Local Plans (Public Consent)

Debate between Nick Boles and Martin Horwood

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Nick Boles]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point, because it was much the most challenging and stimulating of his very challenging and stimulating speech. I hope he will be pleased that there is a pilot of development benefits, which the Chancellor announced in the Budget, and we are working on exactly how it will work. The idea that it is not just the local council that should receive income and revenue streams from development is controversial in our planning system. The council has traditionally always received such income, whether through section 106 agreements or, as happens now, through the community infrastructure levy and the new homes bonus. What has not happened before is that the benefits go directly to householders. That happens in the Netherlands and other parts of continental Europe, and it seems to secure a level of consent that, as hon. Members have eloquently explained, we still do not manage to secure, even with local and neighbourhood plans. That is why the Government are undertaking this pilot, and I would very much welcome my hon. Friend’s thoughts about how it should operate, because we are devising it at the moment.

On that subject, we have decided to allocate to neighbourhoods that put in place a neighbourhood plan—I remind my hon. Friend that 1,000 communities are working on them—25%, uncapped, of all revenues from the community infrastructure levy. That will go to the community—to the parish council—to spend on community assets, community facilities and improvements to community amenities, as the community determines. That will not be decided by the council or a Minister—it will be decided by the community. That is a proper reward for the intense and usually entirely unpaid work people in places such as Kirdford and Bassett put into their neighbourhood plans.

[Martin Horwood]

In my urban constituency, I represent people on the housing waiting list, as well as some of the poorest areas in south-west England. The truth is that, if all the housing planned for the Cheltenham area went ahead, and it was all social housing for rent, people would be able to have three houses each. Massively more housing is being planned for our area than required by natural population growth. The developers have no interest in making it all social housing for rent—that is what Cheltenham borough council is doing in the urban areas, on brownfield sites. However, the developers have said quite explicitly to their investors in the City that they want traditional market housing; they want expensive commuter homes on greenfield sites that are cheap to build. In many areas such as ours, demand is insatiable. House prices are high because we have good jobs and good schools. Our towns have often grown enormously over decades, but that does not bring down house prices.

[Nick Boles]

I am sure we would have been happy to hear a full speech from the hon. Gentleman, because he has a lot to say in representing his constituents. It is, of course, very much open to him to make such points at the examination in public of the local plan, which I know he has some difficulties with.

I want to conclude by, in a sense, warning hon. Members and, indeed, those they represent to be careful what they wish for as they approach the next election; indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) referred to the simple matter of planning becoming an election issue. I say that because the alternative proposed by the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) and the Labour party is dramatically less localist than what we, albeit with problems—one step forward, half a step back—are trying to achieve.

The hon. Lady referred to the review the Labour party has commissioned from Sir Michael Lyons. Let me refer to an article from today’s Guardian—I am sure she will agree that The Guardian is a bible of wisdom—which quotes his speech to the Local Government Association conference in Bournemouth yesterday. The article says:

“Speaking to the LGA in Bournemouth, he said a Labour government would not be abandoning the current national planning policy framework that requires councils to make land available, and if anything it would be turning the screw on councils. He said: ‘We are breaking eggs to make omelettes. The backlog is so serious here that we have to do everything we can.’

His remarks suggest the National Planning Inspectorate will, if anything, have a bigger role in ensuring houses get built.”

The British people have a choice. It is not a choice of whether to meet our housing need and to offer the next generation what I suspect every Member of Parliament in this room enjoys—the ownership of their own home. The choice is whether we try to work with local councils and local communities, giving neighbourhoods incentives to work out what new houses they will build, or whether we allow Ministers in a Labour Government to impose decisions on them. I know which choice I will be making next May.

Planning and Housing Supply

Debate between Nick Boles and Martin Horwood

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Main]

rose—

[Martin Horwood]

rose—

[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.

[Martin Horwood]

Will the Minister give way on that point?

[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.”

[Stuart Andrew]

rose—

[Martin Horwood]

rose—

[Nick Boles]

I am happy to give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham.

[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.

[Martin Horwood]

indicated dissent.

[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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nick Boles and Martin Horwood

Monday 21st October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

More green belt and green space is under threat in my constituency than ever before, and local people marched in protest yet again at the weekend. Will Ministers tell them why local councillors are being told to pay absolute attention to econometric models and unelected inspectors and not to local people?

[Nick Boles]

My hon. Friend knows that local authorities have to assess their housing needs and then work out how they are going to meet them. It is for local authorities to decide whether they can protect the green belt while nevertheless releasing some small portion of it to meet that housing need, but only after full consultation with local people.

Localism in Planning

Debate between Nick Boles and Martin Horwood

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Nick Boles]

I certainly think that in every local community we want, first and foremost, to provide housing for local people. However, in response to my hon. Friend’s question and to the points he raised in his previous interventions, it is not the case that our housing need chiefly derives from the levels of immigration over the past decade, of which I am as critical as he. Immigration explains only about 40% of the formation of new households; the remainder is explained by the fact that we are all getting older and not dying as quickly as we used to. I come from a family that has four generations in it, as do many right hon. and hon. Members, but that was not common 30 years ago. Now, people in their 80s and 90s are much more common to all of us than they were when we were growing up, and they all need houses.

We have failed as a society and as a country to meet the need, and the Localism Act and the national planning policy framework make it clear that every local authority has a duty, first and foremost, to meet objectively assessed housing need. We do not allow local authorities to determine whether they will provide primary and secondary school places, or social care for vulnerable adults and children. We expect them, as branches of Government, to meet the responsibilities passed to them, and meeting housing need is among those responsibilities.

[Martin Horwood]

Does the Minister accept that in some areas it is difficult to meet endless need and demand? Certainly in a constrained urban borough such as Cheltenham, almost all the unprotected green space has already been built on or is right now under attack from developers. The problem is that in the end we will lose other things for which people have a need. Green space is good for local food production, physical and mental health, and for people’s access to recreation, including free access to recreation for poor communities, which reduces health inequalities. Those are needs as well, and we cannot be totally single-minded and blinkered.

[Nick Boles]

I certainly hope I am not being single-minded and blinkered; perhaps the hon. Gentleman thinks I am. I of course accept that almost every urban area finds it very difficult to meet its needs within its boundaries, and that is entirely accepted within all our policies. The regional strategies of the previous Government effectively completely removed any flexibility from local authorities, and that is why in the national planning policy framework we have the duty to co-operate.

I am happy to say that I have met with an authority that is a neighbour to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, and that authority is engaged in co-operation with his local authority to see how it can meet needs, not least those of the hon. Gentleman’s town. As he says, his town cannot meet the needs within its own borders without threatening its precious green spaces. Such spaces are, if anything, even more valuable in relatively built-up towns than in the countryside, and there needs to be co-operation within broader areas to meet the needs of all our citizens.