Nick Boles
Main Page: Nick Boles (Independent - Grantham and Stamford)Planning and Housing Supply
Nick Boles Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Nick Boles)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Brady. In your other role as the chairman of the 1922 committee, I am sure that you are delighted to see so many of your flock here. I wish I could pretend that I thought so many of my hon. Friends were here because I am so popular in the party or because I am a compelling orator, but I recognise that the reason is the level of concern in the communities that they represent and the lack of comprehension in those communities about some of the decisions being made on nearby developments that matter to them. Those decisions seem to be visited on them from on high without explanation.
Many hon. Members have asked specific questions. I could probably take up all the time until the end of the debate just answering them, although I do not intend to do so. Instead, if it is acceptable to you, Mr Brady, and to my hon. Friends and other hon. Members, I will try to address all the issues and see whether I can answer specific questions in doing so. If, by the time we start edging towards the close of the debate, there are burning questions that I have missed answering, I will be happy to take interventions to answer them. However, I hope that I will be able to cover most of them.
I need not start by underlining the scale of the housing crisis faced by this country, the extent of the need for housing or the grief and hardship that the crisis is visiting on millions of our fellow citizens. My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) described it eloquently when discussing the average age of the first-time buyer and the average house price in his constituency, and others have referred to the situation in their constituencies. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) set out clearly the roots of the crisis and the fact that Governments of all stripes share responsibility for it. I hope that we can take that as a premise that everybody agrees on.
Mr Laurence Robertson
The Minister used the word “crisis”, but that is not a situation that I recognise. I would be grateful if he went into it in a little more detail.
Nick Boles
I will just recap some of the figures mentioned by the hon. Member for City of Durham and others. In the past year, the percentage of first-time buyers in England who were able to buy a home without their parents’ help fell to its lowest level ever, under one third. Two thirds of all first-time buyers in England last year required a subsidy from their parents. By definition, that means that they came from a relatively narrow social group—those from relatively well-off families. Until we introduced the Help to Buy policy, the opportunity to become a first-time buyer had been denied to a large number of our fellow citizens.
Another key fact also mentioned by the hon. Member for City of Durham is that the average age of first-time buyers has crept up and up, and is now nudging 40 in many parts of the country, although of course there are parts of the country where the crisis is not so acute. It is intense within the south-east and the south, but there are also pockets in parts of Yorkshire, and it is just as intense elsewhere, around certain big cities.
Nick Boles
If I may finish, we also know that the size of the homes in which families are forced to live has fallen steadily for several decades. The number of overcrowded families has risen and the amount of space in which young people must grow up has fallen for several decades for a simple reason: our population has grown and we have not built enough houses to keep pace with it.
That growth in population has had two main sources. One, which is contentious in the House and elsewhere, is immigration, which was uncontrolled for a long time. We as a party rightly criticised that, and are now doing something to control it. However, it is important to remember that the majority—about two thirds—of the growth in population and in the number of households in the country has resulted not from immigration but from ageing. One way that I ask people to think about it is by considering how many people now are part of families in which four generations are alive. Quite a lot of them are. It used to be rare to have a great-grandparent or great-grandchild in a family; it is now common, because people are living longer, and they do not all want to live in the same house. I could go on, but I know that time is limited.
Nick Boles
I would like not to take interventions on the argument, as I have heard the argument from hon. Members. I will take interventions later if I have not answered the specific questions raised.
Nick Boles
No, I will not take interventions on the argument; I will take them on the specific questions asked. I have sat here for two hours listening to the arguments from the Opposition, and I would like a brief moment to develop my argument.
Housing need is intense. I accept that my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) does not share my view, but many hon. Members do, and there are a lot of statistics to prove it. How are we going to solve the problem? My hon. Friend, whom I congratulate on securing this debate, referred to the country having 700,000 empty homes, which, he said, should be a priority for meeting the intense need for housing. Although I agree with the sentiment, unfortunately his figure does not give a true picture. The figure of 700,000 homes captures every home that is empty right now, including every home that is between buyer and seller and every home in probate.
I will, therefore, give him the true figure for homes that have been empty for more than six months, which I think we can all agree is probably the right figure for an empty home that could meet somebody’s housing need in the long term. That number is 260,000 for the whole of England. It has fallen by 41,000 since this Government came into office in 2010. We are spending a great deal of money, and we and local authorities are working hard, to bring those empty homes back into use. It is important to recognise that many—not all, by any means, but many—of those 260,000 are in parts of the country where demand for housing is not as strong as it once was, not in parts of the country where demand for housing is great. I do not believe that a Government can tell people to go and live somewhere with no jobs and no future, just because houses have been built there. Empty homes can make a contribution and are doing so under this Government, but in the scale of need explained so vividly by so many, they are a small contributor.
