Kevin Hollinrake
Main Page: Kevin Hollinrake (Conservative - Thirsk and Malton)Housing and Planning Bill (Third sitting)
Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Matthew Pennycook
Q 225 We know that effective place making requires decent infrastructure. Do you have concerns, if starter homes are exempt from the community infrastructure levy, that the necessary infrastructure to build sustainable communities will not be there?
Mike Kiely: Almost certainly. It seems an odd public policy to take money away from necessary infrastructure and subsidise a five-year reduction, and then that individual gets the benefit of that public subsidy. When you set your CIL, there is always a huge gap between the moneys that you can bring in through section 106 and CIL and the necessary infrastructure bill. It is always a challenge to provide the infrastructure, and we need to try and get as much money as we can into the public purse to deliver that supportive infrastructure. This will clearly reduce that, and will mean we are less able to provide the schools, highway improvements or whatever that facilitate the functioning of communities. It will be harder for us to do that.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
Q 226 Ms Alafat, you mentioned in your submission the need for local planning and development teams to have more resources. Do you not feel that the changes contained in the Bill on the planning system—to require a local plan by 2017, to make time timely decisions, and on planning in principle—will effectively ensure that local authorities properly provide the resources for their planning departments and prioritise that to ensure economic development?
Terrie Alafat: As Trudi has already mentioned, the reality is that local authority planning departments have been under significant pressure already. It is worth thinking about the implementation of this, given how important planning is, to try to make certain that we have the right resources at local level, but also the right skills. I think that is an important implementation issue. In terms of the Housing and Planning Bill, there are other very good measures being taken—for example, in the private rented sector—that require local authorities to do more on enforcement, but we need to look at the resourcing of that as well.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 227 You would accept, then, that local authorities will need to look in more detail at this and prioritise resources in planning departments as a result of the changes.
Terrie Alafat: I think that if we are trying to engage local authorities to support house building, we need to give them the tools to do that, but we also need to look at the resourcing issues.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 228 That is a matter for them to prioritise, isn’t it? Some local authorities have reduced resources within their planning departments back to 50%.
Terrie Alafat: Yes, they have.
Kevin Hollinrake
That cannot be right. The developers we speak to every single day speak of their frustration with planning systems, because those departments are not properly resourced.
Terrie Alafat: Obviously, these are local decisions. Local authorities have to look at their prioritisation across their statutory duties. I am not in a position to decide that for local authorities, but it is fair to say that if housing growth is a priority for the country, we need to look at how to do that with the involvement of local authorities, which have an important role to play. It is interesting that on some of the other proposals in the Bill—pay to stay and the selling off of high-value stock—the funding is going to be taken back by central Government. It is worth asking in the round whether we are giving local authorities the tools and resources to deliver this.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 229 Dr Ellis, you referred to the changes in the planning processes as radical. Would you expand on that?
Dr Hugh Ellis: The most radical change in the Bill, I guess, is the end of English discretionary planning. The powers in the Bill on permission in principle are extraordinary. They apply to all land and all forms of development contained in the appropriate documents, which is all development plans. There has been a very strong narrative that this will only apply to housing, and only to a small number of houses, but the permission in principle idea, which is as close to zonal planning as we have got in this country, gives the Government the power at any time to introduce it to all forms of development. For example, fracking could easily be a part of it in a minerals plan.
What really puzzles me is, if you want to use this power in a restricted, focused way, why create such an extraordinary level of change in the plan? To give you an idea, the English discretionary planning system was developed in response to zonal planning. It was meant to be more flexible, particularly for the private sector, and more democratic. The zonal planning systems in the US have been extremely problematic. They have been in the Supreme Court 25 times since 1920 because of their explicit use for racist purposes. If you are going to introduce zonal planning, you really have to be careful about how you do it. A White Paper or a Green Paper would have been great.
Discretionary planning and zonal planning are two different cultures and two different systems, and the Bill does not work out how they will mesh together. If you try to drive those two cultures and systems together without an awful lot of forethought, you have a major problem. The balance between permission in principle in the plan and the technical detail later on is important, and the Bill makes it clear that you have to approve the technical detail in accordance. We have created a very, very powerful new mechanism.
The TCPA, looking at 120 years-worth of European and international planning, sees it as a fundamental change. There is nothing wrong with fundamental change, so long as it is carefully worked through so that the issues of local democracy, sustainable development and high-quality outcomes are secured, but we cannot see that any of those critical issues have been fully considered or worked out in this Bill process.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 230 But local plans and neighbourhood plans have been through a democratic process.
