Mark Spencer
Main Page: Mark Spencer (Conservative - Sherwood)
Mr Bacon
My hon. Friend has a good point. The Isle of Wight is one of the most beautiful parts of the country. If we had the north American approach of zoning, which is much harder-edged and makes it absolutely clear whether somewhere can ever be built on, we might make more progress. That is probably outwith the terms of the debate, as would be a long discussion of the green belt, but it is an important point because it relates to people’s deep instincts about land use. Those instincts are sound in many ways, because we want to protect beautiful countryside. As a representative of a rural area with a lot of farmers, I should say that we also want to keep land to grow food on.
Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)
I trust that my hon. Friend recognises that to a developer, the choice between developing a brownfield site, which may have problems of industrial waste or contamination, and developing a greenfield site, which carries none of that extra development cost, makes them much more likely to want to pursue a greenfield or green belt option rather than a more challenging industrial brownfield option.
Mr Bacon
I completely take my hon. Friend’s point. I suppose I would reply, with the Irishman, “I wouldn’t have started from here”, but the developer is presented with the narrow choice that my hon. Friend describes. I should say in passing that one event that I attended at our party conference featured someone from the London assembly who was trying to get some brownfield sites in London made available for housing. They kept on encountering planners who said, “Hands off our strategic industrial land. We need to keep some brownfield land.”
The argument is complex and nuanced, and my hon. Friend is right about the costs of dealing with contaminated land, but in a more fluid and well-functioning world, the responsibilities that sit within the public realm for making land available for use and providing services for it would work differently. In Victorian times, the local councils or corporations—those great Victorian institutions—took it upon themselves to build the infrastructure they needed, such as roads and sewers. The fact that they did that so well is the reason why it has lasted so long and why we now have 100-year-old sewers that need to be replaced through private finance initiative schemes. The only reason they have lasted so long is that the Victorians did such a good job. They went into the market and issued bonds, and they borrowed money. The Bolton Corporation, the Corporation of Birmingham and other great Victorian civic institutions, from when local authorities had a bit of self-respect, did great work and provided the environment in which private individuals could build. Many splendid developments were built, quite dense and quite high, and we can see many still standing in London and our other great cities.
The problem that we have now is that strategic land promotion is, in a way, done by the wrong people. I will come on to the issue of volume house builders, but I will mention them now since my hon. Friend has triggered the point. I do not blame volume house builders for acting in a rational manner, and people who are surprised that they construct dwellings only when it is profitable to do so need to wake up and smell the coffee. Of course that is how they will behave, and we cannot be in the slightest bit surprised. The point is not so much that we encourage them to do a quick job and get out, leading to buildings of substandard quality and durability and poor longevity, but that we require them to do that. They are forced to act in a deeply sub-optimal way in a flawed system. We need a much more patient approach to the employment of the capital that is needed.
We can look at some of the ancient estates that undertook construction years ago, including in London, and still own the properties that were built, or at least the freehold to them, many decades or hundreds of years later. One is the Duchy of Cornwall—there are not that many 600-year-old private ducal estates with the explicit purpose of providing an income for the heir to the throne, but it has been doing its job quite well for 600 years.
Mr Spencer
Surely the planning authority is the ultimate authority, and local authorities should be much more robust in forcing developers to consider brownfield sites before they allow greenfield sites even to be considered. I do not know whether my hon. Friend’s Bill would assist in any way in freeing up brownfield sites first.
Mr Bacon
I am glad the hon. Lady says that, and I look forward to reading it with interest.
I was talking to Shelter at a meeting and trying to distil my policy. I have not come to this as a housing expert, but I look at the world and think that if we had got things right there would not be a problem, there would be an equilibrium between supply and demand, and I would not have to stand here in the first place. I distilled my policy down to six words: everyone should have somewhere to live. That is it; that’s what I know. More than that I do not know, and the rest in some ways is details. We must ensure that everyone has somewhere to live, and at the moment they do not. I think we need every available shoulder pushing on that wheel. Of course, if a big rock is in front of the wheel we need to move it out of the way, but I am up for any idea that increases the total supply of housing, particularly if it is done to the highest possible standard.
One simply cannot tell which parts of Poundbury are affordable housing. When they are pointed out, people look at them and think, “Phwoar—I’d like to live there.” They have no particular special status; people are taken off the local housing list like everywhere else, and Poundbury has its share of social problems. However, the shape of community that has been created does something to lessen some of those problems.