We need to move to the question of brownfield sites. If it were possible, everybody in this country would prefer every new house to be built on a brownfield site. We would all love not to develop a single scrap of greenfield land if we did not need to. Therefore, the question is whether there is enough brownfield land to do that. The Campaign to Protect Rural England often bandies about the statistic that 1.5 million homes could be built on the available brownfield land. I am afraid that that figure is not entirely a fair representation, because more than half of that brownfield land is already occupied for another use—for example, with a house or factory on it. In theory, it might make good sense to use it for converted housing, but the people currently occupying and using it for another purpose would, by and large, have a view on that: if they own or use the property, they will probably not want to give it up immediately, and if they did give it up, where would they be employed? Having taken all that out, a large number of the remaining brownfield sites are in places where demand for new housing is not so intense. In many areas of most intense demand, the number of brownfield sites that have not been developed is relatively small.
I reassure hon. Members that nearly 70% of new houses in 2010, the last year for which figures are available, were built on brownfield land. We are still building more houses on brownfield land than on greenfield land. We are approaching the point at which the number of brownfield sites that are in the right part of the country and are vacant and available for housing development is too small to supply more than a small, although significant proportion—nearly 70%, but not more—of our need.
Another subject raised here and elsewhere by many hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main), is the amount of land banking in the country. We all know individual examples of sites that have been bought and for which planning permission has been given, but on which development has not happened. The question we have to ask is: why has that happened, what is the scale of that problem and what contribution would fixing that problem make to solving our intense need?
We must first recognise that that is true of many sites because developers bought them before the financial crash, secured planning permission in anticipation of the economic environment pertaining at the time and, frankly, could not raise the money to build out the site or, even if they raised the money to do so, could not find people to buy the houses. Ultimately, developers are businesses. Certainly in my party, which so many hon. Members here represent, we believe that businesses need to be free to make investments and bring forward projects, but should be forced to complete such projects only if they have a reasonable prospect of getting their money back and perhaps gaining a small return. That problem grew during the recession not because of developers’ greedy behaviour, but simply because they do not want to build houses if there is nobody to buy them.
That situation led to an expansion in the scale of land banking, but let me tell hon. Members about the current position, because it has been reduced by the recovery in house building. The latest estimate is that the total number of units of housing in land banks throughout England is 500,000, but only half of that is on sites where building has not begun. From our constituencies, we all know that most housing developments of a scale greater than a dozen houses are not built out in one year, but sometimes in three or five years, because it is natural to do so. If all the houses were built in one place in one year, it would result in a strange development in which half the houses were sitting empty. That is how the house building industry works, and unless any hon. Member in the Chamber wants to nationalise house building, we have to live with that system.
Only 250,000 units are on sites that have not been started. That is a significant number, but the point is that it covers the whole country, including some places where demand is not sufficient to pull through supply. The Labour party has proposed to confiscate that land from developers, but will such compulsion really solve our housing crisis or lead developers to build more places where we want those houses? I am sure that that might make a contribution, as empty homes may, but I do not believe that it could solve the problem on its own.
On the whole question of local plans and the process that local authorities are asked to go through in putting them together, the fundamental basis of the national planning policy framework, about which many hon. Friends and other hon. Members have been generous, is that local authorities are in control because they have put in place a local plan. Doing the work of producing a local plan puts the local council, as the representative of the community, in control. The local plan has a very simple concept that is very difficult to deliver, which is that the authority has to provide a five-year land supply of immediately developable and deliverable sites to meet its objectively assessed housing need.
I understand that there are concerns. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) referred to an econometric model, and other hon. Members have spoken about the various methodologies. It is not unreasonable, however, for the Government to tell an authority, which is representing the people and has a duty to serve them, “Work out what’s needed, and make plans to provide it.” That is what we do with schools. We do not tell local authorities, “You can provide as many school places as you feel like”; we say, “Provide as many school places as are needed.” We do not tell the NHS, “Provide as many GPs as you feel you can afford right now”; we say, “Work out how many GPs are needed.” The same is true of housing sites: we tell local authorities, “Work out how many houses will be needed in your area over the next 15 years, and then make plans to provide them.”
