Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Sixth sitting)

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is setting out her case powerfully. It has been suggested that the proposal set out in clause 7 is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Does she agree that it is a sledgehammer to crack the wrong nut, because what really needs to be addressed is the resourcing of local authority planning departments, so that they can apply the existing guidance thoroughly and rigorously, give each application the time it needs and properly negotiate with applicants to ensure that applications are policy compliant?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friend, as ever, hits the nail on the head. It is the wrong target, which is exactly our point. A lot of information is available to local authorities, never mind their experience of applying conditions. The problem is not setting conditions, but the lack of resourcing for planning departments. As we rehearsed this morning, most people’s problem with pre-commencement planning conditions is not the conditions themselves but the time it takes to discharge them because of the lack of resources in planning departments. A lot of information is available to local authorities, so in general one would not expect them to set unnecessary conditions, because that would clearly be in breach of all the documents I have discussed.

I picked up, at random, a list of pre-commencement planning conditions from my constituency. The developer has just written to me about them, to ask me to ensure that the local authority discharges them, and I thought, “Here’s a helpful bit of information that has just dropped into my inbox at a very appropriate time.” To give the Committee some context, the development is taking place in a conservation area—a rather large student accommodation block—so one would expect the local authority to take some care and use some diligence over the pre-commencement planning conditions, and indeed it has. I want to go through the list—I will do so as quickly as possible—because Government Members are saying that these pre-commencement planning conditions are often unnecessary, yet when I went through the list I could not find a single one that was unnecessary. The list states:

“No development shall take place until samples of the materials to be used in the construction of the building hereby permitted have been submitted to and approved in writing by the local planning authority.”

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[Jim McMahon]

Of course, what I am talking about is the physical appearance of a shopfront, not necessarily the fact that a building was previously a shop. A building may be in use as an office but have the external appearance of a shop. It is that conversion that I am talking about. I am thinking in particular of professional services businesses that are based in accommodation with a shopfront façade but where there is office-type use behind that. That is the point that I was getting to.

Whatever our view about the finish, we need to accept that when we are talking about a policy of empowering communities and giving them a voice and a say, it is important to manage expectations to ensure that they are not let down after the fact. Permitted development flies in the face of that empowerment, because it takes power and control away from them. If nothing else, we should at least accept that permitted development rights are a significant burden for local authorities, and when we talk about capacity being an issue, we should at least ensure that local authorities are given the finances to administer that policy in the right way.

[Helen Hayes]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. The gathering of data on homes delivered through permitted development rights is a small beneficial step. It is long overdue; it should have been introduced when permitted development rights were extended. It remains a significant problem that although the negative impacts of the extension of permitted development rights are widely reported, there are no consistent data to monitor those impacts, and we therefore cannot have the debate that we need in the House and elsewhere about this significant problem.

Concerns have been raised with me consistently, ever since the permitted development rights policy was introduced, about the size and type of new homes that are being delivered under those rights; the quality of those homes; the lack of section 106 contributions to provide properly for the physical facilities and public services that an expanding residential population needs; the lack of affordable homes; and, particularly in London, the loss of much-valued employment space for small and medium-sized businesses. We cannot quantify the scale of the problem, because the policy was flawed from the start.

Although the small measure in the clause will help with the monitoring of data, I am concerned by the fact that the Government are extending permitted development rights to include the demolition and rebuilding of office accommodation for residential purposes. That brings with it exactly the same concerns that I have about the previous extension of permitted development rights—but more than that, it will result in local authorities’ total loss of control over the quality and aesthetics of new development. As we debated earlier, those are often among the issues that matter most to local communities and make the difference between something being acceptable and not being acceptable.

The Minister argued on Second Reading that permitted development rights are helping to accelerate the delivery of new homes. The delivery of new homes at speed and at scale is of course of utmost importance, but the housing crisis is more complicated than that.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Lady refers to the Minister’s comments about speeding up delivery. Does she accept that permitted development rights have in many cases done exactly that? She talks about the negative consequences of that policy but has not spoken about the positive consequences. Does she accept that there have been positive consequences, including the delivery of more residential units?

[Helen Hayes]

I was just about to say that in addition to the numbers, which I do not dispute are important, the size and type of homes that we are delivering matters. It matters whether we are delivering homes that families can live in and have a good quality of life in, or only homes that are too small even to fit adequate furniture into. Minimum space standards matter, and the Government have failed to address that issue. The provision of amenities matters. It matters whether there is a local park that is properly funded through the planning process. It matters whether the roads and pavements are of an appropriate standard, whether there is lighting and whether our neighbourhoods are attractive to live in. It matters whether there are places in schools and GP practices for an expanding population to access.

Above all else, affordability matters to my constituents. It is simply not fair and not appropriate that new homes are allowed to be delivered with no contribution at all to the affordable housing that we need more than any other type of housing in London. As a Member of Parliament for a London constituency, the Minister should, quite frankly, know that.

