Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Maria Miller and Victoria Borwick

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Miller]

I am sure that new clause 1 will be well worth the wait. I take this opportunity to thank the Clerks of the House for their expert help in drafting the new clause.

The new clause will ensure that the Bill does exactly what the Minister wants it to do. It will ensure that every starter home is top-quality and is inspected and built in accordance with existing house building quality processes and standards, and that the records that are already made at key points in the building process are available to new homeowners in order to increase transparency and drive up the quality of the new homes in which the Government are investing.

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) for his support, and in particular for his diligent chairmanship of the all-party parliamentary group for excellence in the built environment. In the APPG, we are working together on a formal inquiry into house-building standards, which involves a detailed evidence-led scrutiny of the problems that need to be dealt with.

[Victoria Borwick (Kensington) (Con)]

Will these homes also be disabled-accessible? I am a passionate believer in the importance of lifetime homes for communities and families, especially in view of debates that we have had and what we have already heard this evening. Will my right hon. Friend assure me that all possible ways of improving disabled accessibility will be considered?

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend has raised an important point, to which I am sure the Minister will respond later. One of the problems is that proposals for the construction of houses which might include disability accessibility are judged by the same group who made the proposals in the first place. There is, at the very least, some conflict of interest in the way in which the process currently works.

Ensuring that enough homes are available is, rightly, a priority for the Government, and I applaud their commitment to helping to ensure that people have the security of owning their own homes. Hundreds of my constituents have already benefited from the Help to Buy scheme. I know that many of them keenly await the roll-out of the right to buy scheme, and will take careful note of anything that the Minister may say about it. Let me, at this point, thank him for his support for the new self-build scheme that was announced in my constituency just before the Christmas break.

The Minister is clearly committed to ensuring that the new starter homes are of top quality. Those are not just warm words; the Minister has taken action. The design panel of which he has spoken at length during the Bill’s earlier stages will play a significant part in ensuring that the plans for starter homes are of the highest quality. My new clause would ensure that the top-quality plans that he rightly endorses are turned into top-quality buildings each and every time, and I hope that he will respond to it positively.