Martin Horwood
My constituents in places such as Leckhampton and Hatherley do not understand this: the econometric model is based not so much on need as on demand, which in areas such as mine—and St Albans and many other constituencies—is practically insatiable, so we will still have high house prices that are unaffordable for many first-time buyers in places such as Cheltenham, because we have good schools and shops, as well as a good local environment and good employment levels. If such areas are simply consigned to endless development, we will lose something very precious to local people and to the environment.
The problem with the Minister’s scenario is that the issue is not about trying to stop all development—nobody has said that—but about wanting local people to be able to make some difference and have some say. The economic model for the assessed housing need or demand—
Martin Horwood
Sorry, Mr Brady. The model or whatever dictates that number should not be a be-all and end-all that nobody can influence.
Nick Boles
I want to reassure my hon. Friend that the process is not based simply on a measure of demand. It is not a matter of sending out a survey to ask people whether they fancy living in West Worcestershire. That is not how it is done; it is done on projections of population, of the number of households in which ageing is taking place and of the historical record and, therefore, the likely future trend of inward migration. That is the definition. The immigration figures are based on the past record. They are not just plucked out of the air as the number of people in the whole world who would quite like to live in Cheltenham. The model is based on an understanding of the pressure of demand from people who actually want to come to Cheltenham. They might want to move to Cheltenham to be near a job, go to college, or be close to their mum who is growing old on her own in a flat.
Nick Boles
My hon. Friend shakes his head. I am happy for him to go through the modelling that is the basis on which this is done. I simply say to him that if he added up all the projections of housing need of all the local plans in the country, he would find that it would add up to a figure that is too low to meet the overall population growth of England. It is not, therefore, the case that there are these hugely inflated demand figures being put into local plans, which add up to something way in excess of what we need; they are too low to meet our universal needs as a nation. Somehow, somewhere, we are not overestimating the need.
Stuart Andrew
In 2001, the population of Leeds was 715,000, and in the census of 2011, it was 751,000, but the estimate of the Office for National Statistics said that it would be 788,000, which is 37,000 more than actually happened. If we go on the same figures, Leeds will yet again be overcompensating for a population increase that will not exist, but it will have to have the five-year land supply, and to do that, it will have to go into the green belt. How does my hon. Friend marry up that problem that we and our communities face?
Nick Boles
My hon. Friend makes a good argument, and he has made a good argument generally, which he will have every opportunity to make in the examination in public. He will be able to say why he thinks that the projections done by his local authority are way out of line with any realistic possibility and to challenge those projections. He will be able to require the local council to demonstrate to the inspector the reasons it needs to supply those numbers, which cannot be that it is ambitious or that it is going for growth. If it has no good arguments or good evidence, there will be every reason for him to say that it is a plan to meet not need but ambition and dreams, which is a great and lovely thing but not what plans are meant to do.
A great many of my hon. Friends are concerned because they see that, in the absence of a local plan that has been fully adopted after an examination in public by an inspector, many decisions are being made that local people are not content with and their local authorities have opposed. It will be of no reassurance to them, but it is interesting that there is not a single person who has spoken in this debate who is from an area that has a recently adopted local plan. There is a reason for that: once there is a recently adopted local plan, the authority is then in the driving seat. It may well have gone through a process, as my hon. Friends the Members for Cheltenham, for Tewkesbury and for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) have—[Interruption.] No, let me finish my sentence. It may well have gone through the process of putting together that plan, which would be painful because it requires someone to carry out the contentious job of identifying the sites. Once the plan is in place, that is the point at which local authority decisions—[Interruption.] I hear lots of rumblings. If I could just finish the argument, I promise to take some more interventions. At that point, the authority will find that appeals are not going against it. I accept that there is a certain amount of scepticism about the figures, but I am giving Members the facts. In 2012-13, the number of planning appeals in which the inspector backed the local council and rejected the appeal was 67%. In 2011-12, it was 68%, and so far this year it has been 67%. In two thirds of all appeals, the inspector is backing local decisions, because the council has made local plans that meet the requirements, so it can be trusted to make its decisions.
Sir Tony Baldry
The Minister knows that, for historic reasons, almost half of all local planning authorities in England do not have an up-to-date local plan. They started to get that going with the introduction of the national planning policy framework. I suggest that most of them are doing so with all due speed, as is evidenced by my local authority, which adopted its local plan on Monday. My concern, and the concern of many Members, is that the Minister and the Government are not giving any protection or taking any notice whatever of emerging local plans. As a consequence, they are not giving any consideration to the efforts by local communities and local councillors to ensure that they have robust local plans.
