New Homes Bonus

Mark Pawsey Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

It a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. I welcome the Minister to the debate and I am glad to see him almost in his seat.

I spent 11 years as a district councillor in a local planning authority. As many colleagues will know, being a local councillor is a frustrating affair, but never more so than when it comes to the provision of housing for local people. Many obstacles are set in the way of local councillors, and there is often great hostility. With huge numbers of people on the housing waiting list, I wished we had been able to get to grips with the issue better.

Regional spatial strategies provided for local plans and core strategies to include more houses. That was a valuable stick, which ensured that many authorities made plans for homes, when they might not otherwise have done so. However, the inclusion of houses in local plans and local development framework core strategies was almost always achieved in the teeth of fierce resistance from local people. A great many houses were planned but never built, and that is a key issue, which we need to confront. Plenty of areas did not have regional spatial strategies; indeed, in my time, the south-west still had not put even the bare bones of a spatial strategy in place.

Most important, however, the strategies removed the need for local councillors to think about the merits or demerits of increasing local housing. They could simply hide behind the Government’s skirts and say, “It is all that nasty Government’s fault that new houses have come to your area.” They never needed to confront local people or hostile sections of communities about why increasing local housing provision was a good thing. Quite simply, that infantilised councils. Furthermore, the arrangements gave a huge advantage to those who opposed the plans. One thing follows the other; if a positive argument is not made for increasing local housing, it is hardly surprising that the most extreme views on the other side win the day.

I therefore greatly welcomed the Conservative party’s publication two or three years ago of its Green Paper “Open Source Planning”. It talked about a huge change of emphasis in our approach to planning. We were going to consult much more deeply with local communities, about not just the houses themselves but the reasons why they might be required. We were going to acknowledge that people lost amenity when large amounts of housing were built. We were going to provide a carrot, which we now know as the new homes bonus, to compensate local people in some way for the fact that they would have problems when the new houses came along. That was good common sense.

I already knew at that stage that deep consultation was absolutely necessary. In the Winchester district, we had the courage to act ourselves. We went out into the community and consulted widely. We sat down with large groups of local people, ran workshops and tried carefully to explain why we wished to build more homes. As a result, we found that we could persuade people. If we took the arguments out there and set them out rationally, people would listen; they would accept more housing if they could see why it benefited their communities. We received 3,000 separate responses to the consultation, including nearly 50,000 separate comments. That just goes to show that we really can engage communities if we wish to. That change—consultation, getting together with communities and deciding with them what they need for their areas—forms the principle plank of the proposed changes.

Neighbourhood planning empowers local communities to shape their own responses to their population’s needs, as set out by their local councillors, and councillors have to make that case persuasively. That is all well and fine, but where does the new homes bonus fit in? As I said, the issue is loss of amenity, which is slightly difficult to quantify. Most of the benefits that people think about when we talk about new homes are in the realm of public goods. For example, new homes might provide the critical mass for the local shop, ensure the continuation of the local school or reduce out-commuting in search of local employment. All those things are persuasive, and it is difficult to relate them to the fact that people will be stuck in more traffic when they go to work or might find it more difficult to see the local doctor. However, many individual households will see little, if any, direct benefit from the fact that new houses are going up.

Why not soften that blow, therefore, with a contribution towards whatever the community wishes to spend its money on? That is the right way to move things forward. Indeed, why not go further? There has been lots of criticism, certainly from members of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, that such an approach somehow involves bribery and that it is a bad idea for money to change hands in the planning system. I understand that argument, and I see where people are coming from, but if people suffer a direct loss of amenity and see their lives somewhat devalued, is there anything wrong with making a payment to them or reducing the amount of council tax they pay for several years? I think not. If people see that the authorities understand that they are genuinely losing something, even if only for a brief period, as a result of new homes coming along, we can responsibly make payments in kind to them.

For that very reason, it is incredibly important that all proposals for the new homes bonus include the assumption that spending should be very local to where the development happens. That leads me to my first question to the Minister. What about the 80:20 split in two-tier areas? Why does a county council need to have a share if compensating local people is the primary objective?

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing such an important debate. The 80:20 split is of great concern to Rugby borough council, which argues that it has taken forward the proposals for the new housing from which Rugby will benefit. It is concerned that a proportion of the new homes bonus will be allocated to the county council, which will benefit from development under the section 106 agreement and the community infrastructure levy. I hope that the Minister will give us a little more detail about where this 80:20 split comes from. I note from the responses to the consultation that it is a starting point for negotiation, but those who represent the authority in my area would be interested to understand a little more about where the split comes from and where it is likely to end up.