Housing: North Somerset

Liam Fox Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

I am very grateful for this opportunity to raise the issue of housing and house building numbers for North Somerset. I will make some comments about the general situation, how we got to this point and elements that affect my constituency. Then, with your permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) will add some comments about the situation in his constituency.

North Somerset, as it is now, had a population in 1971 of 139,924 residents. By 2018, that had increased to 213,919. We have seen an increase of more than 50% in our population since the 1970s. That has naturally been accompanied by a huge amount of house building in my constituency. That has particularly been around Nailsea and Backwell. There has been huge development and growth in Clevedon and, most recently, the development in Portishead, one of the most successful developments of a brownfield site anywhere in the country. Of course, Weston-super-Mare has seen its own dramatic growth in that time, which my hon. Friend will come to.

Our current adopted requirement for housing is 20,995 dwellings for the period 2006 to 2026, which is 1,049 per year, but—this is where reality breaks in—developers have not delivered anything like those numbers in that period. In fact, despite a large number of sites with full planning consent, only 808 dwellings on average have been produced per year in that period. Only in one year, 2007, did we exceed the target, and that was at the height of growth in Portishead.

I now come to the projected numbers. The previous joint spatial plan gave North Somerset a new target of 25,000 new homes over 20 years, which means 1,250 per year. Under the new methodology, however, with a target of 300,000 new homes per year nationally for each year of this Parliament, that has risen again to 1,365 dwellings per year.

That was already beyond the realms of what we believed possible, but to take us well into “Alice in Wonderland” territory, the Government’s new algorithm in the plan to get us to 370,000 homes nationally per year takes it to 1,708 dwellings per year for North Somerset, which is 25,620 over a 15-year period. That is more than twice as many as the market has delivered on average in that period. So we have these fantasy numbers that come from the socialist planning edict, rather than what the market has delivered for us.

The question is, where will those houses actually go? I am aware of the strictures about not using props, but I will explain to the Minister the little gift that I intend to give him at the end of this debate, which will show him a map of North Somerset plus green belt. By the time we add on the flood plain, areas of outstanding natural beauty, aerodrome safeguarded zones and the conservation areas, he might like to show me on the map where the 26,000 homes will go.

I could encourage the Minister to improve his colouring-in skills, but there is nothing to colour in on a map where everything is already completely used up. Perhaps we will see the Shard built on Yatton high street; perhaps Churchill will have its new skyscrapers. It simply is not credible to apply those housing numbers to North Somerset.

We are not NIMBYs. As I have said, there has been a 50% increase in the number of our residents, and therefore housing, over the period, but we need to safeguard the quality of life for those who already live there. The infrastructure in our area is creaking in terms of the number of schools and the GP services that we have. Our policing is overstretched and our roads leave a great deal to be desired.

In Wrington, one of the villages in the green belt where there has been some development, we have already seen problems with flooding and drainage that were entirely predicted; I raised the issue with the district council at the time. Road traffic access is a nightmare in a village where the infrastructure had already been degraded. In Portishead, our schools are already full. Yatton is used as the emergency route when there is a closure to the M5, which is a joke, because at the best of times it is effectively a single lane road through a small village.

In Clevedon, there is an attempt to use our last bit of green belt in Cleveland East to build an overflow school. Long Ashton and Dundry in particular have the nightmare prospect of a huge housing estate being planned that will effectively take the urban sprawl from Bristol into North Somerset. The whole point of the green belt there is to stop urban sprawl and to stop Bristol moving south into North Somerset. We utterly reject the idea of some of those lovely villages having huge housing estates, which would be an eyesore as well as a burden on the local authority.



The Government have said that they want to increase the infrastructure budget, particularly in the north of England. I am absolutely, fully committed to that; it makes perfect sense to spread opportunity to all parts of the country. But if that is where the infrastructure spending is going to go, why are we increasing the housing supply in the south of England, where we are not getting the investment in the infrastructure? That applies not only to our constituencies in north Somerset but to many of the constituencies of my right hon. and hon. Friends, who took the opportunity in the Lobby tonight to say, “Speak for us when you are having your Adjournment debate.” We need to have house building commensurate with investment in the infrastructure. We cannot have the mismatch that we seem to be developing at the present time.

So what do we want to see in North Somerset? We need to develop brownfield sites, particularly in Bristol. The idea that there are cost issues should not be allowed to get in the way of building on the most appropriate sites where they are closest to the city environment with all the infrastructure that already exists there. We need to look, particularly in the post-covid environment, at change of use from offices and shops to more dwellings, bringing people back into our town centres and improving the life of our communities there. We want to get rid of North Somerset’s obligation to make up for unmet need in Bristol. Why should the residents of North Somerset have to pay the price, in terms of pressure on their infrastructure, for the failure of the authorities in Bristol to meet their own housing needs, especially given that there are brownfield sites yet to be built on?

