Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

Thank you for this opportunity to speak in the debate, Mr Deputy Speaker, and it is a pleasure to follow my fellow Public Accounts Committee member, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). We debate many of these things on a regular basis. I congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), who is also a member of the Committee, on having organised this debate and ensuring that it occurred. I want to talk about a couple of points, primarily about policy perspectives relating to housing and planning, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) also mentioned.

Before I do that, I should like to refer gently to the points raised by the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). I do not want to get too political, but the problem with baselining everything at 2010 is that we all know in our heart of hearts that that is not the right place to start. I know that from the perspective of local government, because I was a councillor for four years before 2010 and I can recall the amount of money that was sloshing around in the system. Quite frankly, there was too much money in the system because some councils did not know how to spend it and were certainly not spending it effectively. We have to be careful when we go back to those kinds of baselines, not least because that arrangement was unsustainable on a national level and inopportune in many areas at local level.

Moving on to the policy points, I have a couple of suggestions for my hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench. One is about an issue that deserves greater attention in housing policy. The other about is fracking, which is a favourite interest of mine and which many Members are already bored by. On housing, I know from debates such as these, from discussions in the Select Committee and from watching what is happening across the midlands and the north of England that the national planning policy framework—useful though it is in many areas—is becoming a somewhat blunt tool in other parts, particularly around housing. We see the emphasis on house building, particularly in the midlands and the north, which I welcome. I welcome the 217,000 houses that were built last year and the 35,000 housing starts in the first quarter. We can also see the huge pipeline of planning permissions that has built up to an average of 350,000 a year over the past few years.

The policies are obviously working, but we have to ask ourselves whether they are becoming a slightly blunt tool. Areas in the midlands and the north are being asked to take large swathes of housing, but if we look at the best proxy for housing, which is house prices over the past 10 years or so, we see that there has been either no increase in house prices or a real-terms house price drop. I would like us to consider moving the national planning policy framework towards a more regional approach. We obviously have a problem in the south-east and around London, and it is absolutely appropriate that we should address that, but in other areas we might need to think again.

I shall move on to fracking, as I do on a semi-regular basis in this place. The reason that I bring it up regularly is that I do not think everyone in this place really understands the consequences of our fracking policy and where it might end up. If we do not understand it now, we run the risk of facing some very large bills in the future, along with the significant impact on many communities including mine, where we have a fracking application in Marsh Lane at the top of my constituency. No one in Government has ever been clear on what the purpose of fracking is.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

One of the problems that I have considered when thinking about fracking is that if we do it at scale, the impact on the environment and the countryside will be huge, but if we do not do it at scale, the benefit will be so small as to make it not worth pursuing.

[Lee Rowley]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

I deliberately left it late to put in for this debate, Mr Deputy Speaker; I thought that if we were voting, I might get a good audience. I hoped that that audience might include my right hon. Friends the Members for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt) and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) so that I could take one of two opportunities. Option A was that I could try out for any ministerial posts available in the next couple of weeks; option B, if I was not that lucky, was maybe to lobby about some of the things I have been particularly interested in.

I am sure you will be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker, that on 26 June last year, the all-party parliamentary group on excellence in the built environment, which I chair, recommended that there should be a new homes ombudsman—better redress for home buyers. Someone buying a new house for a couple of hundred thousand pounds who finds there are problems with it has fewer rights than if they had bought an electric kettle. My all-party group recommended that and, quick as anything—12 months later, almost exactly to the day—the Government launched a consultation on that very topic. I could have saved them the trouble; they could simply read the APPG’s excellent report and we could just get on with it. If all goes really badly for me in future, maybe I can apply for the ombudsman job instead.

It is important for us to think about safety. There is a lot of talk post-Grenfell about ACM materials, but the excellent Nathaniel Barker from Inside Housing did a report recently highlighting that in March last year 44 councils had fire doors that were non-compliant or possibly non-compliant. Twelve months later, half those councils have not changed a single door. How often do we walk in and out of buildings and see that compartmentalisation has been affected because somebody has put through central heating or wiring and affected the integrity of the building? Fire doors might be propped open or their intumescent strip is faulty in some way. Let us not just focus on ACM materials, but also on the relatively simple stuff that we all see every day. Let us make sure that all fire doors in all buildings are compliant. That was an excellent report from Nathaniel.

The Government could also do something a little more simple on improving safety: they could endorse my private Member’s Bill that suggests that there should be carbon monoxide detectors in all new builds and privately or socially rented homes, so that we can protect people.

However, I wanted to spend most of my speech haggling with the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western). I agree that Help to Buy is not as effective as it could be, but I disagree about the natural heir to the scheme. In my humble opinion, shared ownership is the future. If we replaced Help to Buy, an extra 15,000 houses could be generated in demand for shared ownership. If someone wants to buy a £230,000 property unaided, they need to be earning about £47,000 a year. If they are buying it through Help to Buy, they need to be earning about £38,000 a year. However, if they buy it through 25% of shared ownership, they could be earning as little as £21,000 a year. For people in my constituency, where the average income is about £27,000 a year and the average property price is £127,000, shared ownership is the future. It is a great way of getting people on to the property ladder. They can access it with relatively low incomes and a relatively low deposit, and it is the best way to establish a home-owning democracy.

That was a whistle-stop tour, Mr Deputy Speaker, but thank you for your time.