Housing and Planning Bill

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Miller]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and pay tribute to him for the work he has done in helping more of my constituents have the opportunity to build their own homes. I did not have the pleasure of sitting across from the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), although I am sure we will hear his dulcet tones later.

Many people who buy a new home will have problems with the house they purchase; they will have a snagging list—chipped paint, ill-fitting doors and so on. I do not deny the importance of getting such matters resolved, and the Minister may well want to address some of the difficulties people can experience in getting those small-scale problems fixed, but, as valid as those concerns are, that is not the point of this amendment. New clause 1 would ensure that every home was checked for significant defects while it was being built and at the end of the building process.

Over recent months, I have received evidence from people up and down the country who have purchased new properties with significant defects from major house builders. Some of those properties have damp-proof courses that are below ground level; some have been built off their foundations; and some have roofs sitting on walls that are not structural. There are also reports of inadequate fire insulation and an absence of cavity-wall or loft insulation. Those are real-life examples of defects in houses that are subject to the current regime. Every one of those building errors should have been picked up during the construction of the house, as part of the building control process. That process exists to ensure that houses are built properly. The approved inspector is responsible for building control performance standards and is, to all intents and purposes, the professional who acts as the eyes and ears of the future buyer.

As matters stand, however, there is no legal requirement for even one visit to be made to a new-build home during the build in order physically to check the building standards. On a new estate, a random selection of houses might be monitored and the results extrapolated as though every house were the same. This is called a risk-based approach, but in reality it feels like a lottery. The fact is that every house could be different. The subsoil across a 300-house estate can change dramatically, for example, and changes in the weather throughout the build can significantly affect materials and the way they work. The current risk based-approach creates an unnecessary lottery for the home buyer, rather than certainty. There is a calculated risk, which is not something that most buyers appreciate, and not something that most buyers would expect to accompany the purchase of a £200,000 or £300,000 house.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend not agree that people should get a survey done before buying a new-build house?

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. This is something that we discussed in the evidence sessions held by the all-party parliamentary group on excellence in the built environment. Some of my constituents have indeed been forced to get surveys done as a result of the problems they have experienced after purchasing new houses. That might be the route that the Minister would favour, but I would favour getting it right first time and ensuring that we have a system of compliance that is overseen effectively.

The present guidance is comprehensive, and I believe that it is among the best in the world. It is pretty exhaustive, but it is just that: guidance. The Minister’s Department makes it clear that it is advisable to make four to six visits, even to low-risk new-build houses, but that is not a requirement. New clause 1 would provide certainty that every home would be visited at key points in the construction process. The evidence indicates that building control does not always work as the Government intended it to. Buyers are under the impression that their new home has been physically inspected at each key stage and on completion by a building control inspector, but that is not necessarily the case. On a big estate of several hundred houses, only a handful might be checked. The current risk-based approach adopted by many house builders means that hundreds of houses could have no checks at all, and the current skills shortfall has led to heartache for many new homeowners.

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[Alex Cunningham]

Indeed. The events of recent weeks highlight the need for the inclusion of the new clause in the Bill. The extensive flooding that devastated both large and small communities across swathes of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire throughout December underlines the need for in-built resilience, so much so that the Environment Secretary has committed to revisiting the modelling used by the Environment Agency to ensure its fitness for purpose following repeated unprecedented weather events, as well as committed to a national flood resilience review which will see worst-case scenario planning updated.

These are certainly steps to be welcomed, and I hope the Minister will build on those commitments from his colleagues and agree to grasp the opportunity to legislate for a longer-term resilience objective in the Bill. Doing so would be of great significance at a time when cuts to the resource budget of the Department responsible for dealing with flooding are fresh in the memory and doubts remain about the equally vital issue of spending on flood defence maintenance to ensure its continued integrity.

Although the Government must commit to long-term investment in maintaining flood defences to provide stability and certainty, it is high time that Ministers dropped their complacency about the need for climate change adaptation and actively put measures in place to increase resilience. David Rooke, deputy chief executive of the Environment Agency, recently echoed this thinking, saying that we need a “complete rethink” in our approach and suggesting that

“we will need to move from not just providing better defences…but looking at increasing resilience”.

Building higher walls will not, on its own, provide the protection that our towns and cities need. Such an approach has been well and truly debunked in the past month alone. Instead, we need measures aimed at prevention as well as at defence. Achieving this, as the floods Minister acknowledged only a few weeks ago, means more trees and woodland in the hills, functioning ponds and bogs, allowing rivers to meander, and constructing buffer zones around their banks. The Government’s own climate change risk assessment lists the various risks resulting from climate change to which our homes and communities need to be resilient, including damage to property due to flooding and coastal erosion, and energy infrastructure at significant risk of flooding.

