Five-year Land Supply

George Freeman Excerpts

Wednesday 4th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[James Cartlidge]

I know that my hon. Friend is passionate about that issue and has come up with some radical suggestions in that regard.

The experience in Babergh is common around the country, and it underlines my main point. It sounds good in principle to say to councils, “Nimby councils will be held to account—you must deliver the homes,” but they are doing the right thing. They are granting permissions—in fact, they are granting way more than they are meant to—and going through the pain of taking controversial decisions in planning committees and so on, but sites are not being built out.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

I led a debate on this issue earlier this year, which my hon. Friend supported. Does he agree that although we must get the detail right, there is also a question of principle? Through the Localism Act 2011, we set out to be the party that, when in government, gave local communities the chance to shape their future. We are now in danger of looking like we are in favour of speculators, profiteers and out-of-town developers, who dump housing estates that we legislate for, with no responsibility being taken locally. That is not what our party should be about.

[James Cartlidge]

That is an excellent point. The key word, which we will hear a lot in the coming days, is “control.” We call it speculative development because the community loses control. Let us be honest: if an area has a five-year land supply, there will still be controversial planning applications, but those will be determined by the local authority. People will be unhappy about homes being built in—this is a terrible phrase—their backyard, but the point is that the local community will have a say; it will have control.

Colleagues know what speculative applications are like. They come forward, often from a new breed of company called the promoter of a development, rather than from a builder. Those companies work the system to their advantage, putting out brochures that often boast, “Your local district doesn’t have a five-year land supply.” We get extraordinarily unpopular applications that get people marching down our streets, yet we find there is nothing we can do about them. It is not like councils are not doing the right thing; they are giving out thousands of planning permissions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I shall be brief, because we are likely to be interrupted by Divisions.

I am pleased to say “ditto”, because we have exactly the same problems in Stroud district. We face the dilemma that for all the houses we might want to build, we have a huge number of extant planning permissions—more than 5,000—but no ability to force recalcitrant developers, promoters or landowners to develop those sites, whoever they may be. That is depressing, because we have acute housing need.

There are two other elements. First, the Government have substantially increased the number of houses that we are expected to get built. We are mystified by how they came to the number they did. Hopefully the Minister can do some work via his civil servants to find out why our numbers increased so dramatically when other authorities in Gloucestershire have had minimal increases, a standstill or actually a reduction. That would be helpful, because we think we are being punished for the simple fact that we have been quite good at delivering on our housing, despite all those extant sites.

Secondly—we all know about this—there is the viability assessment. Developer after developer comes back to us and says, “We can no longer afford to build those affordable units. The scheme is now very different from when we got planning permission. We cannot afford to provide the infrastructure we said we would and, more particularly, we will have to reduce, or indeed remove completely, the affordable units that are part of the existing planning permission. If we can’t do that, we will appeal or—worse—move ourselves off the sites,” and then we get no housing at all.

Those two elements make it difficult for a small district authority to keep up with demand—we are trying to build houses, as the Government and the Opposition want—while dealing with those people who say to us, quite rightly, “This was the planning permission. We might not have liked it, but we were getting some affordable houses out of it, so we stomached it. And what have we got? We’ve been kicked in the teeth.” It is as simple as that. Therefore, parish councils that might have proposed innovative schemes say, “Well, that other parish council got turned over big time. Why should we even consider this?” The process and environment are totally negative, adversarial and difficult.

[George Freeman]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point. Does he agree that one injustice in the current system is that those councils—parish councils, in my case—that lead and put together a neighbourhood plan normally propose more housing than the district council had done, but they end up being punished for doing so, not rewarded? Three villages in my constituency did so and have ended up with a Gladman-led development forced through against their wishes. That destroys rather than enhances public trust in planning.

[Dr Drew]

We actually beat Gladman in my constituency, so there is at least one aspect where we are slightly different, but the reality is exactly that. It is most difficult to persuade parish councils that they can do more when they have seen their neighbouring parishes turned over big time.

There is a generic problem, so I appeal to the Minister to look at the process—and in particular at Stroud district, because we have a specific problem with our increase. We will never build anything like the numbers of houses we want unless we solve that quickly. We need clarity so that people know that what is promised will be delivered. Dare I say that we could get rid of some of these extant sites? If the developers do not want to use them, they should lose them. We will find other people who will come and build on them appropriately, and then we will begin to deal with our housing problems.

