amendment of the law

Gareth Johnson Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind words. If he will bear with me, I shall directly address his point about where the houses should go in a moment.

We need to build more homes. Everybody recognises that. That is why, for example, we called for a help to build fund supported by Treasury guarantees to assist small and medium-sized builders in accessing finance to build some of those homes. I welcome the fact that the Government have listened and set up a builders’ finance fund, but history teaches us that we need to do more if we are successfully to change the way in which the market works.

Let me reflect on that for a moment. In the 1930s, when we reached the highest level of private house building ever achieved in the UK, the top 10 house building companies had a market share of 6% or 7%. In 1988, firms completing fewer than 500 units a year produced about two thirds of UK housing but by 2012 that had fallen to less than a third. In other words, as the number of small and medium-sized builders has declined and the big firms have grown larger, it has become easier for the more dominant firms to buy up the land. That is why small and medium-sized builders and custom builders say that it is hard for them to get access to land, so I agree that it is about helping them with finance, but it is also about enabling them to get the soil they need to build on.

The Secretary of State spoke about self-build and the House will remember that the former Housing Minister, now the chair of the Conservative party, promised a self-build revolution and pledged to double––double––the self-build sector. But the facts show that, last year, far from doubling the size of the sector, the number of self-build homes fell to the lowest level for 30 years. That is some revolution.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about the lack of house building. Will he therefore use this opportunity to support without reservation the development corporation that is being introduced to build houses in Ebbsfleet in my constituency?

[Hilary Benn]

I certainly support all measures that will help us to get housing supply up because that is an objective shared across the House. I shall have something more to say about Ebbsfleet in a moment.

We have also called for local authorities to have a higher proportion of small sites in their five-year land supply and to give guaranteed access to public land for small firms and custom builders, something to which the Secretary of State referred and that was also in the Budget. That is also why we have said that a proportion of homes in new towns and garden cities should be built by smaller firms and custom builders. The truth is that if we are going to make progress, we have to change the way in which the housing market and the building market work, which is something that Ministers have not yet acknowledged. Why? We know that the high cost of housing is driven by the cost of land. We know that not enough land is being released for housing development. We know that by the time that land is given planning permission, it is often prohibitively expensive and we know that this can create an incentive to bank, rather than build on, the land.

As the Planning Minister told me in a written answer earlier this year, as of January there were 538,000 units with planning permission that had not yet been completed. About half had been started and the rest were working towards a start or were on hold. He says that land banking is not an issue. He says that in many an answer to a written question, but he forgets that a 2008 Office of Fair Trading survey found that strategic land bought with options, which accounted for about 83% of land banks, was worth 14.3 years of production. That is about enough land to build 1.4 million homes.

What is more, under the current system, there is very little that local authorities can do about it, because existing compulsory purchase order powers are legalistic, expensive, time-consuming and complex. Authorities are in a weak position to try to get the land brought forward. That is why we have argued for and will deliver much greater transparency in the system by ensuring that developers register the land that they own or have options on. We will give councils the power to charge developers escalating fees for sitting on land with planning permission to incentivise them to actually build the homes they said they wanted to build.

The idea is denounced by the Secretary of State but it is supported by the International Monetary Fund and by the hon. Members for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) and for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) and indeed it was supported by the Planning Minister before he got his job. As a last resort, we will give local authorities proper compulsory purchase powers so they can, in the right circumstances, buy, assemble and grant planning permission on land that is being held back from development.

What is the purpose of this? It is to address the current imbalance in power between communities and developers. This is the point the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) raised. Where communities decide where new housing needs to go, which is what neighbourhood planning is all about and why I strongly support it, and when permission has been given, they should be able to do more to ensure that the houses actually get built. But there is a problem here, and it is the reason why the Planning Minister gets a lot of stick from many of his Back Benchers. When a five-year land supply has been identified, all the cards are stacked in the developers’ favour. They can look at one site and say, “That’s brownfield, too expensive to develop, there is contamination. We are not going there.” They can look at another site and say “That’s not viable.” They do not explain their measure of viability but just end the conversation by saying it is not viable. They look at a third site and say, “Okay we can do about 100 houses a year on that site”, even though, physically, it could take 250, 500, or say, 1,000 houses. Then, at the end of the process, when the numbers are added up against the council’s assessment of its annual housing need, what happens? Lo and behold, developers say, “Your five-year land supply is inadequate and therefore, we would like to build there and there and there.” That is what is going on up and down the country.

I think the deal is that communities have to take responsibility for identifying sufficient land for housing supply, but they then have to be able to ensure that the houses that are needed are built on the land that they have identified. What we have at the moment is a system in which communities and their local authorities have very little power and that is why change is required.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I want to discuss the proposed garden city at Ebbsfleet in my constituency. Provided that certain assurances and safeguards are put in place, it will be welcomed by the local people.

Ebbsfleet is as much a concept as a place where we can build houses and development can take place. The proposal is not new; there have been other attempts to build houses in the Ebbsfleet valley. The first proposal was made back in 1996, and seven years ago Dartford council granted planning permission for thousands of homes to be built. What is new this time is the creation of the development corporation and, crucially, up to £200 million of investment in infrastructure in the area to complement the house building. The scheme is bold and forward thinking and, if implemented correctly, will enhance the local area and help ease some of the pressure on housing in the south-east.

The former Housing Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), endeavoured to kick-start the housing project by getting all parties around the table, but to no avail. For some reason, landowners have always been reluctant to get on with building houses in the area and consequently the Ebbsfleet valley is now a muddy quarry. The Chancellor suggested in his Budget that fewer than 300 houses had been built in the area, but I would put the figure far lower. The experience has been frustrating, so I am pleased that we are witnessing the beginning of some action on the site.

The development is on a brownfield area some 20 miles from this Chamber and represents a great opportunity to bring jobs and investment to my constituency. It is next to the High Speed 1 line station at Ebbsfleet, 17 minutes from central London and less than two hours from both Paris and Brussels. It is also adjacent to some of the most beautiful countryside in Kent and to the villages of Betsham and Southfleet, which must be protected under the scheme. I am pleased that reassurance was given to my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) and me that the green belt area surrounding Ebbsfleet garden city will be protected from any building under the proposed development.

It is also crucial that local people form part of the decision-making process. There must be a role for Dartford council, which has proactively tried to make the development happen in recent years. There must be opportunities for local people to input their thoughts and suggestions, as the concept simply will not work if the development is imposed on local residents. The Red Book makes it clear that local residents will be involved in the consultation process for any decisions made by the development corporation, which is a welcome announcement.

The importance of infrastructure’s complementing house building has not been lost on local residents or the Government. That is why the £200 million figure cited by the Chancellor is so important. Families will not move to a muddy quarry without transport infrastructure, school places or medical provision. The development needs to work with the residents and the local council to be successful, but it must also work with the private sector. The site is adjacent to the Bluewater retail complex, which views the announcement as a positive step, and it is also next to a proposed Paramount theme park, the developers of which have also welcomed the idea.

The announcement is pro-enterprise, bold and ambitious. It will create thousands of jobs in the area, help alleviate some of the housing pressures in the south-east and kick-start a faltering project. The possibilities are endless. I have always recognised the huge potential in the area, which, in my biased opinion, adds to what makes it the area with the most exciting prospects in the country.