A YouGov survey two years ago indicated that 75% of people do not want to buy the product of the volume house builders which, as I said earlier, I think are acting rationally inside a systemically flawed system. One of the main constraints on supply is that the standard house models of the volume house builders are attractive to only a small proportion of the total numbers of would-be buyers in the population. That makes it difficult to get above an average of 2.6 sales per month per site. Where there is a custom-build approach—or, as I might venture to call it, a customer-build approach—they can get two, three or four times that level of performance.
There is a wonderful development—it is not an experiment; it has happened—in the Netherlands in Almere on the opposite side of the IJsselmeer from Amsterdam. Many, many dwellings were allowed—it now has 3,000—and most are self-build and custom build. When the volume house builders around the edge were basically in stasis and nobody was buying their dwellings, there was a hive of activity in the middle of that development because the building of houses was being treated as if customers mattered.
A colleague recently retailed to me the story he had been told about a former Conservative MP who had been on the board of a major house building company. The former MP had said, “I have been on the board of this big PLC house builder for eight years. We have talked about land acquisition, finance, buying other businesses, the supply chain, cost control, staffing levels and skills. The only thing we haven’t talked about is houses.”
The truth of the matter is that we do not really have a housing market. If we did, there would be enough houses for everyone. What we have is a land market—which is very tightly controlled—and volume house builders which have access to the open capital market act rationally: they build when it is profitable to do so and take out an insurance policy to cover the down side. A farmer who is getting 3.5 tonnes of winter barley from a field is very happy if someone gives him £4,000 a year for the next 10 years for an option to apply for planning permission to build houses on it one day. That may never happen, but the only entity that can afford to do that is a large, well capitalised house builder. Small house builders cannot possibly do that.
It is even worth a large house builder’s while to employ someone—at considerable expense—to work out how to remove a joist that costs £76 from a roof. It is worth the investment of thousands of pounds and a considerable amount of time to figure that out, because for 1,000 houses on one site it will save £76,000. For someone who builds 9,000 or 10,000 houses a year, it will save £750,000. Over 10 years, that will amount to £7.5 million. What business would not want to save such a sum? But then along comes the purchaser, accompanied by the sales agent who, for some strange reason, often drives a pink Fiat. The sales agent is trying to sell that rather pretty little shoebox, containing furniture that is manufactured to deceive the eye. The width of a double bed in most show homes is about 3 feet 11 inches or 4 feet. Furniture for show homes is not furniture that could be used: it is specifically designed to make the rooms look bigger. The prospective buyers, perhaps a husband and wife with a baby, say, “We are thinking of having another baby. Can we extend into the roof?” But they cannot do that because the design, to save that £76, makes that impossible. The whole thing would fall down.
In a customer-driven environment, from the beginning the customer would say, “This is what I want now, and this is what I may want in the future”, and the market would respond. Some mathematician has worked out that if someone buys a Mini Cooper from the factory in Oxford, there are 126,000 different permutations to choose from.
Mr Spencer
My hon. Friend mentioned the Duchy of Cornwall. The Prince of Wales is on record several times talking about UK architecture and the occasional carbuncles that it produces. If the market allows individual designs, someone’s aspirational design is likely to be someone else’s carbuncle. How will the Bill address that differential in taste and aspiration?
Mr Bacon
The vast majority of our built environment that is worth protecting was built before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, when there was much less control on what could be done. Also, when people are spending their own money on assets, they are likely to do so in such a way that protects the value of those assets. Aesthetics vary: every beautiful Georgian terrace we see—except those that were built on green fields—was built on land that previously held a beautiful row of black and white cottages from the 14th or 15th century that was knocked down to make way.
Imagine a world in which people could go along to a site and the sales agent with the pink Fiat said, “Here are some choices for you. You might want a big plot or a small one. Your tastes might tend in the direction of very traditional architecture or of something very funky. If the former, you might want to think about these architects and builders. If you want something more contemporary, you might want to consider these architects and builders who have a lot of experience in that sector. We have some examples of work they have done earlier and we can attest to their quality.” That could be the normal approach, but at the moment it is anything but.
Interestingly, the UK is an outlier in this area. In Canada, Germany, France, Sweden and Ireland, self or custom build often accounts for more than 50% of the market. In Italy, it accounts for more than 60% and in tiny Austria it is 86%. In this country, self-build is still seen as an elite club that is open only to a small number of people. As Kevin McCloud has said, we build some of the poorest performing, most expensive and smallest homes in Europe. If someone wants a home with triple-glazed windows so that it costs nothing to heat, we have no suppliers who can supply that. I do not know anyone who would not like a house that cost nothing to heat, but triple-glazed windows are not available here, although they are in Germany. They should be available here, too.
