Housing and Planning Bill

Justin Madders Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

There seems to be a certain amount of agreement across the House that it is time for a new approach, but there is probably less agreement that this Bill is the answer. In my opinion, this prescription clearly does nothing to tackle the housing crisis. Where it does have an impact, I believe it will make matters worse, not better.

This Bill will continue to boost demand for housing while doing nothing to address supply. It will lead to rents and house prices increasing, and will mean that the dream of home ownership is even further out of reach for many of my constituents. We are told that measures in the Bill are focused on speeding up the planning system, but going faster is no good if it is all in the wrong direction and will lead to more and more planning decisions being taken against the interests of local communities who want not only housing, but the right developments in the right areas. They want green-belt and greenfield land built on as a last resort, once there is no capacity elsewhere, but instead we will have a “greenfield first” approach, with brownfield sites left empty in areas where local people are crying out for development, and for those sites that are not brought forward for development, local people will find themselves locked out of the process altogether, destroying any last vestiges of accountability in the planning system.

The planning changes brought about in the last five years have given us the worst of both worlds in Ellesmere Port and Neston. On the outskirts of Little Sutton in Ellesmere Port, developers have run roughshod over the wishes of residents to obtain planning permission for a large number of homes to be built on prime agricultural land. At the same time many brownfield sites closer to the town centre which have the capacity to deliver this number of homes and also bring much-needed investment into our town centre still lie empty. These sites have all had planning permissions in place for a number of years—all predating the permission in Little Sutton—but not one of them has had a spade enter the ground. Not one brick has been laid in anger and there is no realistic prospect of that happening while much richer pickings are available for developers elsewhere. The profit motivation of developers has been allowed to override any considerations about local wishes and, more importantly, about what is actually needed in the local housing market.

We have significant levels of land banking, but there is nothing in this Bill that would compel developers either to build on or to release land in areas where construction could start tomorrow. When I see large tracts of land lying empty in our town where permission is already in place, I see a system that is broken; when I see people in my constituency unable to live in a secure home of their own, I see a failure in the market; and when I read this Bill, I just see more of the same—I see a continued push for a market solution when the market has so clearly failed us.

A brownfield register will not help as we all know where those sites are now, and the obligations of developers under section 106 have already been watered down by the coalition Government to the extent that they are not worth the paper that they are written on. The result of this is that on numerous occasions developers have been able to use planning rules to get out of their obligations to build affordable homes. In the last few years more than 200 much-needed affordable homes have been lost in Ellesmere Port and Neston. Developers have driven a horse and cart through these weakened rules to plead poverty and say that they cannot possibly proceed with developments with affordable housing in them. They say that anything less than a 20% profit margin is impossible to work with, and so greed triumphs over need every time. The result is that their permissions are amended with the affordable housing element removed altogether. When the local authority, Cheshire West and Chester Council, tried to challenge this process the Secretary of State’s inspector came down firmly on the side of the developer, handing local people a big bill for costs in the process. So here we have central Government penalising local councils financially for trying to meet local housing need, showing that the localism agenda this Government like to trumpet is in fact an illusion.

This Bill is just a logical extension of that centralising tendency and the downgrading in importance of affordable housing. Of course we want people to get on the housing ladder, but this Bill will not achieve that aim. There is nothing in this Bill that will compel developers to build homes at a price people can truly afford. What is labelled as a starter home in this Bill, at a cost of up to £250,000, is far out of reach for those whom we should be seeking to help. For those on the so-called living wage this pushes the dream of home ownership further away than ever. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), starter homes will be affordable only for those on the living wage in 2% of local authority areas. We have heard a lot about the Government being for the 1%, so I suppose being there for the 2% is an improvement, but this is not a laughing matter; young people in small market towns like Neston cannot afford to live there because the starter home price in this Bill is already in excess of the average house price in Neston and well in excess of the average house price across the constituency as a whole. The scheme will in fact be counterproductive. The maximum values could quickly become the default position, because the greater the price, the greater the profit. Even if we accept that a focus on starter homes might be the answer, the Bill does not tell us how many will be built. That, too, is left to the Secretary of State to determine. In reality, it will be left to developers to call the shots, and we will once again be relying on the market that has so palpably failed us.

The greatest omission from the Bill is any kind of plan to meet the existing need for social housing. How is my council’s 25-year housing revenue account business plan going to stack up if it has to hand over unspecified amounts to the Government every year, on top of the multimillion pound drop in income that the imposed reductions in social rents will bring? How can it be right that housing associations will be able to enter into a voluntary deal on the right to buy—albeit with a gun held to their head—while the Government are saying to councils, “We’re just going to take money off you and spend it as we wish”? That is an abuse of power, and it shows a high level of contempt and disdain for councils. The Bill is a misjudged, rushed, contemptible, ideological, back-of-a-fag-packet disgrace, and we should vote against it tonight.