Planning and Infrastructure Bill

John Milne Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 24th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

First, I wholly respect the intention behind the Bill; it is a serious attempt to solve a serious problem. I also recognise that what was happening under the Conservatives did not work, and never could have worked even if we had given it 1,000 years. All it achieved was to fuel house price inflation, which has now created a destructive division into a nation of haves and have-nots. But I judge this new Planning and Infrastructure Bill through the lens of my own constituency—will it work for Horsham? Will it deliver affordable homes in the right places and with the right environmental standards? I think the answer is no.

The main reason is that the Bill is based on the same mistaken premise as the previous system. The problem lies with how housing targets are worked out—not the national target, which gets all the publicity, but local targets. Why are targets so hard to meet? The reason is that the Conservatives invented a catastrophically bad formula for calculating housing need, which is called the standard method. It measures the ratio of local house prices to local wages, and the bigger the gap, the higher the target goes. The idea is that communities just keep building houses until the price comes down. The only problem is that it does not work. It turns out that in Horsham—as in many places—the average price of a new house is higher than the price of the existing stock, so the more we build, the worse the ratio gets and the higher the target goes. That is the exact opposite of what the theory says should happen.

Unfortunately, this new Labour Bill takes the same flawed Tory standard method and pours rocket fuel over it. Targets control planning permissions, but that is not the same thing as actual houses; Horsham already has 13,500 unbuilt permissions, including the emerging local plan. That total could double under Labour’s new targets. Does that mean that we are actually going to build tens of thousands more homes? No, it does not. We could cover every inch of Horsham district in permissions, but it is not the lack of permissions that is holding back the market. Houses do not get built faster, because developers cannot sell them any faster. Some 80% of what we build today is aimed at the top 20% of the market—all of this was described very well in Sir Oliver Letwin’s analysis back in 2017. The housing market does not behave as one market; it is like six parallel markets, and the houses we are building are largely serving the top two.

I am desperate to build more affordable homes in Horsham, but clogging up the system with unbuildable permissions is not the way to do it. The best way to build more homes is to build more consent. I said that I would judge this legislation on whether it would work for Horsham, and the answer is that it will not.