Mr Bacon
My hon. Friend makes an important point. As I said earlier, people go into planning with the most benign intentions, but they end up becoming the person who says no. They find that they do not like that and they leave. That means that those left in planning authorities can be the less imaginative and creative, who like exercising their little bit of power. I know someone in South Norfolk who built a house and he said that after his seventh attempt to get the gutter colour right, he told the planner to choose. But that person is employed by the taxpayer and should have better things to do. The people who work in local planning authorities are as much victims of the system as everyone else. Perhaps a quarter of them should not be there, but most of them would like to do a good job. They would like to have more ability to help their local communities properly in a true place-making way, as the hon. Member for Nottingham North describes.
The Government have done a lot in this area. The Budget provided £150 million for service plots, and the Government have announced a significant range of housing schemes in recent years—the local infrastructure fund, the Growing Places fund, the new homes bonus and Help to Buy, as well as the more recent starter homes money. The Minister can say more about those if he wants, but my point is not that nothing is happening. It is that it is not happening quickly enough. We need to make it happen quickly if we are to solve the housing needs of our people.
One crucial problem is that, because the supply has not been flowing properly, the cost of buying a house has risen considerably compared with the average income. It used to be three to four times income. In South Norfolk, it is now 8.2 times average income to buy the average dwelling, and it is the same in Harlow. In mid Suffolk, it is 8.6 times. These figures are from a “Home Truths” card for the east of England—the National Housing Federation has produced a card for each region of the country. In South Cambridgeshire, it is nine times average income, in St Albans 10.5 times, in Welwyn Hatfield 11.9 times and in Hertsmere it is 13.4 times. In a well functioning, flowing market that would not be the case.
In my view, the word “customer” should apply in the broadest possible sense. As I said, my policy is that everyone should have somewhere to live, but not everyone can afford to buy a house, and we need to recognise that. It follows that people without the money to buy a house should also be treated as customers. I want to see a world in which a person can say to a housing association, “I can’t afford to buy a house, but I am a human being and I don’t want to live in a ditch. I would like to have somewhere to live, and I understand that you provide housing for people like me”; and I want to see a world in which the housing association replies to such people or groups of people, “How can we help create something you want to live in and then rent it to you?” I know that can happen because it is happening now—tens of thousands of houses are being built this way across Germany and other parts of the continent—but not here. If we treat house building as if customers matter, we will go a long way towards solving the problem.
My humble Bill would require each local authority to keep a register of persons—individuals or associations of individuals—who are
“seeking to acquire serviced plots of land in the authority’s area in order to build houses for those individuals to occupy as homes.”
In the Bill, the word “house” includes a dwelling that forms part of a building, and “serviced plot of land” means
“a plot of land which satisfies such requirements about utilities and other matters as may be specified.”
For example, if a group of people got together to take over a derelict commercial building in an urban area, do it up and turn it into a series of dwellings, and if they got the co-operation of the local authority, that would fall within the scope of the Bill as a serviced plot.
Clause 1 identifies the relevant authorities that in each area would be responsible for observing the Bill: district councils, county councils in areas with no district councils, London borough councils, the Common Council of the City of London, the Council of the Isles of Scilly and other authorities, such as the Broads Authority, national parks and so on. The Government’s vanguard councils, with a bit of help and pump-priming money, are experimenting voluntarily with registers to see what is easiest and most cost-effective, and the last thing I want to do is place extra burdens on already overburdened councils.
Mr Spencer
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case and is slowly winning me round. However, if there was a plot on which 10 houses were to be built, a section 106 agreement, as well as infrastructure for sewerage and top water, would be needed. How would the 10 individual purchasers arrive at an understanding to pay the section 106 money, the sewerage connection fees and other ongoing costs?
Mr Bacon
It could be done in lots of ways. I am grateful to my hon. Friend because he draws my attention to something I should have mentioned earlier. The long title of the Bill states that one of the purposes of the Bill is
“to allow volume house builders to include self-build and custom-build projects as contributing towards their affordable housing obligations, when”—
and for the avoidance of doubt, I should have written “and only when”—
“in partnership for this purpose with a Registered Landlord”.
