Housing

Mark Spencer Excerpts

Wednesday 5th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

I want to focus briefly on three issues that are having a big impact in my community—what type of houses we build, where we build them, and how many we build. Those are the three crucial aspects to the whole debate and they are having an enormous effect in my constituency and community.

I shall start with the issue of how many houses. The Secretary of State is not in his place, but to his credit the first thing he did was abandon the disastrous regional spatial strategy figures that were having such a detrimental effect on the green belt in and around the city of Nottingham. Some of my local authorities are resting on those figures from the regional spatial strategy. I sincerely hope that the Minister can find ways of convincing them to reconsider the numbers of houses they are going to plonk in the green belt and focus on where and how those houses are being developed because they are having an enormous impact on the sustainability of the local communities. Where windfall properties appear because a petrol station or public house becomes redundant and is redeveloped, some local authorities do not take those figures into account but continue to push up their housing ambitions, and that has a big impact on the green belt.

Let me deal next with what we are building. It is very important that we build houses that are appropriate to the communities in which they are placed. An elderly resident in a rural village location who is living in a three, four or even five-bedroom house might want to relocate in the same village, but if it has no elderly people’s accommodation they will be forced to move away from the community in which they have established their life, family and friends, and connections. If we can find ways of building elderly people’s accommodation within those village envelopes, that will allow people to move out of the larger house and into another property, thereby freeing up the property ladder below them. We do not want to force people out of their homes, but we need to encourage them to stay within their communities. By the same token, in former coalfield villages where the average size of a house is two or three bedroom, there is little point in allowing developers to build four and five-bedroom houses, because they do not slot into those communities.

The most important issue is where houses are built. Some of my local authorities are not targeting brownfield sites. They should be developing former coalfield sites such as those in the borough of Gedling, but are instead putting their housing allocations in the green belt around the villages of Linby and near the town of Hucknall. There is funding available to address this. The previous Housing Minister developed a scheme whereby such brownfield sites could be unlocked because of the need for access roads and other infrastructure projects. Despite my writing to my local borough council to ask them to tap into that fund, it has decided not to do so but to allocate its housing allocations in the green belt. That is a tragedy for some of these villages, because the infrastructure cannot support what is there already, never mind the new housing. The village of Blidworth is the only local village entirely encircled by the green belt, and it already suffers enormous infrastructure problems regarding access to the road network, but, for whatever reason, the council has decided to allocate it an enormous amount of housing, causing a great deal of stress and tension for individuals.

This is about getting right what we are building, where we are building, and how much we are building. I believe in localism, but sometimes my local authorities do not make the right choices.