Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Mark Pawsey Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend has not seen the Bill yet. When he does, I hope he will be reassured and converted into an enthusiastic supporter of it. He and I are going to meet in the coming days, and I hope I will be able to reassure him that this is not about casting aside the good, but about reforming and building on it so that we can have the planning system we all deserve.

The principles behind our planning reform are simple. This will be good news for smaller developers, and everything that we do is designed to assist them. It will move the last paper-based system into the digital age, with interactive maps at our fingertips. It will get more local people—more than the 3% who currently engage with plan making—actively engaged and interested in what a local plan is. It will return planning to the social and moral mission that it began as, inspiring plans for the future of a local area, not simply paper-pushing and development management.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

It is entirely right that we support small and medium-sized builders to get houses delivered, but at one end we will need more system building—houses that are prepared in a manufacturing plant and then assembled—to get to the 300,000. What support is the Secretary of State providing for that sector, and what innovation can he tell us about?

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[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I welcome the Gracious Speech: setting out how this Government will boost jobs, drive growth and innovation, and increase opportunity for everyone, with the significant objective of levelling up our country such that young people will not need to move in order to improve their life chances. Today’s focus is on housing and it is relevant to consider what is happening in my constituency, which has a strong record of delivery, with a total net increase in the number of homes between 2012 and 2020 of 4,464. That is 25% higher than the figure for the country as a whole. If the rest of the country had delivered new homes at the same rate as Rugby, we would be much closer to achieving the objective of 300,000 new homes a year.

‘ That has been achieved through Rugby Borough Council, as the planning authority, having been a long-term proponent of plan making as a method of development control for many years. It was a shock to me, as a member of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government between 2010 and 2015, to learn that not all planning authorities have an emphasis on plan making. Even today, only half of all areas have an up-to-date local plan, and I welcome the Government’s proposals to change that.

Rugby has identified zones of development on predominantly brownfield land and has delivered a good mix of housing. An exemplar of new housing at pace is at Houlton, where the council, working closely with Urban & Civic as the master developer, has delivered a great example of how a detailed plan makes better development. It is a template for identifying a parcel of land, as suggested by the Bill, and taking it through to a development site, with associated infrastructure. We have had the early delivery of a link road and of our schools—the primary is already open and the secondary is due to open in September—and plans for community assets are at the plan making stage. That should be looked at by others.

I welcome the White Paper on planning reform. The system is outdated and ineffective. It goes back to the 1940s and is largely unchanged from what I studied at university in the 1970s. I support the proposals for growth and renewal, and protection zones, and I want to empower local authorities to be able to lead on developments. I want plan making to be focused on, exactly as Rugby has done, but there needs to be substantial democratic involvement and we need to consider the role of the planning committee in making certain that we get good-quality development. Good, effective engagement will be the key to success.

On speeding up housing delivery, I hear with concern proposals to levy council tax on approved but unbuilt houses. I fully agree that there need to be proposals to deter land banking. Presumably, any such proposal would apply only to new consents and not the 1 million homes approved but not yet built. It would be a fundamental change to the basis on which applications would be granted. It might provide an incentive to build out before applying for further consents, but housing markets operate in peaks and troughs, and circumstances change. Market conditions two years after an approval might be very different from those at the time an application was made.

I believe that proposal would encourage developers simply to delay putting in their applications until they are absolutely ready to build. It would almost certainly reduce the number of outstanding consents, but it would put huge pressure on council planning departments, with applications coming in en masse in good times and little activity at lower times. There is already no incentive for a developer to sit on a planning approval, because it has already cost him a great deal of money to get where he is today. We do need to change our planning system and get homes suitable for all our residents.