Nick Boles
I thank my hon. Friend for that. I understand what he is saying. It is difficult and painful, especially in an area of high demand, to produce that local plan. Many local authorities have been making excellent progress, which is why the number of local plans has risen from about 30% when the national planning policy framework was passed to more than 50% now, and many more will be adopted over the next few months. The difficulty is that there are cases—I am afraid that some of those cases are represented in the Chamber—in which the local plan, despite what the local authority might have said, does not meet the requirements of the Localism Act 2011 and of the national planning policy framework, and does not provide a five-year land supply.
In some cases, that is because local authorities put too many eggs in one basket. They identify one big site to which they attach a lot of hope value, and which might make a fantastic development, but which, in reality, has no immediate prospect of being developed. It therefore cannot count as a site in a local plan. Sometimes, they make estimates that a site will build out over two years, when it clearly will not do so in less than five. It is not surprising, therefore, that the inspector sometimes says, “I’m sorry, but that is not a robust plan, because the sites you have identified will not deliver what you say they will deliver in the established time frame.” Then he asks the local authority to go back and revise the plan. That is happening in many local authorities represented in this Chamber, and is causing some of the frustration.
Harriett Baldwin
What, in the Minister’s view, is the appropriate time between a council democratically agreeing a local plan and the plan finally becoming set in stone, as there is a very protracted period of inspection by a scarce national supply of inspectors?
Nick Boles
In general—I cannot comment on any particular case—one would hope that that would happen in about nine months. If it could be six, that would be great. It certainly should not be more than 12. In some cases—I am not suggesting that it is happening in West Worcestershire—the inspector, rather than saying that the plan will not meet the requirements, says that the authority needs to do a bit more work on it and then suspends the plan. That can be a good thing, because we do not want to see a lot of good work thrown away because one part of the plan has not been properly completed. That is sometimes what causes it to be delayed beyond the time frame. If everything is in order, it should be done within six to nine months.
Nick Boles
There are many questions that I have not yet answered, and there are only so many minutes left. I want to come on to the point of prematurity that some Members have raised. There is a difficult balance to be struck. One extreme would be to say that it does not matter how early stage a local plan is; as soon as an authority has started on a local plan, the draft policies, which have not yet been examined, consulted on or tested, should determine decisions. That is at one end. I understand that no one is suggesting that it should be at that extreme end. At the other end, we say that no weight should be accorded to a plan until it has absolutely finished the process.
The balance that we have put out in the draft guidance is that once a local plan has been submitted for examination—not completed or passed—it should carry significant weight if there are no substantial unresolved objections to parts of it. A neighbourhood plan has to pass a referendum, which is a big moment at which it might fail, and it starts to acquire weight when it has been presented to the local authority for what is called the local authority publicity period. I accept that both those stages are towards the end of the process. However, the difficulty if we try to move them earlier in the process is that—I promise you—developers will go to court, they will seek the judge’s interpretation and they will say, “This plan hasn’t even been consulted on. It hasn’t even been tested by examination. How can it be the basis for a decision, when in every other way this proposed development meets all of the policies in the national planning policy framework?” That is the argument that they will make, and indeed it is the argument they are making in cases right now.
Therefore, it is not simply in the gift of Ministers to move that decision point through guidance; we cannot do that. We have to put it at a point that the courts will find reasonable as an interpretation of the requirements for a plan to be sound and robust. We have set it where we have because we think that is the most reasonable position, but I am very happy to invite colleagues here in Westminster Hall today to meet my officials to discuss whether there is a way of finding another time frame that would stand up in court. However, I would simply share with them the view that the bar that would stand up in court is a very high one, and I have concluded that the position that we have outlined in the guidance is the one that will not only stand up in court but provide some protection for those plans that have reached an advanced stage of development.
David Rutley
Notwithstanding the point that the Minister is making, can he confirm that the planning horizon currently is to 2030 and any talk of moving to 2050 is for the birds, to use a technical term? Would he also use his good offices, given that there is good will—particularly in Cheshire East—to conclude local plans, to bring the requisite expertise to enable us to get over this hurdle as quickly as possible?
