Housing and Planning Bill (Tenth sitting)

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Public Bill Committees

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

Touching briefly on the point made by the hon. Member for Peterborough and the need for greater clarity and greater protections, the record should reflect the request made by the National Housing Federation in its written submission that the Government

“ensure the wording in the Bill reflects the agreement between housing associations and government”.

It is concerned that that parts of that voluntary agreement are not in the Bill, and so could be changed at any point by future Governments.

[Mr Thomas]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. The brutal truth, as I suspect the hon. Member for Peterborough knows full well, is that the Government have been making up various provisions of the Bill on the hoof. Our amendments are designed to preclude any ability for the Executive to override the intentions of Parliament and to ignore the glitches that we are highlighting in their plans thus far. I recognise that the hon. Gentleman, perhaps for career reasons, may not want to support publicly the concerns of Opposition Members, but I am sure that given the fluency and skill of my contribution, he will want to take up those concerns with his hon. Friend the Minister outside the Chamber.

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[Kevin Hollinrake]

Part 4 of the Bill aims to address the simple problem of supply and demand, which of course controls the housing market. We are simply not building enough homes. The United Kingdom needs 230,000 homes a year. We have seen huge improvements over the past five years: 88,000 homes were started in the depths of the housing recession and there were 136,000 housing starts in England in 2015—a 56% increase. Planning permission consents numbered more than 240,000, so there has clearly been great progress along the track towards building more homes.

[Matthew Pennycook]

Is the hon. Gentleman at all concerned by the Office for Budget Responsibility’s downward revision of its estimate for new homes to 185,000? The estimate is down 34,400 since the election.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

There is no doubt that, in my constituency alone, we have seen a 100% increase in the amount of building in 2015 versus 2014. If the hon. Gentleman looks at his figures, I am sure he will see a similar increase in his constituency. Has he looked at his figures? There is no doubt that the data on the direction of travel in my constituency and many others like it are very clear—there is a 56% increase. Planning consents are increasing, too, but there is more to be done. The Bill is about releasing more land, particularly brownfield land, and expediting the whole planning process to ensure that local authorities properly staff their planning departments. The Bill allows planning in principle, giving developers more certainty about the land they are acquiring so that they can build properties on that land.

The other key thing that we need to address in the housing market is affordability, and of course those challenges are about lack of supply, which we also hope to address with some of the measures in the Bill. Owner-occupation has fallen in recent years, largely due to the recession, and it is something that we desperately want to address. I was lucky enough to buy a home in my early 20s, and I imagine that most people in this room own their own home. Why should we lock people out of that opportunity to own their own home? The Bill contains provisions on starter homes and, as in this clause, on voluntary agreement on right to buy. It is absolutely right to use our public assets more efficiently and effectively, and to release them to allow more building. Opposition Members have asked several times whether the affected homes will be replaced, and time and again we have seen evidence showing that the answer is yes.

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[Kevin Hollinrake]

Absolutely. Many of the provisions in the Bill that we have discussed, such as planning in principle for starter homes, will help to solve that problem.

[Matthew Pennycook]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Riverside Housing, which said in its written submission that

“one for one replacement will be very challenging”.

Does he think that that is wrong and that the organisation will ultimately be able to provide one-for-one replacement, or are we talking about replacement in different areas, across different tenures?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Challenging does not mean impossible. There are great challenges in the housing market and we need to rise to those challenges. As for one-for-one replacement, I feel that replacement is the wrong term: it should be an addition. It is an additional home, because the people who are buying that home were previously renting, and were locked out of the housing market with no prospect of getting on to the housing ladder. They are buying that home and will still live in that home. They will benefit from the place where they have lived, and most of them will live in that home for many years to come.