Dr Hugh Ellis: They have been through a democratic process, but at the moment there are two bites of that democracy: there is the democratic process that says that there is a plan allocation, and then there is a second process that says that a planning application comes in on the detail, and you have a right over that as well. That is the two-stage process we have at the moment. If you want to change that, that is fine, but it is a significant democratic change.
The most important issue is a fundamental planning principle that has not been discussed, which is that the detail and the general principle are intimately related. Anyone who does planning will tell you that you cannot make a decision in principle about a site until you know the detail of its flood risk appraisal and the degree of affordable housing you want on the site. To try to split principle and detail as if they are not connected in reality is extremely dangerous. Understanding the principle of a site means you have to understand the detail of its implications.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
Q 231 You have already touched on some of the issues I was going to ask about. I want to come back to the issue of place making. As representatives of the planning profession—I was once a planner myself—you know that planners try to secure the best possible place making outcomes across all types of planning decision making. Can you comment in broad terms, but perhaps with some detailed examples, on the implications of the Bill for the ability of planning to deliver high-quality places? What consequences might we see in future as a result of the Bill?
Trudi Elliott: I suppose one of the challenges with the Bill is the amount of detail that is going to be covered by the regulations. For example, we think that if permission in principle is going to work with a local authority’s place-making and plan-making function, an amendment to clause 102 would probably be the way to go. If you limited the qualifying documents to the development plan and the register, and if you limited that to the brownfield register, you have a fighting chance of making this mini-system within a system work within the overall place-making agenda.
As Hugh has outlined, not all brownfield is the same. Part of the reason why brownfield land has not been developed is the constraints of the site. The Government have been looking at the criteria to address that. We think accessibility needs to be added to the proposed criteria—it is a massive issue for place making.
If we do not link homes to jobs, we really are in a difficult situation. The other challenge we have on place making is linking up homes, jobs and the infrastructure required and when that infrastructure goes in. There are places in the Bill where that challenge is acknowledged. One thing we may need to look at is mechanisms outside the scope of the Bill on getting more resourcing into infrastructure, because the more infrastructure we can have, the more sites we can unlock. We are doing work with a number of organisations from Adam Smith to Shelter on land value capture and how we can generate more resource in the system for the necessary infrastructure that creates great places.
Dr Hugh Ellis: One brief example in the Bill on place making is changes to urban development corporations. The development corporation model is extremely powerful. There are procedural changes to the way in which we designate urban development corporations, but nothing to secure high-quality outcomes on the corporations themselves—no obligations on place making or quality. Starter homes are another clear example.
The interesting thing is that England is falling very badly behind, both on individual building standards and building techniques in terms of innovation and on the wider project of place making. Internationally, many other cities and countries are doing much better. The reason is that they set democratically very high standards for their industry to achieve. Plainly, with the loss of things like zero carbon and other standards, we have set that process in reverse. There is an opportunity in the Bill, a significant one, to make clear that the achievement of housing growth is both about numbers, particularly for those people most in need, and also about inclusive places and strong place-making standards. That is the English tradition—that is how we built garden cities and how we achieve Letchworth. We achieve Letchworth through very strong planning.
Mike Kiely: I want to touch on two things. One is the nationally significant infrastructure projects. The Government are introducing the ability for an element of housing to be provided—we accept that and it is sensible—where it is functionally related to the infrastructure project. The caretaker’s house is the example, although you cannot have one of those now and it is a nonsense. Another example would be Sizewell B, where the workers’ accommodation will be converted to housing later. That is fine, but there is this “next to or close to” test, which suggests that housing—up to 500 units is suggested—completely unrelated to the nationally significant infrastructure project can be given consent just because it is nearby. I heard that they were talking, or thinking, about fairly significant distances, not close proximity. We are not saying no to including housing in NSIPs, but if we are going to include it, let us have a proper debate about it. The measure seems to be a bit of a fudge and that part of the proposal should be reconsidered.
Permission in principle is a potentially good idea that is in danger of going off the rails. It would be wrong if we see it as a move to a sort of zoning principle, for all the reasons that Hugh has given. It is a fundamentally different way of going about things. It has its origins in complaints largely from small house builders that the outline application process has become burdensome. It has become burdensome because of myriad changes to the planning system over many years, many of which come from Europe. That makes the process more complicated. An outline application is complicated because it produces a planning permission that has conditions attached to it. That is the only point in time at which the authority gets to put conditions on that consent, and therefore it has to look into the matters behind those conditions. That is what drives the complexity. The idea of separating the permission from the conditions was the origin of the proposal, but the measures in the Bill on converting allocations and allocations that go down to five units is a massive additional burden on local authorities.
