Planning Committees: Reform
Debate between Matthew Pennycook and Mark Francois(2 weeks ago)
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Matthew Pennycook
It is true. The Office for Budget Responsibility is projecting that supply will dip below 200,000 homes this year, and the affordable homes programme is on course to deliver between 110,000 and 130,000 affordable homes, not the original 180,000 that were allotted to it. We are taking steps to increase the supply of social and affordable homes, including using the £500 million in additional funding secured for the affordable homes programme in the recent Budget.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
Labour-led Basildon borough council’s new draft plan is at the regulation 18 stage, but it proposes a completely unsustainable 27,000 new properties across the borough, including 4,300 in Wickford, in my constituency, which is completely unsustainable and would involve concreting over whole swathes of our local green belt. As well as reimposing mandatory housing targets, which are an insult to local democracy, why is Labour now trying to neuter local planning committees of democratically elected councillors, taking away the say of local people, when it is desperately difficult to persuade people to vote in local elections as it is?
Matthew Pennycook
Mr Speaker, you will forgive me if I do not comment on the specifics of the local planning question, due to the quasi-judicial nature of the role of the Secretary of State in planning applications. We set out transitional arrangements in the NPPF consultation in July for how local plans at regulation 18 and 19 stage will proceed through the system, to ensure that we get up-to-date local plans through where appropriate and meet housing need in terms of the revised standard method that we have put forward.
We are determined to get these homes built. The right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) says that those levels of housing are unsustainable. It will be for the Planning Inspectorate to decide whether the local plan is sound, but I do not take issue in any way with the ambition that the local authority is showing. We have an acute and entrenched housing crisis in this country. Every week in my advice surgery—I am sure that his is the same—people come to me who are desperately in need of houses. The 1 million homes that the previous Government built in the last Parliament are not enough. We will build 1.5 million homes over the next five years.