We need to have—this is a more generic issue than just what we face in North Somerset—a methodology that is realistic. We need to have a clear link to local demographics, not some made-up numbers that are simply applied irrespective of the real conditions in our population. We must have a fact-based assessment of need in our constituencies. We must have a sensible view of the constraints already in place, including all the issues that I mentioned, including the fact that we have such a large amount of green belt, and the fact that we have the north Somerset levels, with some of the areas that would otherwise be used for planning being on floodplain. The clue to the impact on those areas is in the term “flood”, which is why we do not expect to see building there. We need to have to have the right type of housing. We want to see more affordable housing so that young people who grow up in North Somerset are not forced to leave and come back only when they have attained a much higher income later on in their life. We have a mismatch with our demographics. We need more young people to be able to stay and live where they grew up. We have to see housing targets and the type of house building that are in line with our environmental targets.

I believe that the Government fully understand the need for more house building across the United Kingdom, but we have already seen our share of development in our part of the country. We are constrained by the very elements that the Government themselves set down. We cannot build on green belt. We cannot build on floodplain. It is an accident of nature that we have the north Somerset levels. We cannot build in the protected areas: in areas of outstanding natural beauty or conservation areas. I invite my right hon. Friend the Minister, for some amusement over the weekend, to take back the map of North Somerset that shows all these elements included, and show me where 26,000 houses are meant to go.

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[Dr Fox]

Will my hon. Friend accept that his argument is further strengthened by the fact that the housing density in many of our cities in the United Kingdom is well below the level of housing density that is taken for granted in most cities in Europe?

[John Penrose]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and if we do it this way round we are using the existing infrastructure, rather than overburdening the already stretched infrastructure in our rural areas. It is greener, too, because people can live closer to work. If we start building yet more in rural villages—in my case, places like Churchill or Langford or Congresbury—we just create commuter towns and villages, and we add to the level of the commuting carbon footprint as a result. If people can live near where they work—which is much more covid-friendly as well—we stand a chance of creating greener, more sustainable communities, and ones where investment is desired. However, that does require the Government to change the process—to change the way they give credit for the sites that are thus created. That would ensure that the big volume builders, whose whole business plan is based around building on greenfield sites, do not get the only view of the situation, and town and city centre development becomes a route for councils to satisfy the housing numbers they are required to build.

--- Later in debate ---

[Christopher Pincher]

The hon. Gentleman will know that we have made it easier for councils to build council houses. He will know that, through the affordable homes programme that the Chancellor and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced in September, over the next five years we will inject £12.2 billion into house building. We will build 180,000 new homes in our country, about 50% of which will be affordable and for social rent. I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman raised that point, and I am pleased to have been able to make the point to him that we are building those affordable homes where they are necessary.

That is why we are looking at housing need now, considering carefully how each element of the formula that I described works together so that we can ensure that we achieve the right distribution of homes in the most appropriate places and address any perceived imbalances. We have consulted, as I said, on each element of the indicative formula, and we are reflecting carefully on the feedback we have received.

[Dr Fox]

May I take my right hon. Friend back to what the market has actually delivered over time? Does he accept that if councils are given targets for housing that are utterly unrealistic in relation to the numbers that have been built over time, the Government are likely to miss their own house building target, because houses will not be built in those areas to the extent that the Government would like, and that the process can be self-defeating if the correct balance is not achieved?

[Christopher Pincher]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. That is why I said that we are looking very closely at the consultation feedback that we have received. As part of the consultation on the “Planning for the future” White Paper, we have asked providers of feedback to consider how we can improve the duty to co-operate between local authorities so that we get the right sorts of homes spread over the regions of our country. We know that political geography does not always map easily on to economic or physical geography, so I recognise what my right hon. Friend says.

I will make a couple more points before the fickle finger of time points us towards the door of the Chamber. My right hon. Friend raised the issue of infrastructure. We recognise that the present system of infrastructure levy does not work. We have heard that 80% of local authorities think that the system of section 106 contributions is too slow, and negotiations between councils and developers cannot be relied on fully to provide what communities truly need, when they need it. That is why, in the White Paper, we have proposed a more widely set infrastructure levy. That will simplify the system and ensure fairer contributions from developers.

Crucially, we want to ensure that the levy provides funds up front for the required infrastructure—the schools, roads, clinics and playgrounds that local people expect to see if new, good-quality, sustainable homes are being built around them. We are consulting on whether the levy should be set nationally, or locally or regionally to take account of regional economies.

My right hon. Friend raised the question of build-out and land-banking. He will know that Sir Oliver Letwin produced a report on build-out a couple of years ago. He found no evidence of speculative land-banking, but we all recognise that developers do not always build out at the pace that we would like. Our proposals will help to achieve that speedier build-out, but I look forward to considering the ideas in the consultation, so that we can better incentivise developers to build out.

My right hon. Friend referred to flooding. He will know that we are considering carefully whether we need to make further changes to the national planning policy framework to protect areas at risk of flooding from unnecessary and inappropriate building. We should not lose sight of the Government’s successes over the past 10 years. There have been half a million additional new homes since 2010, and 240,000 of those were built in England last year alone. We can be proud of that.

I thank everybody who has contributed to this debate. We need to get this right, and that depends on what we build, and where we build. I look forward to reading the many contributions of my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset and my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare to the two consultations that have just concluded, and look forward to further debates on this matter.

Question put and agreed to.