The people who drafted the Bill have misread the national planning policy framework. On when a strategic housing land availability assessment needs to be produced, it talks of looking at sites larger than 0.25 hectares that are capable of taking at least five units. The threshold is a quarter of a hectare, not five units. In London, that will more than double the amount of work that local planning authorities will have to do on their SHLAAs. I urge you to read carefully your own definition in the NPPF, and use that in the Bill rather than what is in there at the moment. Frankly, every site in London is capable of taking five units, and producing the register would be an impossible burden. If the threshold is at 0.25 hectares, that is manageable. We are doing that work already and we can easily convert it.
Dr Blackman-Woods
Q 250 The CPRE has also expressed concern about the affordability of starter homes. Do you want to say anything more about that? Do you think the discount should be in perpetuity? Also, do you think that it will deliver more homes for rural areas?
Shaun Spiers: Our concern is particularly about rural affordable housing. The deal between the National Housing Federation and the Government to sell off rural affordable homes, which are affordable in perpetuity, will make it extremely hard to replace those rural homes, because it costs more to build a social house in a village. There is less land available, and there are relatively few specialist advisers. So if you sell the social housing in villages—in four fifths of villages there is no opt-out at all, and in one fifth of villages there is an opt-out but not a full exemption, so some of the larger providers who have only a few rural homes will have an incentive to sell them—it will be extremely difficult to replace those homes. Replacing them with starter homes that can be sold on the open market within five years, and which in any case will cost an average of eight and half times median rural wages—that is median rural wages, not lowest quartile wages—is no substitute.
The question for the Government and the Committee is, are we content to see villages become the preserve only of people who can afford to buy a home, or do we hold by the idea we have all had of villages for centuries, that they are genuinely mixed communities?
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 251 Mr Spiers, on that point, you have obviously read the voluntary agreement between the Secretary of State and the National Housing Federation. It details the fact that housing associations would have discretion not to sell, for example where a property was in a rural area and could not be replaced. Does that ease your concern?
Shaun Spiers: It does not ease it at all, I’m afraid, for two reasons. One is that it is a discretion. Some specialist rural providers, such as Hastoe Housing, which gave evidence to the Committee last week—the chief executive of Hastoe and I are meeting the Minister tomorrow to discuss this point—have said that they will not sell. Other, larger providers, who have a few really high-value properties that are harder for them to maintain, because most of their stock is in urban areas—they might have those properties because of transfers or takeovers over the years—will be quite likely to sell them.
The other thing is that in the agreement between the National Housing Federation and the Government, the definition of “rural” is extremely narrow. It excludes about four fifths of what we would regard as rural areas, and it is almost impossible to get a rural area designated as rural by the Secretary of State under the current agreement. So the Rural Coalition, a group which includes the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Country Land and Business Association, has proposed a much more comprehensive and much clearer definition of “rural” to the Government, but unfortunately the Government have not so far adopted it.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 252 I accept that you are keen to get a definition, but as to your point about housing associations, Mr Orr said last week in evidence that housing associations
“do not want to move away from the business of providing housing for people who are in the greatest housing need”. ––[Official Report, Housing and Planning Public Bill Committee, 10 November 2015; c. 37, Q89.]
Why would you feel that they are likely to sell off houses when local communities need them?
Shaun Spiers: I think the whole point is that rural areas are different. Even if you think that all housing associations are still thoroughly motivated by social need—there is a question mark over the ethos of some of the larger housing associations, but even if you accepted that they still had a social mission—it would be quite legitimate for a housing association to say, “We will sell this affordable home in a Cotswold village, where it has got high value, and build two homes in a lower-value area, and that fulfils our social mission”; and so it may. The CPRE is about rural England and about keeping a social mix in villages, and once that house has been sold it will be very difficult to replace it.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 253 Talking about some of the provisions in the Bill, such as the brownfield register, I know the CPRE has been very keen on providing housing on brownfield sites. How do you think that will play out in future housing development?
Shaun Spiers: We were very pleased to see the brownfield register. There is a statement in the impact assessment that says that we have wildly exaggerated the availability of brownfield sites. We did research with the University of the West of England to show that there was enough suitable brownfield land, most of it already in planning, to provide 975,000 homes, and that that stock is constantly replenished. We do not understand why the impact assessment queries that, because we have never seen any analysis from the Government to query it. That aside, the fact of the brownfield register is a positive thing. It will make smaller sites available for small builders, which is a big need—possibly for self-builders. I think that when the brownfield register is completed it will entirely verify our 1 million figure.
Duncan Wilson: If I might comment on the brownfield register from the Historic England perspective, I should start by saying that we are also in favour of brownfield development, but the national planning policy framework contains a number of checks and balances which we are concerned may be lost, perhaps inadvertently, in whatever process emerges from the brownfield register proposals. That is more about the law of unintended consequences than anything deliberate, but it is not entirely clear in the Bill how it will operate. That may be left to statutory instrument or ministerial statement, but we would like to see it explicit at the outset so that we could be confident that the role we have under the present system to make the case for the historic environment is not entirely bypassed by the brownfield register.
