Town and Country Planning

John Penrose Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mike Amesbury]

I wholeheartedly agree with those powerful and pertinent points.

The quality of housing—the minimum standards required from Government—should be guided by a moral compass, one that puts health and wellbeing at the heart of housing provision, rather than the profit margins of some of the more unscrupulous developers in our country. Rather than bypassing local residents and councils, why not resource and fund local planning authorities properly and maximise that civic voice to create healthy communities and housing that people are proud to call their home? Ministers wax lyrical about the need for more affordable housing, yet this massive extension of permitted development bypasses the requirement for section 106 contributions and in many cases community infrastructure levy payments too, robbing communities of decent affordable housing and local infrastructure. The Conservative-led Local Government Association estimates that 3,500 affordable homes have been lost due to the current regime of permitted development. This centralisation of our planning system is a Stalinist power grab, bypassing local democracy and creating a developer’s charter, while vandalising the character of our villages, towns and cities, hollowing out our high streets, flattening industrial estates and concreting over green space. It is ideological claptrap with bells on. I worry that the Secretary of State is spending far too much time with his Russian oligarch friends—Private Eye is even referring to him as “Moscow Bob”.

If these statutory instruments are passed today, when more of these unplanned monstrosities start to appear in our communities, residents will no longer be able to voice their concerns to local councillors, their MPs or the local planning departments.

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

On the point about local democracy, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be as pleased as me to note that the plans for local development codes and local style codes, which have to be drafted by local councils—set by them, with local standards—ensure a valid local voice; it is just doing it in advance, rather than retrospectively. Surely he must accept that his points about a lack of local democracy are without foundation.

[Mike Amesbury]

Labour and Conservative councillors, parties of all political persuasions, are expressing major concerns about this. The Tory shires are on the march about it. It is a fundamental attack on democracy. It hands too much power to unscrupulous developers—that is a fact and we will consistently challenge on it. When MPs vote on these measures today, I know that Katya, Abbey and many thousands more who desperately need decent, safe and affordable homes will be looking at us all to know which side we are on. A vote to annul these SIs and to stop this chaotic vandalism coming to a town or city near you is a vote to stop this power grab from our local communities, which will create a bad developer’s charter.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

I follow that excellent speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) by saying that I am worried that the tone and tenor of this debate have assumed that quantity and quality cannot come together. We should put that false dichotomy aside, because it is perfectly possible. We should take together not just the three statutory instruments before the House but the whole raft of the Government’s planning reform proposals, because that is what we should get and what I expect we will see.

I say all that because, as I mentioned in an intervention, the development codes will mean that we end up with good-looking local development that is locally appropriate, uses local styles and materials and is set by local councillors and local councils, meaning that local democratic voices are properly heard. Taken together with space standards that were reaffirmed today, that means we can have good-looking and high-quality housing while at the same time opening the floodgates to a far higher overall rate of housing construction than we have ever managed under any Government of any particular political persuasion for decades and decades in this country.

Ultimately, the quantity of new housing, whether to buy or to rent, is what will dictate, over the medium term, the affordability of housing to buy or to rent. That is the long-term answer. The fundamental problem we have had in this country over decades is that we just have not been building enough homes of any kind of tenure. That is what has driven up housing costs to their current unaffordable levels.

I welcome the total package of reforms, of which the three SIs form part, simply because it resolves this dichotomy—this false choice—between quantity and quality. However, I make one plea. A number of us—many Members from all parties, I suspect—will be getting all sorts of concerned emails from residents and councillors alike who are worried about what someone colourfully called the mutant algorithm that is being used to calculate the number of homes that need to be built in each local authority area. I have written to the Housing Minister with a suggestion about how we might be able to resolve this important local democratic concern: if we can allow large numbers of permitted development rights for homes built under high-quality development codes in town and city centres right the way across the country, we should allow the permissions that have thus been created and the homes that will therefore be built to count against the housing targets.

The average height of buildings in a town such as Weston-super-Mare, in my constituency, is roughly two storeys. If we allow them to go up to four storeys, it will take years of steady construction and conversion to get there. We will end up with good-looking local terraces, crescents and mews homes and mansion blocks, every bit as good as the best in any part of this country, but they will have local character and, more importantly, we can create thousands and thousands of new homes. It makes no sense not to allow a proportion of those thousands and thousands of new homes to be set against the new housing targets. With that will come far greater local democratic acceptance of the overall package, including some of the concerns about the overall housing-build rate.