Affordable Housing: Planning Reform

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq, just as it is to respond to what has been an extremely thoughtful and well-informed discussion. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) on securing this important debate, and on the considered way in which he opened it. He spoke with great clarity and persuasiveness about the severe housing pressures in his corner of England—pressures that, as he made clear, have been exacerbated by the pandemic—and he set out a number of interesting proposals to address them, many of which warrant further consideration.

When it comes to second and holiday home ownership in particular, we very much agree that more needs to be done to ensure that local first-time buyers get priority access to new homes for market sale, and that local people who are not in a position to buy or to secure social housing can access affordable private rentals, rather than those homes being used by landlords exclusively as short or holiday lets.

As an aside, I very much welcome the fact that there is an energetic all-party group on the short lets sector, because the regulatory balance in this area is delicate and needs to be approached sensibly, without party political controversy. If the Minister has time, I hope that he might outline whether the Government have any plans to better regulate the short-term platforms spoken about by many in this debate.

I strongly commend the detailed “First Homes not Second Homes” proposals set out today by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). I know the painstaking work he has been doing, as have Councillor Jayne Kirkham, Councillor Kate Ewert and others, to ensure that local people in Devon and Cornwall are not priced out of their local communities. I hope that the Minister will give those proposals serious consideration.

More generally, the hon. Member for St Ives was absolutely right to have used this debate to make the case, on behalf of his constituents, for focusing on delivering the right quantity of new housing in the right places at prices that local people can afford. It was implicit in his remarks that that should be done in a way that secures buy-in from existing local communities. I think those sentiments were shared widely by Members on both sides of the Chamber. Where he and I differ is in the belief that the means of achieving that vision are the flawed proposals outlined in the Government’s August 2020 White Paper for reform of the planning system—assuming that those proposals eventually emerge in some recognisable form from the review initiated by the Secretary of State following his appointment in September.

I will use what remains of my time to pick up on the two main themes of the debate—availability and affordability of housing—but also to draw out the third element, which is what the public’s role in the planning process should be. When it comes to the availability of housing, all Members who have spoken today have made it clear that there is widespread agreement on the need to accelerate the delivery of new housing across the country.

While the Opposition do not deny that the existing planning framework has its problems and there is an obvious case for reform, there is scant evidence that it is the primary cause of supply constraints. Even with all the caveats that must be considered, the statistics make it clear that the total number of units granted planning consent each year has consistently outstripped the rate of construction over the past decade, and the number of un-built permissions is highest in the regions with highest demand. Amazingly, London, of all places, where housing pressures are acute—I know this from my constituency caseload, which mirrors the situation set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi)—has the largest volume of unused consents. A report by the consultancy BuiltPlace suggests that our capital has as much as 8.1 years of supply approved, and yet unused.

Instead of obsessing about supply side reform, the Government would do well to focus, in the first instance, on cracking down on land banking and speculative planning, and consider what might be done to incentivise or compel developers—a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell)—to build out the permissions they have acquired.

When it comes to housing affordability, we really must get away from the over-simplistic notion that ramping up the supply of new housing will fully resolve the affordability crisis affecting many parts of the country. That is a theme that has re-emerged time and time again. Even if the Government’s target of 300,000 new houses a year were to be met—that is a very big if, given that completions in 2020-21 stood at just over 216,000—the impact on prices would be relatively small, and it would be felt only in the medium term.

Prior to the pandemic, there were a million more houses in England than there were households; that surplus has increased over recent decades and continues to grow, at the same time as prices continue to rise. Put simply, increasing home ownership—and boosting home ownership rates among the young, in particular—is as much about the affordability criteria and who can buy any new housing that becomes available as it is about overall deficiencies in supply. Instead of obsessing about supply side reform, the Government should look at how lending can be better targeted towards first-time buyers, so that they, and not just those who already have large amounts of equity, can purchase new homes to live in. As my hon. Friends the Members for York Central, for Vauxhall, for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, and for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) have said, we need better support for those who simply cannot buy, such as greater protection for private renters and action to reverse the sharp decline in social housing provision over recent years.

A key point, which has been implicit in today’s contributions but not brought expressly to the surface, is the role of local people and their priorities in the planning process. It is not disputed that there is an issue that needs to be confronted in terms of England’s discretionary planning system, but the solution to the problems of housing availability and affordability is not to silence communities and hand control of planning to development boards appointed by Ministers in Whitehall. As much as some rather offensively like to brand them in this way, most people in England are not die-hard nimbys, and that is why nine in 10 planning applications are approved.

What local people want, and what they should retain, is a say over how their areas are developed and a right to challenge inappropriate or harmful proposals that they do not believe will help to sustain balanced communities or, as the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mark Fletcher) remarked, provide the necessary infrastructure and amenity to thrive. Instead of attempting to reduce the public’s involvement or remove them from the planning process entirely, the Government should concentrate on how the system can be reformed to ensure that more developers bring forward proposals that significantly enhance local areas for existing communities, as well as for newcomers. That will incentivise local people to say yes with greater frequency.

As things stand, we have no idea whether proposals to reform the planning system will re-emerge from the review that the Secretary of State commissioned and, if they do, what form they will take. If a Bill is introduced next year, we hope that it will be the product of genuine reflection on the criticisms levelled at the White Paper by Members from all parts of the House. We hope that rather than approaching the planning system as so much red tape that needs to be swept aside, the Government will seek to make the current system more reflective, rational, transparent and democratic, and better resourced, putting communities at the heart of good place making that delivers high-quality, zero-carbon affordable new homes in the places where they are so desperately needed. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said powerfully, the housing crisis is, at the end of the day, not about numbers or units; it is about how we build the homes that people and families need so that they can flourish.