The extension of permitted development rights is a disaster for the delivery of the high-quality neighbourhoods with good facilities and services that we all want to see. We want to see the right numbers of homes being delivered, but we also want to build attractive and successful communities for the future, not tomorrow’s regeneration projects. I am deeply disappointed that, through the Bill, the Government are trying to patch up a broken policy, rather than accepting that it is not working in the way it needs to and reforming it to make it more fit for purpose, so that we can deliver not only the number, but the type and quality, of new homes needed within the successful neighbourhoods that we all want to see.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

My hon. Friends the Members for Oldham West and Royton and for Dulwich and West Norwood have done an effective demolition job on the Government’s case for promoting permitted development. The Opposition are on record, on a number of occasions, as being totally against the relaxation of permitted development rights for all the reasons that my hon. Friends outlined, including the very poor-quality development that often ensues from developers taking a permitted development route.

It is not that we are against a change of use from offices or agricultural buildings to residential; we just think that it is critical that local people have a say on whether those changes of use take place. The process should take place through the planning system, not through permitted development. We are living with some of the huge consequences, such as poorly planned developments and neighbourhoods, emerging from too much permitted development.

On amendment 28, we are not in favour of permitted development, but if the Government are in favour of it, it makes some sense that they might actually want to know what is going on with it. To date, they are probably not that aware. The compilation of the planning register would elicit further information from local authorities about what is happening with regard to permitted development. The circumstances set out in clause 8 are too restrictive and will not capture some of the information that local authorities have told all members of the Committee is very important to them.

How many additional homes have been created through permitted development? What is the impact on any local council regeneration plans, and on the local plan? Those questions are important. Let us begin with the local plan. If a lot of windfall sites have emerged through permitted development, and a lot of homes—even of relatively poor quality—have been created that contribute towards meeting the housing need, there might be an impact on local plan provisions. The local authority might like an opportunity to tell the Minister and everyone else about the impact of permitted development on the local plan. It will also want to be able to give information not only on the type of housing delivered but on the number of homes, who they are for, whether they are affordable, their quality and a whole lot of other issues.

My most significant point about the amendment is what it would mean for regeneration, and I am really interested to hear what the Minister says about that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton touched on earlier, a number of cities and towns have areas with empty shops, pubs or offices, but they are empty for a reason: the local authority has or is developing a plan to regenerate the area. Local authorities have told us that a developer will now be able to come along, get the office block and say, “I can make a quick buck here by converting this block into housing through the prior approval route”—and bang goes the council’s ability to regenerate the whole area in line with a local plan that has emerged through the neighbourhood planning system or consultations with the community. That does not seem a very sensible way forward.

If I were the Minister, I would want to know whether a policy of mine was actually impeding local authorities from regenerating their areas because permitted development was getting in the way. I would want to do something to put that right and to help the local authority with that process. The Minister will know that the prior approval system in place for permitted development simply does not give a local authority the tools to turn down a permitted development, either for regeneration reasons or because it severely, or even mildly, affects the authority’s local plan.

Indeed, the prior approval system is very complicated. The Government make much of the fact that they have simplified the planning system; I could not help but smile when I saw the statutory instrument that they passed last year, the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, which is 162 pages long—such have been their extensions to permitted development. Each class of permitted development has different prior approval conditions, but none of them allows consideration of the issues addressed by our amendment. For instance, for a change from offices to dwelling houses, the local planning authority has to consider

“whether the prior approval of the authority will be required as to…transport and highways impacts…contamination risks…and…flooding risks”,

but it cannot take account of anything else. If the development will impede a regeneration scheme, the authority cannot even consider that. If there are huge energy conservation issues because the office block has poor energy efficiency, the authority cannot do anything about that either. If it thinks the materials are wrong, it cannot do anything about that. If it absolutely needs affordable housing in the area, it cannot do anything about that. There is really a very small list of things that it can do anything about, and that list certainly does not cover the issues in the amendment.

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[Gavin Barwell]

I would not accept that a council is a community, but I certainly accept that it comprises the elected representatives of that community and speaks with the authority of the community, if that is helpful to the hon. Gentleman.

Stepping aside from the controversial topic of office-to-residential conversion, the question that we should ask ourselves when deciding whether something should be a permitted development right or require a full planning application is whether the change being made to a property is sufficiently significant that it is likely to have implications for adjoining owners. If it does have implications, there are clearly arguments that it should go through the planning application process. I was trying to make the point that the Government did not invent permitted development—it has existed for a period of time—but have chosen to extend it to particular classes of conversion.

The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, who represents a constituency not too far from mine, spoke passionately, as she did on Second Reading, of her concerns about the permitted development process. It is entirely legitimate to say that, compared with the full planning application, the authority does not receive a section 106 contribution for local infrastructure or for affordable housing, and neither do the space standard rules apply. She raises legitimate concerns.

