Homes: Existing Communities

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend for initiating this short and very timely debate. I will refer in a moment to a speech that he made on 29 February on a similar theme, but he will not mind my saying that he is not one of the usual suspects who turns up to our debates on housing. However, his insight is invaluable, because he comes from a successful commercial background, providing consumers with what they need, which we have manifestly failed to do in housing, and he brings a clarity of purpose—and also a sense of impatience and frustration about the current system, with which I very much sympathise. Who could argue that where we are today is the right place on housing and planning? There was a very perceptive article by Paul Johnson in the Times on Monday.

Having read my noble friend’s speech on 29 February, I have some reservations about part of his approach. He proposed two simple principles to the world of housing, and what he said then bears remarkable similarity to what he has just said:

“I have time to suggest just two … It simply insists that all new development does nothing to materially devalue neighbouring homes and businesses. The second, the ‘carry your weight’ principle, requires all new development to leave infrastructure in the state in which it found it or better. Before 1947, such a free market system existed in broad terms; it delivered the architecture, streets, cities and towns that we love and cherish today”.—[Official Report, 29/2/24; col. GC 158.]


It also delivered some pretty terrible stuff that no planning system would permit.

I have difficulty with those principles, and I am one of the guilty party; I was Housing Minister for about nine years and Planning Minister for four. The trouble with the first principle is that it risks denying the country the new homes that it needs. After 41 years in another place—with those four years as Minister for Planning—I know that there are many people out there who will argue that any new development, however well designed, will materially devalue their homes or businesses. We have need of development, however. We need new pylons —who is going to welcome those?—we need new prison capacity to deal with overcrowding, and we need 1.5 million new homes to meet the Government’s target.

What we in fact need is a system that weighs the material devaluation to a few people against the wider benefit to society as a whole. That is what a planning system does and what a free market simply cannot do. A free market, for example, will not deliver the new towns that were delivered after the war and which we will need again. It would not have tolerated the compulsory purchase of land, nor would it have delivered the regeneration of Docklands by the 1979 Conservative Government.

Even if a market-led approach delivered the houses, what about everything else—the schools, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, or the medical centres and so on that need to go with it? What about minimising the impact of climate change by promoting development near, for example, existing transport interchanges? How would we develop social housing—now delivered through Section 106 agreements—without a planning system imposing conditions? The planning system captures the difference between the £15,000 per acre and the £1.5 million by obliging the developer to provide the infrastructure and the social housing. I am not sure how the free market that my noble friend referred to would do that.

I also have a problem with the second principle of leaving the infrastructure in the state it was found or better. My concern is that the “or better” would not be provided were it not for the planning system—either through Section 106 or infrastructure levies—which insists that the person building the houses also provides the infrastructure. If that is not done by the developer, by capturing the land value, the burden would simply fall on the taxpayer, which is not a good option.

Where I agree with my noble friend is that we need to have a system that ensures that there is greater certainty about where development will take place and to have a construction industry that delivers. I am sorry if I have sounded very negative about my noble friend but, having tried over the past 30 or 40 years to do what he wants to do, there are some real issues that I am not sure the free market, or the commercial approach that has inspired his career, would address.