Neighbourhood Planning Bill (Sixth sitting)

Kevin Hollinrake Excerpts

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 25th October 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I beg to move amendment 22, in clause 7, page 6, line 23, leave out subsection (5).

This amendment would ensure that local authorities are still able to make necessary pre-commencement conditions on developers.

Thank you for that direction, Mr McCabe. I will address my comments not only to amendment 22, but to some of our wider concerns about clause 7.

The Minister knows, because he heard the evidence, as we did, that clause 7 was the one bit of this relatively short Bill that concerned people who gave evidence to the Committee. In fact, a number of people thought that the clause was just as likely to slow down development as it was to speed it up. Councillor Newman, who represented the LGA, said:

“The whole perspective of what I am seeing in the Bill looks very much like a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach—another layer of red tape.”

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, Mr McCabe, to serve under your chairmanship. Is not that exactly the opposite of what has been said? We are trying to get rid of the complexity of the system. Clause 7 creates conditions of good practice, where people sit down together and make an agreement. If a council is being reasonable and a developer is reasonable, there will be no issue. There will be written agreement and things will move forward. If either party is being unreasonable, an inspector will be able to look at that and judge for the other party. It is in everybody’s interests to sit down and get a sensible agreement on the conditions. Is not that a sensible piece of legislation?

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

The hon. Gentleman has described the situation that exists at the moment, not the position in which we will all be in after the Bill is enacted. The Bill puts in writing the agreement between the local authority and the developer. Significantly, as we have all been discussing, it gives powers to the Secretary of State to intervene in the process by producing regulations that will say something about the conditions that can be attached.

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the system is working well at the moment because, as Councillor Newman reminded the Committee,

“nine out of 10 permissions are given, and 470,000 permissions are already granted for homes up and down the land that await development for various reasons.”

All those reasons are not pre-commencement planning conditions.

Hugh Ellis said:

“From our point of view, the concern about conditions is that they are fairly crucial in delivering quality outcomes.”––[Official Report, Neighbourhood Planning Public Bill Committee, 18 October 2016; c. 23, Q31.]

He also said that he had no evidence whatever that conditions result in delay. Duncan Wilson from Historic England said that local authorities are usually reasonable already. He did not feel that unnecessary conditions were being imposed, and he believed that that particular assertion could be challenged. That is what we have been attempting to do thus far today.

It is not just Her Majesty’s Opposition saying that all this is unnecessary; it is the Town and Country Planning Association, the LGA, Historic England and the British Property Federation, which said that it saw an issue with the discharge of conditions, but could not give us much detail on pre-commencement conditions.

I want to outline the evidence we have been given on why the clause is unnecessary. Various people who gave evidence said that they felt that if an application was turned down because an agreement could not be reached with the developer, it could take longer to argue about the condition and determine it than under the current set of arrangements. I point out to the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton that that point has been made not only by me but by lots of other people.

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[Kevin Hollinrake]

The hon. Lady refers to the Minister’s comments about speeding up delivery. Does she accept that permitted development rights have in many cases done exactly that? She talks about the negative consequences of that policy but has not spoken about the positive consequences. Does she accept that there have been positive consequences, including the delivery of more residential units?

[Helen Hayes]

I was just about to say that in addition to the numbers, which I do not dispute are important, the size and type of homes that we are delivering matters. It matters whether we are delivering homes that families can live in and have a good quality of life in, or only homes that are too small even to fit adequate furniture into. Minimum space standards matter, and the Government have failed to address that issue. The provision of amenities matters. It matters whether there is a local park that is properly funded through the planning process. It matters whether the roads and pavements are of an appropriate standard, whether there is lighting and whether our neighbourhoods are attractive to live in. It matters whether there are places in schools and GP practices for an expanding population to access.

Above all else, affordability matters to my constituents. It is simply not fair and not appropriate that new homes are allowed to be delivered with no contribution at all to the affordable housing that we need more than any other type of housing in London. As a Member of Parliament for a London constituency, the Minister should, quite frankly, know that.

The extension of permitted development rights is a disaster for the delivery of the high-quality neighbourhoods with good facilities and services that we all want to see. We want to see the right numbers of homes being delivered, but we also want to build attractive and successful communities for the future, not tomorrow’s regeneration projects. I am deeply disappointed that, through the Bill, the Government are trying to patch up a broken policy, rather than accepting that it is not working in the way it needs to and reforming it to make it more fit for purpose, so that we can deliver not only the number, but the type and quality, of new homes needed within the successful neighbourhoods that we all want to see.

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[Gavin Barwell]

Well, it may be that the hon. Lady and I are not as far apart as I thought we were, because I agree with that. People have different requirements at different ages, and it is certainly important that adequate space is provided for family housing. She may agree with the point that I am going to make. I was going to close by giving an example of a permitted development conversion that I had the opportunity to see in Croydon. She may want to go and have a look at it herself.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I quite agree with the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood about family homes, but where the opportunity exists to innovate and create homes for young people and first-time buyers, particularly in areas of high house prices, should we discourage that purely on the basis of space standards?

[Gavin Barwell]

I suppose the story I told that prompted the hon. Lady’s intervention interested me because one might to a degree expect private developers to look to maximise the units that they can build on a site and their commercial return, but what was striking about that conversation was that the chief executive of a housing association also wanted that flexibility. He saw clearly that there was a trade-off between having homes that were fully accessible and fulfilled the space standard and maximising the number of homes for vulnerable people that he could have on the site. There is a debate to be had, but I do not think that the hon. Lady and I are as far apart on this as I thought we were.

Let me give an example. There is a building in Croydon called Green Dragon House, which was a fairly old office building that was not wholly vacant but had very limited use. It has been converted into 119 homes—a mixture of one and two-bed homes. It is a little like the Pocket housing schemes. It is very high-spec—the quality of the finish is very good—but the rooms are smaller than the national space standard. Interestingly, what is not taken into account is that there is a huge amount of communal space. Virtually the whole of the first floor of the building is given over to a high-standard communal lounge, and the whole of the roof is a terrace, which is communal space for residents. In a way, it is a different vision of how people might live, and it is targeted very much at young professional people.