Cost of Living: Energy and Housing

Mark Hoban Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Hoban (Fareham) (Con)]

I shall return to the comments made by the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and talk about housing in the bulk of my speech, but may I first commend my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), my friend and neighbour, for moving the Loyal Address yesterday? She spoke with passion, wit and great substance, not just about D-day and the Navy but about Portsmouth. Portsmouth has had a good week because not only has my hon. Friend moved the Address, but it is the focal point for the D-day celebrations, and this week the Conservatives took control of Portsmouth city council from the tired and discredited Liberal Democrats. I can get away with saying that since none of them are in the Chamber.

This Queen’s Speech is pro-business, pro-work and pro-aspiration. I want to focus my remarks today on aspiration—the aspiration that people in my constituency and across the country have to look after themselves and their family, to provide security for their retirement and to have a home of their own. However, I first want to address the issue of housing.

Housing development was a big issue in the elections in Fareham. Demographic change and a growing population mean that we need more homes if we are to enable people to get on the housing ladder and if we are to accommodate the families currently in overcrowded affordable housing or social housing. The challenge we face is where to site the 6,000 homes needed, for sale and for rent, to accommodate the demand.

Fareham has expanded during the past 40 years. Where I live in the west of the constituency, there used to be strawberry fields. In the last decade, the focus of development has predominantly been on brownfield sites, not greenfield ones or, indeed, strawberry fields. Although that approach to development has preserved green space in a predominantly suburban area, there have been issues with the provision of infrastructure. We have relied on expanding existing schools, rather than building new ones to accommodate demand. We have tweaked road junctions and lay-outs, rather than building new roads. GP surgeries have become overcrowded. For example, the Jubilee surgery in Titchfield has about 2,500 patients per GP, compared with an average of 1,800 patients per GP across the country as a whole. As a consequence, GP surgeries have shrunk their catchment areas and required families moving less than a couple of miles to change surgeries if they no longer live in the same GP catchment area. The use of brownfield sites has therefore imposed more pressure on existing infrastructure.

As a community, we have now reached a decision point about how to accommodate current population growth and where new homes are built. How and where do we build the 6,000 homes that Fareham needs? Brownfield sites have largely been utilised, so Fareham faces significant challenges. Do we merge existing communities so that Portchester merges with Fareham, Fareham with Stubbington, and Titchfield with Titchfield Common, creating a ribbon of development along the A27, which bisects my constituency? Alternatively, do we create a new settlement, where we create a vision for the future in which the services and infrastructure are tailored to meet the needs of the new community, rather than being cobbled together from what is already in the area?

Fareham, as a community, has decided to go down the second route. It will have a new settlement within its borough boundaries called Welborne. It will be on a greenfield site to the north of the M27. I am the first to acknowledge that that is not an easy decision for the communities that border the site, such as Funtley, the north of Fareham and Wickham. However, it is supported by the borough as a whole. Having Welborne in the borough plan to meet the future housing needs of the constituency protects other sites from development. An application to build in the gap between Fareham and Stubbington is less likely to succeed because we have a robust plan in place to meet housing demand in the borough. The Government’s planning reforms have been implemented to good effect in Fareham.

For Welborne to gain the full consent of the community, it is vital that the infrastructure is of a high standard and is provided when it is needed, rather than when the existing services are creaking at the seams. The developers get that and will finance the bulk of the infrastructure. Plans are in place for community facilities, new schools and new GP surgeries. A key part of the infrastructure provision is the creation of a four-way junction at junction 10 of the M27. That will improve road access to Welborne and the north of Fareham.

That junction is the main ask of the Solent local enterprise partnership in its bid to the local growth fund. The developers of the site, Fareham borough council, the Solent LEP and I have met the Housing Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), to press our case for that funding. The £90 million bid from the Solent LEP will ensure that we get the improvements that are needed to our road infrastructure to ensure that development takes place across Fareham and to facilitate improved access to the enterprise zone at Daedalus.

Welborne will meet the borough’s housing needs. Without it, fewer people will get on the housing ladder, there will be significant upward pressure on house prices and more families will be forced to live in accommodation that is too small for them. It is right for the Government to increase the supply of housing and to make it easier for people to own a home of their own. Owning one’s own home is an aspiration that many people save hard to fulfil. It took a decade of hard saving for my parents to buy their first home. My grandparents exercised their right to buy their council house. My family’s experiences motivate me to help others get on the housing ladder. That is why I support the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, which helps those who can afford mortgage payments but who do not yet have the deposit that lenders require.

The measures that the Government have taken, which have been built on in the Queen’s Speech, to tackle supply through planning reforms and the schemes to help affordability are vital to aid aspiration. We will improve social mobility and tackle inequality only if we make it easier for people to acquire assets such as a home of their own.

I shall touch briefly on the pension reforms in the Gracious Speech. They form part of the agenda on aspiration. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), should be commended for pursuing collective defined contribution schemes. He recognises the shift in pensions, whereby the burden of risk has been transferred from employers in defined benefit schemes to individuals in defined contribution schemes. His approach of tackling that through pooling investment should help to reduce the investment risk that the individual faces.

The pensions tax Bill, which the Chancellor announced in the Budget, is part of a series of radical reforms to pensions since 2010. The implementation of auto-enrolment, the move to single-tier pensions and the end of compulsory annuitisation have transformed the pensions landscape. The Chancellor was right in the Budget to recognise that new landscape and to give people greater freedom in the use of their pension pot. The single-tier pension will float most pensioners off means-tested benefits. It is right to give people more freedom in how they use their pension pot and not simply to roll it over into an annuity offered by the pension provider. People are not getting a good deal from the way in which the annuities market is operating. Freedom will force providers to sharpen up their act and to offer better value annuities and a wider range of products to help people manage their income in retirement.

The key to the success of these proposals is the guidance guarantee. We need to ensure that people are equipped to make the best choices for themselves. From meeting various stakeholders in the pensions sector, I know that that is a cause of concern. How will we ensure that people have good guidance at the right point in their life? Simply having guidance at retirement is not enough, given that people’s needs change over the period of their retirement. How will we gather together all the information about people’s pensions and savings so that we can give them good quality guidance? Will there be a digital service that people can dip into at will, or will advice always be face-to-face or on the telephone, which would be more expensive? How will we ensure that people take up the offer of guidance, so that they get the support and help they need to make the most of the new freedoms that we provide? If we get the guidance process right, it will help more and more pensioners to make better use of the assets that they have accumulated over their working life and ensure that they have the income that they need in retirement.

Ensuring that people are able to build up a pension pot, to save and to have good quality accommodation, whether that is in the private sector through owner-occupation or in the rented sector, is important if we are to support aspiration in this country. Over the past four years, the Government have made huge strides towards helping people realise their aspirations of work, a home of their own and savings. We need to continue that work into the next Parliament.