Local Housing Need

John Healey Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

The country has a housing crisis, and Ministers are tinkering with the technicalities of the planning system. I thank the Secretary of State for the early copy of his statement, but 70% of people now see that the country has a housing crisis, and they are right: everyone knows someone who cannot get the home they need or aspire to. Home ownership has hit a 30-year low, homelessness is soaring and just 1,000 new homes for social rent were started last year under this Government, directly as a result of policy decisions taken by Conservative Ministers since 2010. There have been seven years of failure on all fronts. Not just the public but his own party expect more of the Secretary of State. Even the Prime Minister knows that housing was a big reason why Conservatives did so badly in the election.

Some of what the Secretary of State has announced today will be useful to help to underpin the national planning policy framework, albeit five years after it was adopted, but we cannot meet local housing needs without new homes of all types—from new homes to buy to new homes for affordable social rent—and securing planning permissions is only a small part of the answer. There were 300,000 planning permissions granted last year, yet the level of new affordable house building has hit a 24-year low.

The Secretary of State is right that the duty to co-operate is not working in a system in which there has been no strategic planning since 2010, so how is another plan going to help, even if it is called a statement of common ground? What will he do after 12 months if local authorities do not meet his deadline? It is sensible to have a standard method of assessing housing need, and the national housing and planning advice unit had one until 2010, when it was abolished. Will the new method apply from April 2018, as the White Paper promised, and if not, when will it apply? Lack of a standard method causes delay in producing local plans, and that is part of the reason why it now takes months longer to adopt a local plan than it did in 2010. How much quicker will these changes make the plan-making process?

At the heart of this is a new national formula that fixes housing numbers for local areas. The Secretary of State tells us that it is not a hard and fast target, yet local plans must meet the new numbers, and in more than half the country the numbers will go up by at least a third. What is it—tough action or warm words, a big stick or small beer? What action will follow a local authority’s failure to use the numbers in delivering the local plan? How many local authorities will at present meet and how many will fail to meet the new housing delivering test that he set out in the White Paper, and how many Conservative councils will fail his housing delivery test? Why did he make no mention of it at all in his statement?

One advantage of having the statement in advance was that I noticed the Secretary of State failed to mention one of the constraints that may mean these numbers do not need to be adopted. The green belt is in his script, but he failed to mention it in the House. Will he make it clear whether he meant to leave out any mention of the green belt?

Finally, people are looking for big action from the Government to fix the broken housing market and housing policy failures. They are looking for leadership to tackle the housing crisis. After seven years of failure, simply fine-tuning the detailed workings of the planning system falls dismally short of what the country needs.

[Sajid Javid]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his entirely predictable remarks. If I heard him correctly, he talked about tinkering with our broken housing market and about failure in the housing policy changes. I think he was referring to the 13 years of the Labour Government, in which he served as Housing Minister, and under which Britain reached the lowest level of housing starts since the 1920s. During those 13 years, housing starts declined by 45%, waiting lists increased by more than 1 million and the number of units available for social rent was cut by 420,000. This House will not take any lectures from him; that is his legacy. I readily admit that there is much more to do, but we have made serious progress over the past seven years—more than 893,000 new homes, including 333,000 new affordable homes, and planning permissions last year were at a record high. Of course, there is much more to do, and that is what today’s statement is about.

The right hon. Gentleman asked about the statement of common ground. The requirement is to build on the duty to co-operate. We want to ensure that every local authority is doing just that—working with its neighbours, but in a much more transparent and open way. They must show their communities exactly how they are going to work with all their neighbours. He will see that the consultation sets out in detail exactly how that will work, but one of the first requirements will be that, within 12 months of the planning changes being made, all local authorities will be required to publish a statement of common ground.

The right hon. Gentleman asked when the new way to assess housing need will apply. We hope to make the changes by April 2018, but the earliest they will apply will be April 2018. To be clear, if any local authority is close to finishing a plan based on its current methodology, and if that plan is submitted for inspection by April 2018, that will be the basis on which the inspector will consider the plan.

The right hon. Gentleman also asked about the numbers—he referred to them as targets. I have been very clear that the numbers—the new way to assess housing need, which ensures that it is done properly and is more open, honest and transparent, and that there are more homes in the right places—will be the starting point for adopting new plans. When local authorities set out their plans and submit them to the independent planning inspector, they will be expected to have started with these numbers. If there is any difference from these numbers, they will have to explain that. For example, green belt, which the right hon. Gentleman asked about, is a perfectly valid reason, because protections are provided for the green belt, areas of outstanding natural beauty and national parks. Local authorities can say, “These are some natural constraints that I have. How can you help me work with them?”

The right hon. Gentleman also asked me about the delivery tests. I did not mention them because they are not part of the consultation. They were consulted on for the White Paper. The White Paper was the consultation for the delivery tests, and it will be introduced, as planned, in 2018.

The right hon. Gentleman has a choice. He knows that his party failed the British people abysmally on housing for 13 years; it took us backwards, not forwards. Now he has the chance to put that right. He can either play party politics with this issue or he can listen to the British people and help us to fix this broken housing market.