Housing: Young People

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I speak as an observer rather than as an expert. Your Lordships will be aware that I do defence, engineering, transport and things like that and do not normally get involved in housing, so it indicates that something is going seriously wrong if I have to intervene.

The purpose and effect of the UK’s planning system is to resist development, keep the rich rich, the poor poor, and the rest where they are. Before explaining why that might be, I should declare an interest as my wife is on the planning committee of the local parish council, and it is her duty to operate the system as she currently finds it.

In my opinion, since 2010 the Conservative Party has absolutely skewered the younger generations by making it impossible for them to buy their own house. Where they can, they must take out a mortgage with an imprudent multiple of salary and far too long to pay, as many noble Lords have already observed. Very frequently, they must rely on the bank of mum and dad to find the deposit and keep the payments affordable.

In the Thatcher era, a property-owning democracy was created, as my noble friend Lord Lilley, among others, observed. Even people with modest occupations could own their own house, and ordinary families could develop deep financial resources as a result—I think the noble Lord, Lord Best, touched on that. That ability to have deep financial resources was no longer confined to rich, landed classes.

We have now created a precariat. Apart from the employment uncertainties, many of our people cannot be confident of their accommodation as they are obliged to rent. In some cases, they are discouraged from working. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, touched on, there is an effect on the fertility rate, because they simply cannot have a family. It is no good my noble friend the Minister pointing to the sticking-plaster policy regarding Section 21 evictions, because it will probably make matters worse and not address the underlying problem of the lack of housing.

We have artificially restricted the supply of housing by means of the planning system and increased housing demand by means of immigration, but done nothing to restrict the supply of finance. What did noble Lords think was going to happen with the affordability of housing, even for people with good-quality employment? The planning system has become increasingly difficult to navigate and generally requires very deep pockets. This is not a problem for big organisations—ultimately they can appeal to the Secretary of State regarding their development, they can go to judicial review and they have all those tools—but for small developers it is hopeless. Therefore, the planning system keeps the rich rich.

I apologise for going slightly off-piste. There are multiple causes of our inability to improve the UK’s productivity, but one must surely be the malign effects of our planning system. Not only do we not build the housing that we need but we do not build, or allow to have built, sufficient small industrial premises. I live between Petersfield and Portsmouth. A few years ago I wanted to buy a small industrial unit of 1,300 square feet, below the small business exemption for rates. I needed it for my charitable engineering activities. I had the cash in the bank to pay for it, but I had to give up because there was nothing available to buy within 15 miles of where I lived. Interestingly, I detected from the Land Registry that a unit in a nearby industrial estate had been sold but had never even come on the open market. It all seemed to be by word of mouth.

When I look at SMEs local to home, I see that they are packed into units that are far too small and therefore internally poorly laid out. Furthermore, they are unable to invest in more equipment because they lack the space. This means that certain production processes must be undertaken elsewhere, but that uses transport with its associated emissions and other adverse effects.

Following on from the remarks by my noble friend Lord Lilley, we are increasing our population by about 1 million people per full Parliament, but we are steadfastly refusing to bring more and sufficient land into development, both for housing and for industrial use. It is all down to planning. The noble Lord, Lord Best, who I hold in very high regard, was very keen to keep this debate about housing and not immigration, but the fact of the matter is that the two are inextricably linked. If we keep increasing the population by 1 million every few years, we are bound to need more accommodation, both for people to live in and for industry. There is no getting away from it. It is no good talking about brownfield sites. The old industrial sites have already been turned into retail parks and housing estates up and down the country, but retail parks do not provide high added-value jobs, nor opportunities for improving productivity.

With all this, no wonder the support for my party among graduates of less than 50 years of age is apparently in single figures. I am very pleased to see that the party opposite regularly promises to reform the planning system. I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, will be able to say a bit more about this. My noble friend the Minister will tell us what the Conservative Government have been doing to improve the planning system. The output that I have seen is our local plan. That plan seeks to measure the requirement for land for housing and employment, and then possibly meet the requirement—but, of course, it never does. We certainly never hear about any desire to create a slight glut of housing or employment premises. If there was a slight surplus of both housing and industrial units, employees and businesses could be ideally accommodated because something would be available immediately when required. Much has been said about affordable housing. What would happen if, in any particular area, there was a slight glut of up-market and more profitable-to-build housing? It is obvious that developers would move on to building affordable housing without any intervention from government or the planning system.

I go back to where I started. The purpose and effect of the UK’s planning system is to resist development and keep the rich rich, the poor poor, and the rest where they are.