Weighed against that, we must look at the contribution of the policy to housing supply. I believe that in Croydon—my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, also sits on this Committee—the policy has certainly brought back into use buildings that would otherwise not have come back into use. Therefore, it has contributed to supply. The debate on space standards is particularly interesting. We certainly need to ensure that at least a proportion of our housing stock is sufficiently large, providing the space to accommodate families with particular needs. There is a much more difficult balance to strike on whether we should say that all homes must meet a minimum standard, or whether we should allow flexibility. Strong arguments can be made both ways.

I visited a site just south of Nottingham at the end of last week, where I saw a good mixed tenure development with some owner-occupied housing. The housing association also provided some shared ownership properties and some affordable rent. When the Homes and Communities Agency master-planned that site before selling it on to the developer, it insisted that all the homes built on it meet the national space standard. Perhaps predictably, the developer argued to me that it would have preferred to have that requirement only for some properties, because it would have been able to build more homes, which is clearly in its commercial interests.

Interestingly, the housing association made the same argument. It needed some stock with sufficient space to accommodate families who perhaps needed a carer, or included somebody in a wheelchair. However, the association believed that housing need in the area was sufficiently acute that it would rather have had a compromise whereby some of the homes had that space standard but it could have got a larger number of homes overall out of the site. I am not expressing a view one way or the other; I am simply saying that there is a choice to be made between overall supply and space standards.

[Helen Hayes]

I simply do not accept that, in seeking to meet the need for new homes, we aspire to rabbit-hutch Britain. There are of course families who have exceptional needs for space, but every family deserves a home into which they can fit the right amount of furniture and within which their waste and recycling storage commitments can be met and there is appropriate storage for cycling equipment and all the other stuff that people accumulate in the course of family life. We should not accept that families being asked to live in homes that are too mean in space terms so they can afford an adequate and appropriate standard of life is a fair compromise anywhere in the country.

[Gavin Barwell]

The hon. Lady makes her point passionately. Let me be clear that I do not think anyone wants people to live in rabbit hutches. Her own local authority—her constituency crosses local authority boundaries, so I should be clear that I am talking about the London Borough of Lambeth—has given planning permission to a scheme in the north of the borough by Pocket Living, which I had the opportunity to visit. As part of a deal with the GLA, that developer has been given the flexibility to develop homes below the minimum space standard, and those homes have proved popular with young professional people.

A journalist gave a rather slanted representation of a presentation I gave at party conference in which I talked about housing for young people. I ran through a whole load of things that we could consider as part of that, and I referenced that Pocket Living scheme. The journalist wrote an article saying that I wanted people to live in rabbit hutches. Interestingly, that night I was speaking to students at a university and one of them had read the article in question and said, “I’d just like to say that, given the choice of being able to buy a small home of my own or there being bigger homes that I can’t afford, I’d be interested in looking at that flexibility.” Every single student in the audience agreed.

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[Helen Hayes]

To be clear, developments of the type produced by Pocket Living are a specific type of housing—they are a niche in the market. There is certainly a place for that type of accommodation in the market, and Pocket balances space standards and quality particularly well for that niche, but we are talking about the much broader issue of national space standards for all types of homes, and particularly family homes. I have too often seen examples of schemes up and down the country that are not built to the national space standard, whose quality is too mean and that do not provide the best possible basis for successful communities or places that people want to live in.

[Gavin Barwell]

Well, it may be that the hon. Lady and I are not as far apart as I thought we were, because I agree with that. People have different requirements at different ages, and it is certainly important that adequate space is provided for family housing. She may agree with the point that I am going to make. I was going to close by giving an example of a permitted development conversion that I had the opportunity to see in Croydon. She may want to go and have a look at it herself.

[Gavin Barwell]

I suppose the story I told that prompted the hon. Lady’s intervention interested me because one might to a degree expect private developers to look to maximise the units that they can build on a site and their commercial return, but what was striking about that conversation was that the chief executive of a housing association also wanted that flexibility. He saw clearly that there was a trade-off between having homes that were fully accessible and fulfilled the space standard and maximising the number of homes for vulnerable people that he could have on the site. There is a debate to be had, but I do not think that the hon. Lady and I are as far apart on this as I thought we were.

Let me give an example. There is a building in Croydon called Green Dragon House, which was a fairly old office building that was not wholly vacant but had very limited use. It has been converted into 119 homes—a mixture of one and two-bed homes. It is a little like the Pocket housing schemes. It is very high-spec—the quality of the finish is very good—but the rooms are smaller than the national space standard. Interestingly, what is not taken into account is that there is a huge amount of communal space. Virtually the whole of the first floor of the building is given over to a high-standard communal lounge, and the whole of the roof is a terrace, which is communal space for residents. In a way, it is a different vision of how people might live, and it is targeted very much at young professional people.

[Helen Hayes]

The Minister is being generous with his time. I will simply say that the scheme he describes sounds commendable. It also sounds like exactly the kind of scheme that a local authority would have given planning permission for. The point about permitted development rights is that we cannot leave to chance whether the development industry will deliver to that high standard. We have to secure that high standard through the planning system.