There is no reference to that in the text of the Bill, and there is a reason for that. I had planned to suggest to volume house builders that they could do this too, but on advice, owing to concerns from the affordable housing sector, the Department for Communities and Local Government and others—particularly in the other place, there are many experts who have forgotten more about section 106 agreements than my hon. Friend or I will ever know—it became apparent that I would have been treading into deep waters unnecessarily and that much of what might be needed could be done by guidance and regulations from the Department. For a technical reason, however, the words about volume house builders in the long title have had to remain: this was the Bill that was presented, so I have to keep the long title on Second Reading. If it gets into Committee, however, I will move an amendment deleting those words so that the Bill is silent on the question of section 106 agreements and volume house builders—there is no definition of volume house builders in law anyway. There was much justified concern that this approach might have been open to abuse, and it was certainly not my intention to allow that.
In defence of volume house builders, whom I do not blame for behaving rationally, there are some—in particular, Mark Clare, chief executive of Barratt Developments—who are across this agenda and thinking broadly and deeply about what they can do to help. For example, Barratt is providing plots for local small builders alongside its big developments to encourage diversity and choice. I commend that approach tremendously. Barratt is a high-quality operation, and as it does that, more will follow. In their negotiations with big developers, local authorities could start discussing how volume house builders might incorporate that into their big developments, but I would rather it be done on a case-by-case basis—local authority by local authority—rather than have us tell them from above what has to happen. That is not likely to work.
Clause 1 deals with the establishment, maintenance and promotion of the register, and clause 2 deals with the duty as regards the register. It states that local authorities, having established the register, must have regard to it in bringing forward their housing plans. The meaning of “have regard to” will vary enormously. What is appropriate for the London boroughs of Hammersmith or Newham, depending on conditions and the amount of land available, will be very different from what is appropriate for a national park, which is also a local authority, for a suburban area, a rural area such as South Norfolk or a market town. So I have not tried to define exactly what it would mean. Instead, the Bill provides that the Secretary of State could issue guidance and make regulations about what it means.
Just yesterday, the Government published their “Right to Build: supporting custom and self build” consultation document. It is a thorough document and I commend it to hon. Members. It is an index of how serious they are about talking to local authorities about what will work locally and how to make this the new normal without its becoming a bureaucratic and burdensome exercise.
I do not pretend that the Bill will change everything overnight. We have a serious issue with our housing need that has not been solved for a generation, and we are not going to solve it overnight. However, I contend that if we open up choice and empower the customer—I mean “customer” in the broadest sense, including those in the market for affordable rental properties—we will start to make a significant difference. We need every available arrow in our quiver if we are to start to solve this problem, which has been going on for far too long. If we can unleash the energy of our own people, we can make a tremendous difference. As Rod Hackney, the architect who used to advise the Prince of Wales, said, it is a dangerous thing to underestimate human potential and the energy that can be generated when people are given the opportunity to help themselves. I believe that my Bill would contribute towards helping people to help themselves, and I commend it to the House.
Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)
Madam Deputy Speaker, you and I represent constituencies with an equivalent demography and similar levels of deprivation and dysfunction. My constituency could be characterised as seven enormous former council estate. It might seem odd, therefore, for me to begin by praising the Bill put forward by my hon. Friend—if I may call him that—the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) and mentioning Kevin McCloud and his programme “Grand Designs”. I do that because he has popularised the concept of self-build and because it happens to be my favourite television programme. When Kevin McCloud came to the House of Commons to speak to the self-build group, I remember him being deeply unimpressed when I showed him that my phone ring-tone was the “Grand Designs” theme tune. More seriously, however, he has put the concept of individual self-build very much into people’s minds, so we owe him and the show a continuing debt because it opens up a line of thinking.
The line of thinking for me is not building a £1 million house in beautiful green belt, but, to connect back to my opening sentence, that self-build, custom build or community build could be one of the answers for areas such as my constituency and that represented by Madam Deputy Speaker—places that linger at the bottom of the league table on so many statistical indices, whether it be, as in my case, sending the fewest number of young people to university, or having double the number of single households or double the national average of the number of children entitled to free school meals. I am trying to juxtapose these two extremes, and I think we can do this, which is why I would like to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk, the chair of the self-build, custom-build and many other builds in the title of the group. If we are extending the title further, I would like to add, in brackets, community build, because that is where we can bridge into the less affluent areas where the need for housing is just as important. By dint of personal energy and effort, my hon. Friend has raised this issue virtually single-handedly in the House, bringing us to a position whereby I understand that both the Front-Bench teams will support his Bill—quite an achievement, albeit only one of many in his illustrious parliamentary career.
