Housing Targets: Planning System

Esther McVey Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Esther McVey (in the Chair)]

I will call Gordon Henderson to move the motion and then the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

[Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered housing targets and the planning system.

This is not the first time I have raised the subject of overdevelopment in my constituency. In the last 12 years, I have done so on a number of occasions, so I will not repeat what I have said before, except to emphasise the problems that excessive housebuilding has caused my constituents. Our local roads are congested and cannot cope with the level of traffic generated by the new housing. My constituents struggle to get a GP appointment, because there are not enough doctors to service the thousands of extra people who have moved to the area. Many of our local schools are over-subscribed, and new arrivals struggle to get school places for their children.

The huge increase in housing development in my area has been driven by my local authority, Swale Borough Council, attempting to meet the top-down housing targets imposed by the Government. In past debates, successive Housing Ministers have insisted that the Government do not impose targets, and that it is up to local authorities to determine housing growth after consultation with the Planning Inspectorate, which of course is a Government quango. An example of the outcome of such consultation is that Swale Borough Council submitted its most recent local plan, which had a housing land allocation for 776 homes per year, only for the Planning Inspectorate to reject the proposal and insist that the figure should be increased to 1,048 per year.

The irony is that, despite the massive increases in housing in Swale over the past 30 years—17,000 new homes have been built in that time—developers have not once matched even the 776 figure in the past 10 years. The problem with nationally imposed mandatory housing targets is that they are arbitrary and lack supportable evidence of need. Officers and members of Swale Borough Council believe that targets should be set at local and sub-regional levels, and should take into account an area’s ability to deliver them. They believe that the housing delivery test, buffers, housing action plans and housing targets have served only to increase pressure on local authorities, rather than to deliver more housing.