Oliver Colvile
Main Page: Oliver Colvile (Conservative - Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport)
Greg Clark
I will indeed. I have been clear about the constructive approach we intend to take, as exemplified in our dealings with housing associations. I think it is incumbent on all councils, including Labour councils, to play their part. This is an imperative for all of us in positions of political leadership to do what is needed to provide homes for the next generation.
Oliver Colvile
We are talking about aspiration, but does my right hon. Friend recall that Herbert Morrison, the Housing Minister and Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, said in 1945 that his Labour Government would end up trying to
“build the Tories out of London”?
Greg Clark
He did indeed say that. Our approach is to make sure that our period of government is associated with one of the successes that every successful Conservative Government achieve, which is to house the people of our country for generations to come.
Mr Bacon
That is a very disappointing statistic, but it reflects the central problem. We either have an assumption, as apparently many Opposition Members do, that housing has to be provided in a top-down way by large housing associations, often with chief executives on bloated salaries in excess of £300,000, or we assume that somehow the volume house builders will make up the difference. There is a wide-eyed astonishment among many people that volume house builders construct housing when, and only when, it is profitable for them to do so. What we actually need is to break open the choice for people—break open the supply if someone wants to get a piece of land and build their own house.
As anyone who is a subscriber to Homebuilding & Renovating magazine will know—and frankly everyone should be—the fact is that people can construct a very decent house, to very high thermal performance standards, which will cost nothing to heat, for £140,000 to £160,000.
Oliver Colvile
Does my hon. Friend agree that there are too few volume house builders and we need to have significantly more competition in the market?
Mr Bacon
Yes, there are far too few volume house builders. What we actually need is proper choice. I do not blame volume house builders for building when it is profitable to do so and not otherwise, but they can artificially restrict the supply of land and acquisition possibilities for others by not even buying the land, but by buying an option on the land. If they pay a farmer in my constituency £4,000 a year for 10 years for an option to buy the land, they can keep it off the market. The farmer can get 3.5 tonnes of winter barley or wheat off it so he is happy, and he gets the option money as well.
There is one thing that does not happen, however. A lady emailed me last year when my Bill was going through to say that she had spent five years looking for a piece of land, and that she was no further forward than she had been on the day she started. It seems as though, in this country, it will never be a middle-aged rite of passage to get a piece of land and build one’s own house, as it is in Germany.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow two south London Members of Parliament, but it is important that the House sends a clear message today that the housing crisis we face should not just be seen through the prism of London, but is one that faces the whole of our country. Many people listening to this debate will applaud wholeheartedly the measures that the Government are taking in the Bill to show that they get it—that they understand the scale of the problem this country faces and are doing something about it. The right to buy will benefit up to 13,000 families in my constituency. Hundreds of my constituents have already benefited from Help to Buy, as they have from self-build projects. Starter homes will give thousands more the opportunity to have what we know so many people in our country want, which is a home of their own.
I will add three brief points to the debate. The first is that we have continued to build high volumes of new homes in Basingstoke throughout the recession, because it is a great place to live. When other local authorities were not doing their bit, we kept on doing ours. In the past 10 years, nearly 9,000 new homes have been built in Basingstoke, and 75% of my constituents now feel that enough homes have perhaps been built in our local area. However, in our emerging local plan, as it currently stands, we are being asked to build 850 homes a year during the period of the plan, amounting to a total of more than 15,000 new homes up to 2029.
In comparison with some neighbouring authorities, which we respect deeply, Basingstoke has considerably outperformed them on house building, delivering some 50 new dwellings per 1,000 residents, which is a good 25% to 50% more than in neighbouring areas. Nationally, my constituency has had one of the highest levels of house building for more than a decade. It has recently been ranked the third fastest growing town in the UK in the past 10 years. When the Minister replies, will he assure my residents that their views are being listened to by the local planning inspector and that the previous house building that is driving up the demand for the future can be properly understood, not perhaps misunderstood, as part of that process?
My second point is that all new homes must be the best. We expect new homes, whether starter homes or any other sort of homes, to be of the highest standards. I applaud the Minister for his drive in this area. He has set up the design advisory panel to make sure that exemplar designs are available for all to use. We can get the best houses only if we have the best people to build them. I again applaud the Government for understanding that and for making sure that Government apprenticeships are a top priority.
We also need to make sure that we have a robust and transparent building inspection regime to ensure that the homes are well built and fit for purpose. The Minister and I have had many conversations about that, and he knows my strength of feeling on the matter. He will also know that the all-party group on excellence in the built environment is holding an inquiry into the quality of new house building, under the able chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile), and that we will put our thoughts to the Minister when we have concluded our inquiry.
Oliver Colvile
Does my right hon. Friend agree that we must ensure that we do not have any sloppy building, which is the key issue in all of this?
Mrs Miller
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Why should we accept sloppy building when it comes to a house? Given that we would take a sloppily made mobile phone back to the shop and expect a full refund, the same needs to be applied to housing.
I plan to table an amendment on the important point of addressing the status of building control performance standards. Those guidelines are currently regarded as best practice, and I believe that they need to be taken forward in a much more formalised manner.
