Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Mary Robinson Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

Yesterday I was at a planning inquiry in my constituency. It should have been a situation in which a planning inspector signed off a neighbourhood plan produced by a village, but the process has in fact been stopped because of incompatibility with the local plan. It has to be said that the neighbourhood plan had not started quickly enough; nevertheless, it has been stopped.

In response to views expressed by the planning inspector, Mid Sussex District Council has proposed a 500-house settlement to the north of the village of Hassocks. The cumulative effect of that new development and others would be to increase the size of the village by a third. There are huge local concerns about the adequacy of infrastructure, the decision to locate the settlement at the proposed site, the loss of countryside, the closure of a green space between two villages and so on, but the important point is that the parish council was preparing its neighbourhood plan, and it was proposing an increase in the number of houses. Neighbourhood plans have delivered more houses than expected. The parish council proposed a limited number of houses in that location, but 500 was completely out of kilter with the number it expected to produce, and the site of the proposed new settlement is not in the location that the parish council wanted.

During the inquiry, a huge number of members of the public were listening to the evidence given by not only elected representatives, but a vast array of QCs representing an equally vast array of house builders. Members of the public were not allowed to speak, but every time they just said, “Hear, hear,” or disagreed with a point in the way in which polite members of the public in West Sussex do, they were told to be quiet. They were silenced. A reform that was introduced under the Localism Act 2011 and that was designed to empower local communities—giving them the decision about where housing should be located—has suddenly regressed to the old-fashioned planning by appeal process, with decisions taken by the planning inspector and the public literally silenced. I suggest that we need to hold faith with the principle of giving communities more control over where housing goes.

In reality, more housing than expected was produced by the process of neighbourhood planning. I think that those on all sides can agree with the principles of empowerment, of taking responsibility and of putting decision making into the hands of the local community. Upsetting neighbourhood plans undermines those principles and this very powerful reform.

We should understand why this has happened: developers have been gaming the system, and continue to do so. Developers, by not using planning permissions, have driven down the five-year land supply so that we have a planning free-for-all whereas we should have a planned system. Developers have conspired—I use that word advisedly—in Mid Sussex, as they have in other districts in my constituency, to delay putting local plans in place so that they can maintain that free-for-all, yet cynically they have not built.

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend refers to the power of the local voice. I am sorry that my voice has gone a little, but I will still speak up for local people. That local voice needs to be heard in planning. My area falls within the Stockport local plan area, but that, in turn, falls under the Greater Manchester spatial framework. For four years, one of my villages has been trying to set up its own neighbourhood plan. The community has done a lot of work, but it is now worried about how its neighbourhood plan will fit in, as two other plans are being put in place. There were indications in “Planning for the right homes in the right places” that this would be addressed through a different methodology. Does he agree that we need to keep that approach?

[Nick Herbert]

Where possible, we need to respect neighbourhood plans. Of course the local planning authority retains the position of a strategic planning authority, but we should not allow developers to bust neighbourhood plans by cynical means, which is what has been happening.

It is important to note that the housing that is now being built in West Sussex is far in excess of the level that was envisaged 12 years ago, when I was first elected to the House. The objectively assessed need for local authorities is now 61% higher than it was under Gordon Brown’s draft south-east plan, and it will be double that when the Government bring in the new housing need figures. New houses are being built. However, it is important that permissions actually translate into new homes.

I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) back to his place. I agreed with almost everything that he said. We can all agree about the importance of building more houses. He gave us his framing of the fundamental problem, and I agree that returning to the free market is not the answer, and nor is saying that we should hold to the current system, which is clearly not delivering. Somewhere in the middle, we have to identify a more radical reform that will allow us, as he suggested, to capture the uplift in the value of land between what it would be as ordinary land with an agricultural market value, and land with development potential, which suddenly becomes worth millions or tens of millions of pounds per acre. We have to think hard about how we do that.

I want to deliver a warning. Putting into the hands of local authorities powers of compulsory purchase that give them the ability to confiscate land at not the market value, but an assessed value that is far lower, might indeed have the effect that my hon. Friend suggests. While we must explore such ideas, that might also create wholesale property blight across the country, inconveniencing not just the owners of agricultural land, but communities more widely. I look at the effect of a proposed new town in my constituency, which is in the same district of Mid Sussex, but also falls into Horsham district. Neither local authority wants that, but it has been relentlessly promoted by a developer that does not even have an options on the land, against the wishes of the local community and the local councils. That has created an enormous blight on a large swathe of this part of Mid Sussex, because people are fearful that a new town might come and therefore the value of their properties is affected.

If we are to investigate such a reform, we have to be very careful to draw a distinction between previous powers exercised by the Government in relation to compulsory purchase for new towns such as Milton Keynes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford set out, and the idea that we could somehow translate those powers to local authorities in a way that was not carefully constrained. That needs much more careful thinking, but it is undoubtedly the germ of an important idea.

I agree with my hon. Friend that we will need new thinking if we are to increase supply in the way that is necessary. We are not France or Germany. We have a much smaller country, and there are huge pressures on infrastructure, but reform might help to deliver infrastructure for local communities.

