Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Boles and Stuart Andrew
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)
The Minister said earlier that local plans and examinations can be considered as part of any appeal. Constituencies such as mine, however, are not quite at that stage. My council and local neighbourhood forum are still developing their plans, but they are seeing developers use this interim period to get permission on important strategic sites. What assurances can he give my constituents, who have put a considerable number of hours into this work, that their efforts will not be in vain and that they will not see important sites swallowed up on appeal?
Nick Boles
I know that my hon. Friend’s authority is working to deliver a very ambitious plan, which takes time and needs to be underpinned by the necessary evidence. No application should be granted if it is in conflict with the sustainability policies in the national planning policy framework. Even in the absence of a local plan, there are all the protections of the national planning policy framework on transport, environment and other sustainability issues to ensure that unsustainable development is not allowed.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Boles and Stuart Andrew
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)
My constituents are rightly concerned about opportunistic developers. Does my hon. Friend agree that if a local authority’s core strategy has passed its examination hearings and its site allocations process is out to consultation, at this advanced stage it would fly in the face of localism for a planning application to be approved at appeal?
Nick Boles
After a local plan in draft form has been submitted to the Planning Inspectorate for examination, it is clear in planning guidance that the policies in it can carry weight in decisions on applications that come forward.
Planning and Housing Supply
Debate between Nick Boles and Stuart Andrew(11 years, 1 month ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
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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.”
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.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Boles and Stuart Andrew(11 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)
The Leeds core strategy is currently being examined, with the council proposing what it admits is a hugely ambitious target of more than 70,000 houses and with the developers pushing for even more. Such huge targets would see up to 80% of new homes in my constituency being built on greenfield or green-belt sites. What appeal mechanisms exist for my constituents, should the inspector approve such unrealistic targets?
Nick Boles
Local authorities have to assess their housing need objectively. They can sometimes exaggerate or underplay it unrealistically, but any local plan has to go through an intense process of local consultation before it can be adopted. That will give my hon. Friend’s constituents every opportunity to say what they think of those assessments.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Boles and Stuart Andrew(12 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Nick Boles
The hon. Gentleman has done a fantastic job of drawing that matter to the attention of the House and of the nation, and I am sure that he will be able to put pressure on his local authority to follow the law.
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)
8. What plans he has to require that all brownfield sites within a local authority should be developed before planning permission is granted to build on green belt land.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
11. What plans his Department has to bring forward proposals to encourage commercial development on brownfield sites.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Nick Boles)
The national planning policy framework encourages local authorities to reuse brownfield land that is not of high environmental value. It also maintains strong protections for the green belt, making it clear that most forms of new development are inappropriate in the green belt.
Stuart Andrew
I welcome the Minister to his new position.
My constituents are concerned about the threat to the green belt, particularly as councils seek to fight the five-year land supply provisions. Additionally, we are seeing an unprecedented number of applications for development of land classified as “protected area of search”—PAS—land and greenfield land, as developers take advantage of that period. What support can the Government give to residents in my constituency who are trying to save those sites and who want the brownfield sites to be developed? As this is the Minister’s first Question Time at the Dispatch Box, may I invite him to come to my constituency to see how important that land is, and to meet members of my residents groups?