The factors that we normally highlight either need to come into play at the inscription of the site on the register or in the technical detail stage. By calling that stage the technical detail stage, there is an implication that nothing very major can be raised. So we do have some concerns. Let’s take the example of a brownfield site in a conservation area. Our concerns relate to the sensitivity of a development in terms of massing materials or the archaeological implications of developing a brownfield site, which could be missed. They might not be known when permission in principle is granted, but might subsequently become clear. The present system allows some due diligence to take place before final permission is granted. We are concerned that the new system may not allow for that stage.
Helen Hayes
Q 254 Taken in the round, the Bill introduces some fairly substantial reforms to the planning system. Could you comment on the extent to which, in your respective areas of expertise, you think that rural and heritage matters will continue to receive appropriate attention at the appropriate stages in the planning process and whether you have any concerns?
Duncan Wilson: I refer to my previous answer. Our main concerns relate to uncertainty around the brownfield register. We do not believe the present process, at least on our part, is unduly cumbersome. Our turnaround time on planning applications and listed building consent is 99.8% within 21 days, with an average turnaround of 12 days. From our perspective, I am not sure the proposals are shooting at the right target. We acknowledge that local authorities are very stretched, and we have been doing our best to make up for those deficiencies with additional training and support for planning departments, but realistically it is a much bigger problem than we can address. There at least needs to be some acknowledgment of that, as well as a streamlined process.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 265 Mr Spiers, you concede that, if a property is sold through the housing association through the extension of right to buy, the person living there is still part of that social mix?
Shaun Spiers: They are while they carry on living there. They can sell it on, though, and that has been the problem with the sale of council houses in villages. Villages have been transformed by the sale of council houses. The village that I partly grew up in had council houses built in Cotswold stone with Cotswold slate roofs paid for by a local philanthropist. They have almost all now been sold on the open market because they are very desirable houses built to Parker Morris standards. They are not for local people any more. Portable discount, maybe; but if you want to have villages in 20 or 30 years’ time that have a genuine social mix of the sort all of us have always thought was intrinsic to village life, we need to think again about the right to buy as conceived in the Bill.
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 266 Your villages must be different to my villages. I live in a rural area in north Yorkshire that is quite expensive, but a lot of the properties sold into the market through the original right to buy have people on lower incomes still living in them, having either bought them or rented them. I cannot accept that that is not part of the social mix you are trying to ensure. Those properties tend to be less expensive than the other properties in those villages.
Shaun Spiers: Do you think that that will be the case in 20 years’ time?
Kevin Hollinrake
It is certainly the case now; we are 20 years on from the original right to buy, are we not?
Shaun Spiers: I can assure you that it is not the case in many villages across England.
The Chair
We have come to the end of our allotted time. To both Historic England and CPRE, thank you very much for your evidence, which has been extremely useful for the future deliberations of the Committee.
Examination of Witness
Brandon Lewis MP gave evidence
Kevin Hollinrake
Q 285 Going back to starter homes and affordable rents, you talked at the Select Committee about local authorities and developers still being able to negotiate arrangements to suit local needs. Will you expand on that to say how that will happen in practice?
Brandon Lewis: At the moment local authorities negotiate with developers and we see different types of development and different viability issues in different parts of the country around what works and what the mix will be. Yes, we want to see starter homes. We think there is a real need to deliver homes that are affordable for people to buy and we want to put a clear focus on that, but local authorities will still negotiate what is right for them locally, what the viability is locally, and they are ultimately the ones who make the planning decision locally.
I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding by the TCPA representative today about how planning permission works in principle. Actually, it is ultimately driven by a democratic, locally focused scheme. They support the RSS, so I suppose I should not have been overly surprised by their evidence. Ultimately, local authorities have the final decision as to whether a planning permission is approved. Even when a plan is there in principle, the detail is for the local authority, and part of that will be the negotiations around what is viable.
At the same time, as I said earlier, I think we will continue to see developers working with housing associations to deliver mixes of housing, not least because that is how the financial modelling works for the developments that they are putting forward.
The Chair
That brings us to the end of our three evidence sessions preparatory to our detailed consideration of the Bill. I hope the Committee will agree that it has been an extremely useful series of panels. I thank the Minister for appearing in front of us and for being frank and straightforward in his responses. We will meet next on Thursday at 11.30 am in Committee Room 12 to start detailed, line-by-line consideration of the Bill. I thank the members of the Committee for their patience and I hope we have managed to get as many members in as possible during the question session.