Homes and Planning Bill

Fleur Anderson Excerpts

Friday 13th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

I welcome that intervention, and I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about small business rate relief on retail, hospitality and leisure, especially for those in the hospitality sector, who in many cases—certainly in my constituency, as in his—are on their knees as far as future viability is concerned. At the end of the day, if one wanted to disaggregate the holiday letting fraternity from that definition, the Bill could be one means of doing that. If we had a planning register, we could see them all with their C6 categorisation, which would help us to say, “This category is exempt from the small business rate relief system.” Then we would not be wasting money in that area; we could instead invest it where it is desperately needed.

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s Bill on housing, which is such an important issue to constituents across the country, as he said. In London, dark flats—flats not used by anyone—are a big issue for us; at the same time, more than 8,000 people are registered on the social housing waiting list and 4,000 families are in temporary accommodation. Many mums criss-cross London, taking their children to get on buses to school and back. Does he agree that the issue is not just having more homes, but where those homes are, so that they are connected to jobs and support networks and make life affordable for people in many other ways?

[Andrew George]

I entirely agree. Although I have highlighted rural and coastal areas such as my own, I am well aware that London and many inner urban areas also have an issue with the proliferation of second homes.

In fact, that brings me to what I was hoping to talk about some moments ago: the clauses of the Bill itself. The first four—the community-led homes element of the Bill—are simply a logical extension of community rights relating to assets of community value. The powers would simply extend those rights to the identification of land or buildings either in or adjoining a community. That would enable a local community organisation to advance a project to deliver affordable homes for local communities.

I declared an interest as having been a professional in this sector in the past, and I am still a volunteer in it; I therefore have some experience of being involved with local communities that wish to address their local housing needs. This is the opposite of the nimby: the yimby. This is, “Yes, please, in our backyard; we would like affordable homes,” not more unaffordable homes, which is what the planning system seems to deliver for many local communities in areas like mine.

How can we deliver more affordable homes? The way to do it, if all potential development sites are taken, is to undertake a call for land. In many of the cases in which I was doing that, through community land trusts or parish and town councils, there would be no response: the price available for affordable housing on rural exception sites was significantly more than the agricultural value currently available to the landowner, but less than might be available to that landowner—easily by a factor of 10 or 100—if the land were to get planning permission for unaffordable, open-market housing. Landowners therefore would not come forward with sites to deliver affordable housing. The purpose of the first four clauses is to give communities the powers—as a community right—to identify that land. That would strengthen the ability of communities—through parish and town councils, community land trusts and other community-led organisations—to meet unmet local housing need, including through the delivery of in-perpetuity social and affordable housing.

The Bill contains a number of safeguards. The local authority must be consulted, and land made available would have to be at a scale commensurate with the moderate growth of the community. Provisions would prevent the expropriation of private gardens and similar land, there would be a vacancy and utilisation test, and powers would be exercised only as a last resort, after a call for land and all other measures had been pursued.

The planning background to the Bill is that in places such as Cornwall we have for decades followed the policies of successive Governments in meeting very high house building targets. Indeed, Cornwall has been one of the fastest growing places for housing in the United Kingdom—almost trebling its housing stock in the past 60 years—and yet the housing problems of local people have got significantly worse. One of the lessons that one learns from this is that pursuing a policy of a means to an end rather than an end in itself—that is, the building of homes, rather than meeting the need—has been an abject failure. This Bill would put need first, rather than simply building homes.

Cornwall has had its house building targets significantly increased—almost doubled—as a result of the Government’s changes to housebuilding targets. That has resulted in the counter-productive outcome that sites previously identified for affordable homes—rural exception sites on the edge of towns and villages—have, as a result of planning appeals, had those permissions changed to now deliver unaffordable homes. In other words, all the affordability has been stripped out of the development, and planning inspectors have been obliged to permit those homes to be delivered purely as open market homes.

The reason that the planning inspectors have said this is the case—[Interruption.] The Minister is chuntering at me; I am very happy to take an intervention from him if he wishes. Planning inspectors have said that because local authorities have had the rug pulled from underneath them, they are no longer able to demonstrate that they have a five-year supply of land. It takes two or three years for a local authority to go through the process to identify sites. Cornwall had identified a five-year land supply at a prior stage, but when the Government announced the new figures, it immediately no longer had that.