New Towns

Melanie Onn Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I congratulate the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) on securing the debate, and I wish her town and the respective constituency towns of the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) and the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) a happy birthday. I also welcome the Minister to his new post in what I believe is his first outing. Is he the Minister for pubs? For the northern powerhouse? For devolution? Yes? All of the above, but not for parks, apparently, which I think his predecessor was. I think he should fight for that, given the comments today on green spaces in new towns.

Nobody listening to the debate can have failed to hear the passion and pride that all hon. Members have in their new towns—or cities, as in the case of Milton Keynes. The hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) certainly demonstrated a “Whole Lotta Love” for her town—as well as for Led Zeppelin—while recognising the challenges faced by new towns.

As the anniversaries show, many new towns no longer consider themselves new and, as hon. Members have outlined, there is now a need to look to renewal and investment. I am afraid that some of the issues raised today have only been exacerbated since 2010. As the hon. Members for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) and for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) said, many town centres across the UK have been starved of investment and are in desperate need of regeneration. The Government will surely have to look at the complications mentioned of dealing with multiple private companies in town centres when trying to address this. I have been looking closely at regeneration with my local authority and Departments to try to improve the situation in my constituency of Great Grimsby, so I am well aware of the difficulties and challenges that people face.

The Government, of course, commissioned Mary Portas to write a review of the future of high streets in 2011, but she slammed them just three years later for making only “token gestures” in response. Many of the things we have heard today reflect a frustration that, on the one hand, the Government say they want to support towns, new towns and house building, but on the other, as two hon. Members mentioned, there is a loss of Government jobs in these towns. Those jobs are critical for not only the local economy but individuals. The loss of HMRC jobs—really good, secure jobs—is having an impact in my constituency as well.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) and the hon. Members for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) and for Redditch mentioned transport infrastructure. There was quite a strong emphasis on rail, but I was pleased also to hear a reference to buses. There is a significant issue around bus transportation, particularly for those on lower incomes. Buses are essential, but unfortunately since 2010 funding for buses across England and Wales has been cut by a third, with thousands of routes cut or downgraded as a result. Ensuring that there are good bus routes is essential for people’s ability to move around their local areas.

[Robert Halfon]

I thank the hon. Lady for her kind birthday wishes to Harlow on its 70th anniversary. She mentioned Government jobs, but would it be fair to say that that does not reflect the whole picture? I mentioned that the Government invested £400 million to bring Public Health England to Harlow, to make us, except for Atlanta in the United States, the public health science capital of the world. That will bring thousands of jobs, including skilled scientific jobs, to our town.

[Melanie Onn]

I am delighted that the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency is benefiting from that investment. I am sure that lots of Members around the room will be hoping for something similar or the same; I certainly would not be disappointed if the Minister came to me and offered something similar.

Broadband, which I thought might come up, has not been touched on today. In 2015 we were promised ultrafast broadband to nearly all homes in the country. Maybe someone will leap from their seat and say, “It’s all absolutely fine; we’ve got ultrafast broadband,” but I know that across the board, only a handful of constituencies have more than 1% of connections receiving ultrafast broadband speeds. To make all our towns across the country successful, the Government must take that seriously and press forward on it.

[Iain Stewart]

I should point out that the National Infrastructure Commission, which is looking at the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge corridor, is not just considering hard infrastructure such as roads, railways and the rest; broadband provision is very much part of its work.

[Melanie Onn]

Excellent. I could not agree more that soft infrastructure is an essential part of connectivity in new towns.

[Dr Cameron]

I would also like to comment on broadband. It came to my attention at a constituency surgery recently that there is real concern about new housing estates. If the number of homes being built does not reach a certain number, broadband does not necessarily have to be provided for residents. Residents are buying new houses, expecting broadband to be a feature of what they are buying, but there does not seem to be any legal requirement for it. Will the hon. Lady comment on that?

[Melanie Onn]

I certainly urge the Minister to consider that. When people purchase new build properties on those estates, modern facilities fit for the 21st century must be part and parcel of them.

Renewal and expansion of the housing stock are clearly issues that face new towns, as the right hon. Member for Harlow in particular highlighted. Under the Conservatives, we have seen the lowest level of house building since the 1920s and the lowest level of affordable house building for a quarter of a century. As rent and house prices have hugely outstripped rises in people’s incomes, we now have a generation of young people who cannot afford to buy a home—and not just in London, but right across the country, with the result being 200,000 fewer homeowners today than in 2010.

The hon. Member for Telford spoke of the specific problems for those who buy leasehold properties. Increases in ground rent charges are a particular issue that sees leaseholders being ripped off by developers or management companies and can make it impossible for individuals to sell their property. An APPG on the specific issue raised that in the previous Parliament, but perhaps her new all-party group will consider it as well.

[Peter Grant]

In Scotland, we have dealt with the problem of extortionate ground rents by abolishing the feudal property system lock, stock and barrel. Might that be worth examining for other parts of the UK?

[Melanie Onn]

When we are considering these issues, nothing should be off the table. It has to be something workable and reasonable that protects leaseholders. That option will not necessarily be the right solution, but it certainly should be available for consideration.

Labour has proposed capping some of the charges and, in the longer term, ending the routine use of leasehold ownership in developments of new houses entirely. That is an alternative, perhaps, to the suggestion from the hon. Member for Glenrothes. The 2017 housing White Paper pledged 17 new garden towns and villages, but it came five years after the former Prime Minister announced a consultation on new garden cities in his speech to the Institution of Civil Engineers. That delay does not exactly instil confidence that the Government recognise the scale of the housing crisis facing the country today, or the importance of new towns and garden cities to tackling the crisis.

Let us compare and contrast with the Labour Government of 1945. It took the Attlee Government just one year to enact legislation for new towns and to designate Stevenage the first. A new planning system was introduced the next year. Within five years, 10 new towns had been started, with social housing for rent making up the overwhelming majority of new homes built. That shows what Government can achieve if the desire is truly there, which is exactly what the hon. Member for Glenrothes was talking about earlier. Will the Minister update us on the progress of the new garden towns and villages?

The viability of new towns and garden cities relies on the agreement of the local population. They have to be developed in a way that genuinely improves the local area by bringing the jobs and services needed for a real community. When the latest tranche of garden towns and villages was announced in January, the former Housing Minister, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), said:

“What worries me about all of these announcements…is perhaps it is just a good name to tag on to more housing development rather than somewhere…you’d really want to live, bring up children, work and play.”

He went on:

“And if it is not all of those things then we will have failed to actually create new garden cities; we would have just tried to make housing sound more popular.”

Will the Minister reassure us today that these proposals are not simply spin on new housing developments but will genuinely reflect the ethos of garden cities?

We have heard today about the higher infrastructure costs faced by new towns. Labour has suggested that in future, new garden cities or towns should retain 100% of the business rates locally, to provide an income stream for those higher costs. Business rate retention was one of a large number of policies dropped in the Queen’s Speech, but perhaps the Minister will consider reviving it for new garden cities.

I also want to ask about the need to provide greater protection for those purchasing new build homes, which is of course a particular issue in new towns and villages. I spoke about the Bovis Homes scandal in my previous role as a member of the Communities and Local Government Committee. When I challenged the former housing Minister, now chief of staff to the Prime Minister, on what the Government are doing to safeguard new homeowners from this in future, he told me that a planned announcement had been put on hold when the Prime Minister called the general election. Nothing was brought forward to address the issue in the Conservative manifesto and there was nothing in the Queen’s Speech. Perhaps the Minister here today can say what this previously imminent announcement was and when we can expect it.