Nick Boles
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding me of two very important specific questions, to which it is a great pleasure—and a rare one—to be able to give an answer that I hope is satisfactory. The answer to the first question is that there is nothing in the Localism Act 2011, in the NPPF or in any aspect of Government planning policy that requires someone to plan beyond 15 years. So, anybody who is suggesting that there is any requirement to safeguard land or wrap it up in wrapping paper and ribbons for the future development between 2030 and 2050 is getting it wrong. There is no reason for it and my hon. Friend can knock that suggestion straight back to wherever it came from.
Regarding help for authorities, I will make an offer to everyone here in Westminster Hall who has an authority that is having difficulty resolving the final objections to a plan that is still in draft form. It is that I am very happy to ask officials in my Department and—perhaps even more usefully—the recently retired chief inspector and another recently retired very senior inspector to meet those authorities to help them, in a sense, to understand what are the practical things they have to do to get the plan to a point where it can pass examination.
I fully understand that there is a frustration, namely that people cannot negotiate with an inspector, because an inspector is basically like a judge; it would be like someone negotiating with a judge in court as to whether they will be found guilty or not. The inspectors cannot negotiate, but that is why we have created a resource within the Department that is able to provide that practical support, and I am very happy to offer it to Cheshire East and to other boroughs where it would be necessary.
Nick Boles
I will move on to the infrastructure point; I am happy to take more interventions after that. That is because my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert), who spoke so passionately and so persuasively, as he has done so many times before, on this subject, raised a particular point about a commitment to make a clearer reference to the need for infrastructure to be planned in planning guidance.
When my right hon. Friend raised that point with me before this debate, I was very concerned that I had failed to deliver on a commitment made on the Floor of the House, and that that was something I needed to correct. I will not suggest to him that it is impossible to improve on what we have done, but I would like to reassure him that my officials—being marvellous officials—put in something that addressed the concern that he raised and the commitment that I made; it just may not be something that he considers to be sufficient. I will quote from the new draft planning guidance, because it is important that we all understand it. It says:
“Local Plans set out a vision and a framework for the future development of the area, addressing needs and opportunities in relation to housing, the economy, community facilities and infrastructure”.
That is the introductory phase. Then it says specifically:
“The Local Plan should aim to meet the objectively assessed…infrastructure needs of the area”.
Then it says something even more specifically, which directly addresses the point of whether it is possible to ensure that a development only goes ahead once the necessary infrastructure has been put in place, and only after that necessary infrastructure has been put in place. We have made direct provision
“that a condition”—
that is, a planning condition—
“may be used to prohibit ‘development authorised by the planning permission or other aspects linked to the planning permission...until a specified action has been taken (such as the provision of supporting infrastructure).’.”
That is the element where we have attempted to make it clear that planning authorities can very reasonably say, “Yes, we’ll pass this planning application, yes, we will consent, but it can only go ahead and be built out once that infrastructure has been put in place.” I believe that the use of conditions is the right way to do it, as well as the plan making that makes the broader plans for infrastructure. However, I am very happy to invite my right hon. Friend to meet my officials and to come up with a better solution if one can be found that addresses his concerns.
Nick Herbert
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister and I will have a look at the specific provisions that he says address the concern that we raised last December, and that he committed to bring forward; I thank him for that. Can he assure me that the proposals in the guidance in relation to infrastructure will enable a local authority, in drawing up a plan, to adjust the housing number that it sets, such that the number may be lower than the strategic housing market assessment provides, because of infrastructure considerations?
Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)
Before the Minister replies, I remind him that we only have three and a half minutes left, and I am keen to allow the Member responsible for securing the debate—the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson)—to reply as well.
Nick Boles
If you will forgive me a very scrappy finish, Mr Brady, I will answer the question, and then I will sit down to allow my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury to speak.
Very specifically, development must be sustainable, and sustainable in many ways. Infrastructure is one of the ways in which it needs to be sustainable. However—the however is quite important—to say that the current infrastructure is insufficient to support a level of development that otherwise would be “sustainable” in other senses of the word is not quite enough, because someone has to be able to say that it is incapable of being made sufficient to support that level of development; in other words, that the local authority either could not bring the financial resources together or could not physically and geographically make arrangements to make that development sustainable. Just to say, “The road is too narrow; we can’t do anything more there,” is not quite enough. To say, “The road is too narrow and can never be widened, because it’s between two ancient forests that have the highest status,” could be sufficient and that tends to be where the debates take place. However, as I say, I am very happy to invite my right hon. Friend to meet officials to explore this issue further.
I will conclude. I am sorry if I have not answered everybody’s questions.