Mr Spencer
As his constituency neighbour, I am well aware of the challenges the hon. Gentleman faces in his constituency. He referred to Mr McCloud and the “Grand Designs” programme, but it strikes me that almost all those type of programmes conclude with the projects going over-budget and over-time—a demonstration of the enormous challenges of building one’s own property. Is there enough support out there from the National Custom & Self Build Association to assist people who are not of great wealth to overcome the challenges they might face in the self-build process?
Mr Allen
I am tempted, in Kevin McCloud fashion, to say, “Will I actually get to the end of this speech, and will it be done by Christmas? Let’s come back after the break and see.” More seriously, my honourable neighbour makes an important point, which I shall try to cover on the basis of what little I know about this field. It is indeed important not to look at individuals of high net worth to do the self-build, which would simply not be possible in my constituency. Rather, we should look to local partnerships, particularly including local councils. I have alluded to the experience of Berlin, to which I shall return, but in my own area, the superb Nottingham City Homes is the arm’s length management organisation for the former council housing stock. It is very well led, with imagination and creativity in abundance. If we can tie such organisations to people in the private sector who are prepared to help, I think it will be possible to bridge from those high-end individual self-builds into something that could have a real impact on my constituents.
I say that for another reason, too—not necessarily for the obvious housing reason. This could be a demonstration and a symbol of the fact that people in areas decimated by the decline of manufacturing who have been pulverised by the loss of employment in their communities—and, in many cases, the loss of self-respect, as well—are capable of getting up, organising and achieving something like this. That could have a really cathartic effect on those estates with which I know the hon. Gentleman is so familiar.
I pay tribute to Ted Stevens, whose name has been mentioned. Ted was not simply the chair of the National Self Build Association. One cannot come into contact with Ted without being electrocuted by the passion and desire he brings to this field. He is an inspirational character, and we were fortunate that he chose to come to Nottingham recently to convene a meeting with a number of colleagues who are interested in this field. One cannot pay for that sort of passion or buy that sort of interest and desire to spread the word. If, with the hon. Member for South Norfolk and Ted Stevens—he is no longer the chair of the association, but he is not the sort of character who is going to leave the field—we can bottle that passion, there is a real chance of doing something very significant in this field.
Let me say a little more about the specifics in relation to my own constituency, which I know the Bill’s promoter is concerned about, too. If we are to make an impact on the market, we are going to have to look at how this will impact on the former council estates, on working-class and low-income housing, which is where much of the expansion could come from. I made a point earlier about having more devolution so that local government can make some decisions rather than be the passive recipient of policies coming down the pipe from Whitehall. In my constituency, we need to enable the local authority to get on and do the job it sees fit. Peculiarly, there is too much housing in my constituency.
The project I am fortunate enough to chair in my constituency is called the rebalancing project. It is called that because we are trying to balance the fact that 95% of the constituency is covered by former council estates, with very little provided in the way of employment, training, leisure—all the things that go to make an effective community. To balance that, we have to confront the reality of being issued with housing targets that are wholly inappropriate for a constituency such as mine, and the drive in local government, when battling austerity, to sell land assets, often to people who could put a semi on a corner or a Barratt estate on a zone designated for business and enterprise, losing that land for ever. Those pressures must be considered .
We need a much more flexible system—one that is looked at locally rather than one in which all we are doing is looking to tick the boxes sent to us by the centre. If we can have that degree of flexibility, there will be room and possibilities for self-build, custom build and community build—breaking, in my case, this unleavened sea of former council housing. I put on record that this is actually very good stock—brick-built houses from the new garden city movement era, with gardens front and back and pitched roofs, with no deck access and no high rise, but which, none the less, in modern circumstances, without the employers who were around at that time, creates a large, single problem, verging on a ghetto, which we need to break down in order to create communities and neighbourhoods on a more human scale, based on a balance of employment, skills and training.
I was inveigled by the hon. Gentleman to go to Berlin to have a look at some of the self-build or community build there. It was one of the best bits of inveigling I have ever experienced. This was not “Grand Designs” as a concept. Some of the buildings we saw were converted. There was a beautiful former school which had been made into a wonderful set of apartments for a broad-based mix of people, with plenty of facilities on site. The other buildings that we saw were flats, sets of housing rather than individual housing. That visit opened my eyes to the fact that it was not necessary to do a one-off in a green field. I realised that this was relevant in an urban context and relevant to more than just an individual, and that it could start to involve a more collective approach that could be the answer in areas such as mine.