House.