Planning and Housing Supply

Julian Sturdy Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady, and to speak in this very important debate. I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on securing it. Like many other Members, I would like to highlight some of the concerns in my constituency.

York, like so many other towns and cities across the country, is surrounded by green-belt land, which is vital in preserving and enhancing its character and setting. It is as important to the identity of our great city as the Gothic minster, the Roman walls and the National Railway Museum. To my mind, it is an essential part of York’s DNA.

However, the very fabric of what makes York such a great and beautiful city is under threat from the misguided plans of the local authority. The City of York council published its draft local plan in April of this year and, to the utter dismay of many of my constituents, the plan proposes to take 1,400 acres out of York’s green belt and build 16,000 new homes on that land during the 15-year life of the plan. As if that was not enough to satisfy the council’s appetite for green-belt land, a further 1,000 acres will be removed from the green belt and safeguarded for future development. Sadly, the plan does not stop there. The council has also proposed more than 80 additional Traveller and showpeople pitches, all in inappropriate locations, on green-belt land, in quiet rural communities such as Dunnington, Knapton and Huntington in my constituency.

The icing on the cake is that the council is also pursuing its plans to destroy the open countryside that surrounds our great city with 40

“areas of search for renewable electricity generation”,

covering vast swathes of green-belt land in my constituency. It was, until recently, pursuing those sites as potential wind farms. However, due to the unsurprising lack of sufficient wind speed in the Vale of York—something that was obvious to most local people, but that the council and the local taxpayer-funded studies failed to pick up—I have now been given the impression from the council that it is considering solar farms on the sites as an alternative.

I am therefore speaking on behalf of my constituents in welcoming the recent announcements from the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), about the Government’s determination to crack down on inappropriately sited solar farms in the countryside by introducing the solar road map. I urge the City of York council to consider very carefully what the Minister has been saying on the matter and not to ignore the views of local residents.

Turning to the important issue of housing supply, I want to make it clear that, like many right hon. and hon. Members here today, I fully support the decision to scrap the rigid, top-down housing targets in the regional spatial strategies. The Government should be congratulated on doing that. However, three years on, there remains confusion among some local authorities about what housing targets are appropriate.

Some local authorities surrounding York are reducing their targets from the levels that they were at in the now redundant regional spatial strategy. Meanwhile, York, which is currently controlled by Labour, is proposing to increase its old housing targets by more than 40%. In doing so, the council is placing itself completely at odds with the guiding principle behind the modern planning framework—that development should always be sustainable.

York is an historic city in which the local infrastructure is already under strain. Adding tens of thousands of new homes will mean tens of thousands more cars on an already congested road network and thousands more pupils trying to gain entry to our excellent but already oversubscribed schools. That is not to mention the drainage and the strain on existing health care facilities.

With approximately two thirds of the council’s overall housing projections to be allocated to York’s established green belt, I am deeply concerned that the plan will push our already creaking local infrastructure to breaking point. The council has provided no guarantees that it will help secure the investment we need in our local infrastructure. It clearly believes the local plan will result in economic growth for York, but having investigated the issue, I fear that putting the cart before the horse and failing to guarantee the infrastructure investment York already needs will lead many of the city’s leading employers to question in the long term whether York is still a suitable base for their businesses.

In its current form, the plan has the potential to end in disaster for York on the economic stage. That is why I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) that the requirement for infrastructure must be considered when granting planning consent—something that, to be frank, is blindingly obvious. I was reassured by the pledge from the former Minister of State at the Department, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), that the requirement would form part of the planning guidance. I hope, therefore, that the omission will be rectified, as York’s future viability as a centre of commerce and enterprise could depend on it.

Local authorities that press ahead with unsustainable housing plans must be stopped and compelled to consider whether they have the necessary infrastructure in place; if not, they should change their plans accordingly. Equally, we must ensure that the important principles of sustainability and green-belt protection remain central to the national planning policy framework and that our local authorities understand that that is the case. Otherwise, I fear that the towns and cities we are proud to represent will change out of all recognition.

In summary, the tension between our local planning authorities and the planning inspector is twofold. Where councils produce reasonable, appropriate and sustainable local plans, we face the problem of planning inspectors overstepping the mark and making unreasonable demands. In areas such as York, however, we appear to face the opposite problem, because the local authorities propose to decimate our open countryside and change it out of all recognition. I therefore reiterate that it is vital that we have a strong and fair Planning Inspectorate to protect our communities and countryside from unsustainable development. That means that infrastructure must be at the heart of any considerations.