Housing: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly

Debate between Matthew Pennycook and Noah Law

Monday 9th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on securing this important debate, and I commend him for the forceful but thoughtful case he made on behalf of his constituents. He has considerable experience and expertise when it comes to housing policy and practice, and I listened with great interest to his views and many of his proposals.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham) for her incisive contributions and all those who have added to the debate this evening. There is clearly a fierce clarity of purpose on both sides of the House in respect of meeting housing need across the county, and I assure all hon. Members present that the Government are resolved to do what is necessary to ensure that that can happen.

It would also be remiss of me not to acknowledge my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). He is not a Cornish MP, but his constituency suffers from many of the challenges that hon. Members have touched on; indeed, he is impacted by the challenges coming from Cornwall. He has been a champion over many years for bold action to tackle the housing crisis across the south-west.

As we have heard, the housing crisis in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly is acute. Eye-watering house price-to-earnings ratios are putting home ownership out of the reach of most local people; an overheated and shrinking private rented sector is placing a severe strain on local economies as well as families and communities; and social housing waiting lists are growing steadily. I recognise that second homes and short-term lets are not the sole causes of those pressures, but none of them can be properly understood without taking into account the sharp increase in the numbers of second homes and short-term lets in the county over recent years—an issue to which I will return in due course.

In the time available to me—there is more of it than I expected when I drafted this speech—I wanted to provide the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members representing Cornish seats with an overview of the Government’s thinking in this area, and a sense of how we intend to address the challenges around housing availability in the county, with the caveat that there is a limit to the detail I can provide at this point, given that we are a new Government still considering the best options to achieve our aims.

The causes of England’s housing crisis are multiple, but among the most important is our singular failure as a nation to build enough homes of all tenures. That is why this Government are determined to do what is necessary to get the country building again, including by ensuring that we put in place a planning system geared towards meeting housing need in full. On our proposed reforms to the national planning policy framework, I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about the introduction of mandatory housing targets, and I appreciate that he made a nuanced argument, but I am afraid that I am unconvinced by it. The fact that the distribution of homes in his constituency is creating significant challenges for the communities he represents is not, in my view, an argument against ensuring that sufficiently ambitious targets are in place to boost housing supply. Rather, it is an argument for making sure that local planning authorities have the full set of tools they need to manage those distributional challenges, and to plan for development in line with their targets in a way that meets local need.

[Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give consideration to the hypothesis to which the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) alluded, which was that building the wrong kind of housing in Cornwall can beget demand for the kind of housing that we have so struggled to build—namely, truly affordable and social homes?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. I acknowledge the pressures and the challenges. We need to give local authorities the tools to shape the type of development undertaken—not only through their local plans—and to get a grip on excessive concentrations of second homes and short-term lets. That is the Government’s intention. On the NPPF and housing targets, it is the Government’s considered view that we need to act to increase supply in all parts of the country, and need to take steps to ensure that the housing market responds to the needs of communities. These are complementary, not conflicting, policy intentions.