Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

A friend of mine, while raising money for Shelter, the housing charity, ran the London marathon dressed as a house. In view of the quite serious injuries he sustained while doing that, it was perhaps not the wisest decision, but he was making a point. On the side of the house were painted the words “Home is everything”, and indeed it is, particularly for those who do not have one. Our country has a growing population, an ageing housing stock and a younger generation who have been almost entirely priced out of home ownership and for whom even renting a home costs far too high a proportion of their income. We need to build new homes.

The reason I am delighted to support the Second Reading of the Bill today, including its proposals for strengthening the planning system, is that it offers the best chance we have had for many years to improve what is an unacceptable and deeply flawed system. We currently have a serious problem. In 1995, two thirds of people between 18 and 34 were homeowners with a mortgage. The proportion is now just one in five. The Government observed in their February 2017 White Paper, “Fixing our broken housing market”, that the housing shortage was not a looming crisis, stating:

“We’re already living in it”

and noting that it was

“a problem that won’t solve itself”.

A gap has opened up between the places we want to see and those we actually create. Instead of beauty and a natural order in our new housing, we see a sterile sameness almost everywhere we look. The consequences are stark: most new housing is opposed most of the time, and in no other period in our history would housing be thought of as pollution. I understand why there is so much opposition. One witness in the housing review I did for the Prime Minister last year commented that

“the planning system rewards mediocrity”,

and people are entirely right to object to mediocrity.

We do not do enough to protect our beautiful countryside; nor do we insist on land reuse as a default starting point. Instead of the new housing that most people want, we have a soulless monoculture. The clunky and inconsistently applied methods for taxing land value uplift mean that we do not see the timely and right-sized improvements in physical and social infrastructure that we need, whether that is schools, doctors surgeries or strong sewerage systems. Most fundamentally of all, the wishes and interests of customers are barely considered. Indeed, for the very item on which customers spend the largest proportion of their incomes—their homes—they hold the least consumer power. That is intellectually indefensible.

There is a solution, and it involves creating the conditions in which customers are treated as if they matter the most, rather than for the most part scarcely mattering at all. More people want to build their own homes than to buy new ones. Research by the Home Builders Federation indicates that only 33% of people would consider buying a new build home, while research by the Nationwide Building Society indicates that between 53% and 61% of people would like to commission their own home at some point in their lives. For the under-34 age group, the figure is 80%.

If we genuinely want to see a solution to England’s housing problems, we must remove the risks around infrastructure—a proper public function—and create more certainty around planning so that the system is predictable, as should happen anyway in a rules-based system. We need permissioned and serviced plots to be readily available everywhere, and then allow consumers to make real choices. Moreover, there is clear evidence that consumers with free choices commission much greener houses with much lower running costs. Increasing consumer choice will therefore assist the Government in meeting their climate change commitments, which will not be met without significant changes in how we build houses. In conclusion, this Bill offers a real opportunity to deliver important changes and I am pleased to support it.