Housing
Debate between Mark Pawsey and Hilary Benn(10 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Hilary Benn
I am going to make some progress.
When Kate Barker carried out her review of the housing market a decade ago she found two factors that we need to consider. First, she said that
“limited land supply means the competition tends to be focused on land acquisition rather than on consumers”.
Secondly, she found that
“many housebuilders ‘trickle out’ houses…to protect themselves against price volatility”.
[Interruption.] Hon. Members say that that was a decade ago, but it is still going on. Roughly translated, it means that not all house builders have an incentive to build all the homes for which they have planning permission as quickly as possible or as quickly as the nation needs them to. That is a problem, and we have proposed a way of dealing with it. Even when times were good, when mortgage credit was readily available and house prices were booming, the house building industry was unable to build the number of homes required.
Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Debate between Mark Pawsey and Hilary Benn
Hilary Benn
Of course, and the fact that local authorities have been willing to renegotiate the section 106 affordable housing requirements is proof of that—[Interruption.] Well, lots of them have done so, and no doubt the planning Minister will tell us about those that have not.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
Why does the right hon. Gentleman think so many local authorities have been unwilling to renegotiate section 106 agreements up to now? Will the Bill not encourage them to do so?
Hilary Benn
The hon. Gentleman says “so many”, but the Government have not given us the evidence. The whole Bill is based on supposition, what was whispered in someone’s ear, what was in the newspapers and what the Prime Minister fulminated against. We are legislating, and we should do so on the basis of evidence. I look forward to seeing that evidence.
The third leg of the Secretary of State’s assault on local democracy is clause 21. It, too, gives him wide powers to take planning applications away from local communities. It significantly extends the lists set out in the Planning Act 2008 by including business and commercial projects, as we have heard. We have seen the lists the planning Minister gave the Select Committee, but can he or the Secretary of State clarify whether that would include major retail or leisure developments? I will happily take in intervention. Any takers? No? It is interesting that we have not received an answer.
Do the Government intend to develop national policy statements for the new categories? The Secretary of State floundered when my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) asked that question earlier.
What is this change for? The press notice issued by the Department on 6 September states:
“Thousands of big commercial and residential applications to be directed to a major infrastructure fast track”.
It only took about a month for that policy to change—another example of the Government making it up as they go along—because residential applications appeared to be pulled from it, as clause 21 now makes clear. Instead, the Government seem to have decided to make greater use of their call-in powers, as the planning Minister set out in his statement last week, but that will have the same effect—Ministers, not local people, will decide what happens in their community.
The Bill Committee will no doubt explore the extent to which the Government intend to use that call-in power to deal with applications for residential developments. If they call them in, Government and Opposition Members will suddenly find that, as a result of the change in policy, their local councils are not taking the decisions. Given that call-in powers have existed for a very long time, will the Minister who responds to the debate explain what the clause gives Ministers that they do not have already under existing planning law? How will the Planning Inspectorate cope with the additional work load? It is a mess.
National Planning Policy Framework
Debate between Mark Pawsey and Hilary Benn(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Hilary Benn
That point has been raised by a number of organisations in response to the consultation, and I shall put a specific point to the Minister about it shortly.
Hilary Benn
I have given way a number of times already, and I am anxious to make progress.
Given the primacy of the sustainable development presumption in policy, given that so much flows from it, and given that no one in the House wants development at any price, the Government need to get the definition of sustainable development right. The Environmental Audit Committee has already made clear its view on which definition should be used. As the Minister will know, in a report published in March, it called for the inclusion of the five internationally recognised principles of sustainable development that were set out in the 2005 sustainable development strategy, which, as I recall, the then Opposition supported at the time, as I do now.
I listened carefully to the argument presented by the Minister today, and I hope that the Government will bear it in mind when they produce their revised draft, because there is a risk that in the absence of a complete definition, there will be more argument about what the term means. The last Government, with support from the then Opposition, replaced the original Brundtland definition with the 2005 definition, and I was not persuaded by what the Minister said about why that should not endure in time. If we stick with it, it will be well understood and enduring.
Hilary Benn
I agree with my right hon. Friend. I am sure that the revised draft will be a slightly longer document, but the existence of a bit more material sometimes assists decisions in the planning process rather than making them more difficult.
I do not know whether the Minister has seen the CPRE legal opinion, issued by a respected planning QC, but it addresses this very point about the definition of sustainable development. The QC argues that
“there is an ambiguity which permeates the NPPF, and which is likely to lead to uncertainty in its application, with a consequent increase in the number of appeals.”
None of us wants that. This serves as a powerful argument that the Minister should reflect on possible changes, as he has undertaken to do.
Mark Pawsey
The issue of sustainable development comes into play only in the absence of a local plan. Does the right hon. Gentleman therefore agree that Government and Opposition should come together to encourage local authorities to get their local plan in place early?
Hilary Benn
The NPPF says that in the absence of such a plan there should be a presumption in favour of sustainable development, but regardless of whether there is a local plan, someone must still decide about what constitutes sustainable development.
The second issue I want to address is the choice of land for development. There are many competing pressures, and we want to protect as much green space as possible. That point was made eloquently in this week’s Westminster Hall debate initiated by the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry).
Because of our heritage, we have a lot of previously developed brownfield land and, building on the foundations laid by a previous Conservative Government, Lord Prescott created the “brownfield first” policy. It was very successful. Last year, 76% of new dwellings were built on brownfield sites, up from 55% in 1989. We need only look at the centre of cities like Leeds and Manchester to see that it is working, or consider that in the last decade the proportion of new homes built on the green belt fell from 4% to 2%. It is estimated that there are almost 62,000 hectares of brownfield land in England that are ready for building on, which would be enough to build about 1.2 million homes.
The Minister appears to argue that a
“land with the least environmental or amenity value”
approach is the same as this “brownfield first” policy. If that is the case, why change it? If it is not the case, then we can understand why people are worried. Indeed, the Government’s own impact assessment refers to
“removing the target and the priority for brownfield development”.