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

The last time I was in this Chamber, I had cause to warn the rail Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), that in Sussex we have a habit of burning an effigy of people who have particularly irritated us. At the moment, those who run Govia Thameslink Railway are at the top of that list, but running a very close second are those responsible for undermining the neighbourhood planning policy, which should be heralded as such a great success for this Government. It was the policy by which power was to be returned to local people, who were to have control over where development went. Decisions taken in neighbourhood plans are entered into by the whole community, having been drawn up by volunteers and then voted on by that community in local referendums. Just as we are now debating nationally the importance of honouring a referendum result, so it gravely undermines democracy locally when decisions taken by local communities can be so easily overridden. I am afraid that is exactly what is happening.

I very much welcome my hon. Friend the Minister to his place. I hope that he will take this message back to his Department. This is like groundhog day: we have had this debate endlessly in this Chamber and on the Floor of the House, and we are constantly told, “Yes, the Government understand the problem and will do something about it.” Indeed, in December 2016 Gavin Barwell, then the excellent Housing Minister and now the Prime Minister’s excellent chief of staff, introduced helpful new guidance precisely designed to deal with the problem, ensuring that neighbourhood plans would be respected and that speculative developers could not win in the way my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) has ably described. The problem with that guidance is that it can apply only to neighbourhood plans made up to two years before the date of that guidance, and if local authorities did not have a three-year land supply it did not work at all.

Subsequent to the introduction of those new measures, I have had at least two decisions taken right up to the Planning Inspectorate or the Secretary of State and then lost on appeal because that guidance could not be used. It offered no protection to the local community on those technicalities and the speculative developers won. It is important to underline my hon. Friend’s point: that is not the way to increase house building in this country. We stand united in our desire to increase housing supply, which is a political, economic and social imperative. Everybody gets that, but the whole point is that neighbourhood plans delivered significantly more housing than was anticipated and, best of all, they did it with local consent.

Local communities were brought together and told that they would be given power. They were asked to accept responsibility and they did so, taking difficult decisions, sometimes in the face of strong local opposition, and agreed that development should go in certain places while other places should be protected. Those communities worked on the assumption that what they had been told was true, so those areas were to be protected for the 15-year life of the plan. However, almost within months they see that meant absolutely nothing; the developers could simply charge in.

Worse, those communities were given promises by their local Member of Parliament that everything would be made better by the new guidance, from December 2016, which the Campaign to Protect Rural England, I and hon. Friends who worked on it all said would help. No doubt it has helped in some circumstances, but by no means all, as I indicated. What happens then is support for neighbourhood plans collapses. In West Sussex, I now find it difficult to persuade communities that have not done neighbourhood plans to enter into them. They say, “Look at what happened in the neighbouring village. They went through this process, which costs a lot of money and costs the volunteers a lot of grief. Is it really worth it? The developers come in and simply overrode the plans anyway.”

[George Freeman]

My right hon. Friend is putting a powerful point to the Minister about the undermining of trust in the system. Does he agree that something else is going on? Where, in my case, the district council agreed to put housing in the right place, down by the main road—the A11 in this case—the developers are banking those permissions for later, because they know that they will get them, and using the five-year land supply to force the wrong development in the wrong places. Not only is trust in the system undermined, but we are getting the wrong development in the wrong places, which is deeply undermining people’s ability to say yes to new housing. It is compounding the problem.

[Nick Herbert]

My hon. Friend puts it incredibly well, and I strongly agree. That is why this is so cynical. We have to understand that developers are not just taking advantage of a loophole but gaming the system. As a consequence, I believe we are building fewer houses than we could if developers had to do what policy should require and deliver. I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) has been charged with looking at this, and that is important, but there are changes we could make in the meantime, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk has suggested.

I will make two final points to the Minister. First, the Government are incorporating the guidance they issued in December 2016 into the new national policy framework. Could they look again at the threshold for the three-year land supply and the longevity of the test? Under both those things, the suitability of this as a remedy is being lost. It is not as effective as it should be. Could the Government also look at the wording they are using to incorporate it? It defines “recently brought into force” neighbourhood plans as meaning

“a neighbourhood plan which was passed at referendum two years or less before the date on which the decision is made.”

That is leading some to believe that neighbourhood plans simply fall after two years, which I am sure is not what the Government mean. It would be helpful to clarify that they do not mean that.

Secondly, and more important, our policy needs to change and we need to move away from five-year land supplies to delivery as the test. That is the fundamental change that needs to be made if we want to build houses and we wish to do so with public consent. I suggest that is the better way to do it.