Town and Country Planning

Matt Western Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I rise to oppose these plans. What have we learned since the war? When we think back to the new towns developed in Hertfordshire, Essex and elsewhere, and the great planning that went into them, we realised that we really did some fantastic stuff. These statutory instruments would remove the ability of people in Warwick and Leamington and across the country to have their say in how their neighbourhood is being developed—we have seen a degree of that over the past 10 years—and instead hand over power to the big housing developers while communities and councils are emasculated. Shelter, the Local Government Association, Crisis, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors are among the bodies to have expressed serious misgivings about these changes.

SIs 632 and 755 have been spoken about around the Chamber, so I will not dwell on them. It is actually SI 756 that most concerns me. Developers will be able to demolish housing and offices and rebuild them as denser and taller blocks of flats—as tall as six storeys and containing up to 60 or 70 flats—without making a full planning application. We already know that the previous permitted development regulations, which allow for the conversion of empty office blocks into new homes, have led to modern-day slums. This was forcefully exposed by BBC “Panorama” earlier this year, and the Government’s own report has concluded that

“permitted development conversions do seem to create worse-quality residential environments than planning permission conversions in relation to a number of factors widely linked to the health, well-being and quality of life of future occupiers.”

There is also a lack of control over where the homes are placed. Naturally, many previous PDR developments have ended up on industrial estates and other unsuitable places. This leaves residents without essentials such as access to public transport, local services, shops and amenities. Whatever happened to our communities and town planning? It beggars belief, therefore, that the Government are seeking to expand these rights at the cost of the most vulnerable members of our society and our communities, who will end up living in these appalling homes. It is the developers who are gaining significantly. I think about the multimillionaires and billionaires who have made so much money out of development in south Warwickshire, south of Warwick and Leamington, but they have provided no amenities or facilities there.

One of the most serious problems running through all the statutory instruments is that they allow developers to avoid obligations to build affordable housing. Last year, just 6,300 new social homes were built in England. When sales and demolitions are accounted for, we lost more than 17,000 social homes over the course of last year. We have had only 21 new social rented council homes built in Warwick district since 2010—and we wonder why we have a housing crisis. Section 106 obligations are now the main way to get new social rented homes built. According to the most recent year’s stats, 10 times as many social rented homes were built through section 106 as were built with money from Government grants. These SIs mean that developers are not obliged to contribute to affordable housing through section 106.

Instead, the Government must make building social rented council homes their No. 1 priority. Look at places such as Goldsmith Street in Norwich: built under a Labour council, it shows us what social rented housing can be—beautiful, well designed and environmentally friendly; reminiscent of the great developments in the post-war period. We know that building social rented homes is popular: 268,000 people have signed George Clarke’s petition to build 100,000 council homes a year for the next 30 years.

These statutory instruments will strip away power from local communities in favour of big housing developers. They will lead to poor-quality unaffordable homes. I am afraid that these changes are a foretaste of the full reforms proposed in the planning White Paper. They are a developers’ charter, giving them sweeping power to build poor-quality homes and, importantly, avoid commitments to build truly affordable social rented homes.