The final point I want to make—I want to allow other hon. Members to contribute to this important debate—is on the issue of right to buy in relation to almshouses. I welcome the measure to extend the right to buy. As I have said, 13,000 of my constituents could benefit from this important measure. Many of them supported the measure at the general election, which is why it was important that it was central to our manifesto. However, some concern has been expressed to me by providers of almshouses about the possibility that the measures in the Bill may inadvertently draw them into a situation in which their residents acquire a right to buy in a way that is incompatible with the charitable status of almshouses.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I strongly welcome the Bill. It stands comparison with some of the finest examples of progressive Conservative policies on housing in the past 100 years. It is a radical, yet pragmatic Bill, and it draws on the Government’s success in areas such as Help to Buy and the fact that in the past five years we have delivered 260,000 affordable homes, with 140,000 housing completions in the last financial year. I have a great deal of respect for the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey). I read very carefully his piece in The Observer yesterday. It was long on complaint, but very short on coherent, costed and cogent alternative policies. He complains about the 32 new planning and housing powers invested in the Secretary of State, but in the same breath he says that we have a housing crisis in terms of supply, and that we need to deal with it. Well, we are dealing with it and needs must. We also have a manifesto commitment to deliver 1 million starter homes by 2020 and the right to buy for housing associations.
I, for one, make no apologies for being very proud that right to buy in the 1980s delivered the biggest transfer of capital to working people of any policy ever in British political history. I am very proud of what we did.
We have the right policy on starter homes. It was a little bit of an afterthought emerging from the ministerial fiat inserted in March this year into the NPPF guidelines, but now it will be on a proper legislative basis. I welcome the new legal duty on local planning authorities to promote the supply of homes and proper monitoring. I welcome, too, the flexibility between the number of homes and areas, because they will not be the same everywhere. We have discrete housing markets, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) said. I would perhaps challenge the Minister to consider the fact that there is, unless I am mistaken, no specific reference in the Bill to the insertion of starter homes in the affordable homes criteria. I might be wrong, but he might need to look at that in terms of the NPPF or in Committee. There may be some discrepancy with section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, where local planning authorities have to give proper cognisance to their adopted plans.
I support the introduction of a brownfield register. I welcome clauses 102 and 103 and the “permission in principle”, in particular. Only last year, the Campaign to Protect Rural England told us that 975,000 homes could be delivered by virtue of utilising brownfield sites properly. We must, however, have a coherent cross-government policy on this issue. The Public Accounts Committee only very recently looked at the failures of the Department to properly co-ordinate and use its methodology to follow through on the provision of land to the actual building of houses.
Oliver Colvile
Does my hon. Friend recognise that if we are to encourage people to develop brownfield sites, we must ensure that if they have planning permission they should not just sit on it? Should we not consider ensuring that they start paying business rates on land which is potentially to be used for development?
Mr Jackson
I have long been an advocate of a fiscal disincentive from Government to land banking, but the idea of land banking is apparently an urban myth. We need to do more work on that and I hope the Minister will take on board my hon. Friend’s comments.
Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I have a shareholding in a small communications company that I set up before I was elected to this place and which gives advice to, and sometimes opposes, developers, including in respect of public consultation.
I thank the Minister for Housing and Planning, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), and the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), for having visited my constituency in the last year. The Housing and Planning Minister met constituents of mine who were having difficulty with their development—something I will talk about in a moment.
I am also chairman of both the all-party parliamentary group for excellence in the built environment and the APPG for the private rented sector. The built environment APPG is undertaking an inquiry into the quality of design, while the private rented APPG is holding one into energy efficiency. I would like to point out that I am one of the few Conservative Members who represents a totally urban, inner-city constituency.
I very much welcome the Government’s target to build 200,000 new starter homes over the next five years, but to deliver it we need not only enough brickies, plumbers and electricians in the industry, but a speedier planning system. This means better public consultation and forcing developers to build the new homes fairly quickly once they have been granted planning permission. As I have said, I think that if the development is not brought forward within six months of a brownfield site being granted planning permission, business rates should have to be paid on the site.
Working commercially, I worked on a number projects that failed to get planning permission, partly because the client did not take any notice of what I was saying and also because they did not gain local community support. We need more master planning of developments. Taking local communities with us will, I firmly believe, quicken the granting of planning permission.
I am also a champion of what we are doing on the APPG for the built environment. We are going to have an inquiry into the quality of design, because I have had a number of constituents who have had problems with their new-build homes in my Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport constituency.
Buying a first home is probably the largest investment someone will make in their life. It is the first rung on the housing ladder and being part of the property-owning democracy. People expect the new home to be in tip-top condition and, being new, one would expect the various authorities to have checked it to ensure there will be no problems for a significant amount of time. People do not necessarily think that they need to have it surveyed before handing over the cash, as they expect the local council to have done its job.
Imagine, therefore, discovering a few months or a couple of years later that there are some difficulties. One would certainly not expect to have to produce a list of problems, as one of my constituents did—and it went on for three pages. While I very much welcome the Government’s investment into new-build at Devonport, I have been appalled at the brown stains that are already appearing on the outside walls of these new homes. Earlier today, I met the Royal Institute of British Architects, which wants to have equality of space, so that people can live in developments that have a suitable amount of space. While I was doing a project in the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea, I was made very aware of the importance of children having space to do homework rather than having to share a kitchen-diner with their siblings.
Let me deal with the private rented sector. It is important to ensure that this sector delivers good quality housing to rent. If people are renting from housing benefit landlords who are not delivering housing of the appropriate quality, those landlords should be struck off the list immediately. In my opinion, this Bill is very much about making sure that we have suitable quality homes for today that will not become the slums of the future.