We need to produce more affordable housing, but we should try to apply the principles we latched on to a few years ago with the Localism Act 2011, through which we gave communities the power to decide where they wanted housing and the responsibility to exercise that power. That yielded great results, because it meant that communities that had previously said no to developments started saying yes in a very positive way. We should be careful about principles that rely on such state intervention, control or indeed confiscation that they would be anathema to the public and many Conservative Members.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Wragg]

There are many flaws in the statistical methodology of the GMSF that I would like to unpack, but unfortunately perhaps, or fortunately for the House, I do not have the minutes in which to do so. However, my hon. Friend is spot on.

Further to that, to give an example, the draft framework proposed that 4,900 hectares of Greater Manchester’s green-belt land be built on, representing a net loss of 8% of green-belt land across the area. In my constituency, proposals included a development of 4,000 homes on fields around the village of High Lane—essentially trebling the size of that village, with little regard for the burden of increased traffic on the road network and the increased pressures on public services.

[Mary Robinson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for giving way. I appreciate the points he is making, particularly about the green belt, because, as he knows, in my constituency 8,100 homes are planned to be built on the green belt. That is not sustainable or wanted, which is why more than 3,000 people signed my petition on that very point, which I presented to the House.

[Mr Wragg]

The constituents of Cheadle have a doughty campaigner in my hon. Friend. We think we have it bad in the Hazel Grove constituency with the proposals for 4,000 homes. The figure is more than double that in Cheadle, which is beyond the pale. Her constituents are fortunate to have such a vigorous representative in this House.

As my hon. Friend alluded to, in the last Parliament we presented petitions to the House on behalf of thousands of our constituents who are opposed to the massive scale of development on green-belt land and urge instead the development of brownfield sites. I also had the pleasure of introducing a Westminster Hall debate on the matter, which was well attended by colleagues from all parts of the House, including the current Mayor of Greater Manchester. That demonstrated the concerns over the spatial framework right across the region.

Since then, the combined authority has undertaken a public consultation on the Greater Manchester spatial framework, which received an astonishing 27,000 responses. While many of those recognised the need for new housing, concern about the allocation of green-belt land for that development was the single biggest issue raised in the consultation. Concerns over the environment and infrastructure were also raised. The massive response to the draft framework rightly prompted a fundamental rethink of the plan. Work is under way on a second version, which is due to be published in June 2018 and will be subject to a further 12-week consultation. The grass is long on the green belt in my constituency, but I hope that the combined authority have not put the plan into the long grass.

While we await the second draft of the GMSF, I have a few suggestions that might make the revised plan more acceptable to the public. I hope that the Minister will put some of them into practice when considering national planning policy. First, we need a vigorous “brownfield first” policy. Brownfield sites that have had development on them before should be prioritised for the building of houses, rather than the green belt. That not only protects the countryside, but encourages the regeneration of our towns and makes best use of land where the necessary infrastructure already exists. In Greater Manchester, there is at least 1,000 hectares of brownfield land spread over 400 sites that has not yet been fully developed for housing. That is more than enough to build at least 55,000 homes and it is probable that more land of that nature can be found.

We must also look for ways to optimise the density and quality of new housing developments, without eroding the green belt. After all, the green belt is an important barrier against urban sprawl. It encourages us to build upwards and not out. That allows people to live nearer their places of work and does not extend commutes, which in turn reduces the strain on local roads and transport infrastructure.

The Government recently conducted a consultation on the new approach to calculating local housing need, to which I submitted evidence. If the Government wish to proceed, I believe that the most significant policy change that should be implemented is for the new approach to calculating housing need to be considered at county level, rather than at metropolitan borough level. In the case of my local area, it would be considered by Greater Manchester rather than Stockport. It makes more sense to look at overall demand at a broader county level, rather than at borough level, especially in light of the devolution to city regions, combined authorities and metropolitan mayors, which look after other infrastructure and services.

Furthermore, members of the public do not necessarily observe and are perhaps even unaware of council boundaries as they go about their daily lives. They often live in one borough and work in another, and they may travel through several others to get from one to the other. The more artificial boundaries that form the basis of planning policy, the more divorced decision making is from reality. Critically, my proposal would allow flexibility to improve how local authorities work together to meet housing and other needs across their respective boundaries. Just because one borough has higher levels of employment or property values, it does not necessarily follow that it has more sites to build houses on.

In conclusion, the strength of local opinion is clear. The voices not only in my constituency but in neighbouring constituencies and from colleagues across the House are clear: the green belt should be safeguarded and previously developed urban land should be prioritised for housing instead. I recognise that the housing White Paper proposes to make it clear that green-belt boundaries should be subject to change only where the local authority can demonstrate that it has

“fully examined all other reasonable options”,

including the proper use of brownfield land. Indeed, any changes to green-belt designation should be made only as part of a wider local planning review process to ensure that there are opportunities for community consultation. Giving neighbourhood plans greater legal authority in planning law would be one means of achieving that. I commend the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and hope that those on the Treasury Bench were in listening mode for his submission.