Responsibilities of Housing Developers

Jess Brown-Fuller Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I thank the hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) for securing today’s debate.

Housing developers have a duty to create communities, not just buildings, yet the current planning system prioritises developers over the very people who live, work and raise their families in the areas. Chichester district council, where most of my constituency lies, sits within the South Downs national park to the north and Chichester harbour to the south, which is a national landscape with protected status. That leaves a belt of only 20% of the land available for housing. The limited space has led to high-density developments that stretch infrastructure to breaking point.

I commend Chichester district council’s focus and determination to get its local plan to inspection stage, but I am worried that Labour’s new ambitious target will take it back to the drawing board, with developers proposing unsuitable land outside the plan. Over in Bersted and Pagham, covered by Arun district council, the housing target is the highest of any planning authority outside Greater London. The area is currently experiencing repeated catastrophic flooding as a low-lying coastal plain.

People feel as if decisions are being made for them, not with them, and trust in the planning process over many years has been completely eroded. Our planning authorities feel as if they are fighting with their hands tied behind their backs, because if they refuse applications for very reasonable reasons, such as the site being a designated floodplain or key agricultural land, there being next to no local infrastructure, or the water companies saying that they have no more capacity at their local water treatment sites, developers then take the authorities to appeal and the inspector finds in favour of the developers.

If a local authority refuses 10% of large-scale developments, it risks being designated, which gives developers the right to totally skip the local planning process and go straight to appeal. To add insult to injury, developers in my constituency regularly deliver sites with far fewer than the mandated 30% social and affordable homes. The homes that are being built are not for local people, and developers are regularly not delivering the infrastructure promised in the lovely glossy brochure.

That is why the Liberal Democrats are calling for meaningful reforms. We propose a “use it or lose it” system for planning permissions to end the practice of land banking. There are currently over 1 million homes across the country with planning permission that have yet to be built, which suggests that the responsibility to deliver homes lies with those developers, not the planning authorities. We demand stricter accountability for developers who build their homes poorly to ensure that the burden of remediation does not fall on those already struggling residents. Critically, we call for a planning system that truly engages with communities, placing their needs and voices at the heart of the process.