However, although new developments are to be prepared for all the eventualities identified in the risk assessment, the Government’s plans for infrastructure development pay little attention to the need to manage resource risks or the need for so-called green and blue infrastructure to support development by better bringing together water management and green infrastructure. That is worrying when continued urbanisation is drastically reducing the amount of rainfall that can soak away into the ground, meaning that water has to be actively managed to prevent flooding.

Although national planning policy was strengthened from April 2015, making clear the expectation that sustainable drainage systems will be provided in all major developments unless demonstrably inappropriate, that was a blatant watering down of previous commitments. The Government originally said that sustainable drainage systems would become compulsory in all new developments from April 2014, as mandated by the flood and water management legislation, but they delayed implementation before choosing to ignore completely the findings of the 2007 Pitt review and cancelling plans for the approval bodies that would have been established by local authorities. Will the Minister tell the House what proportion of new developments now include sustainable drainage systems?

Exemptions and opt-outs currently apply to smaller developments, allowing many to go ahead without sustainable drainage. The Government stopped short of implementing the Pitt review recommendation to remove developers’ automatic right to connect new homes to the public sewer system, which provides an incentive for them to include sustainable drainage.

The provisions in new clause 2 would ensure that local authorities and the Secretary of State take the positive steps necessary to promote resilience and protect against such damage in future. A failure to address the issue, however, and choosing to push ahead with non-resilient development is likely to increase costs in the economy, not to mention ruining people’s homes and livelihoods at the same time as threatening critical national infrastructure. It is therefore vital that as the area of urban development grows, sufficient green space and wetland must be incorporated to support nature and to manage flood risk both in any new developments and downstream. With the failure of the existing framework to encourage developers to pursue such strategies freely, it is right that mechanisms should be put in place to compel developers to create more places for trees, shrubs and grass to flourish—to create what engineers in the field term “hydraulic roughness.”

Today the Government have a chance to add a vital part of the system: the management of water in our communities. Many hon. Members will have seen the story of the north Yorkshire town of Pickering, which used natural flood defences to protect itself when traditional concrete options were too expensive. At a tenth of the cost, the people of Pickering were protected by investing in natural resilience. We should incorporate that objective in all our new developments. Although added resilience is certainly no guarantee that such flooding will not occur, there is popular concurrence that the absence of such features compounds and intensifies these events.

Ministers will recognise what new clause 2 would achieve. I hope that it will be accepted, or that we will hear alternative proposals from Ministers on how to address the specific issues I have raised today. We owe it to the country and, in particular, to every individual and family who have suffered in recent weeks.

[Oliver Colvile]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this debate on new clause 1, which was introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), whom I thank for her generous and heartfelt words. Before going any further, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests; I have an interest in that I still give advice to developers.

I am also chairman of the all-party group for excellence in the built environment, which, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, is currently conducting an inquiry into the quality of new build. Although I have no wish to prejudge or predict the report’s recommendations, I want to explain a little about why we have launched the inquiry. I remind the House that I am also probably one of the only Conservative Members who represents a totally inner-city seat—the only thing I have that resembles a field is a muddy meadow called the Ponderosa pony sanctuary.

I am keen to pay tribute to the previous Labour Government for embarking upon a great deal of regeneration in the Devonport part of my constituency. Like most of Plymouth, Devonport was badly bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. The city fathers quickly put up new housing to accommodate the many homeless in the city but, as Members can imagine, its quality was not fantastic. After all, it was erected after the war, so with very little money.

I am delighted that the coalition and Conservative Governments have continued with the previous Government’s housing initiative. The Government ensured that there would be a mix of both municipal and private market housing, which is important as it has changed the demographic profile of the ward. I am delighted that the Government have set themselves a target of building 200,000 new homes by 2020. Oddly enough, that is the year when we will celebrate the anniversary of the Mayflower leaving the great city of Plymouth in order to found the American colonies.

I am very keen that we should have good-quality design in any new housing. The vast majority of the new builds are perfectly acceptable. However, I am surprised at the number of new builds in my constituency that are already showing mould after just five years. I am also surprised by the number of constituents who have beaten a path to my constituency surgery because they have problems with the quality of their housing. In the main, the developers have agreed to take up those cases, but they are very aware that they have to be careful; they want to ensure that they do not find themselves legally liable.

There has been some confusion as to who is responsible for sorting out those problems. Is it the council? Should it have signed off on the development before it was sold? Where do the insurers fit in? What happens if the consumer, who has paid good money for the property, cannot get a satisfactory answer? Who should consumers go to if they cannot get redress? We need to remember that this is probably the biggest investment that individuals—our constituents, and probably ourselves—will make in their lifetime. I hope that our report on the built environment will deal with those issues and suggest some recommendations on how the inspection regime can be improved and strengthened.

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[Oliver Colvile]

rose—

[Tim Farron]

I would like to move on for other people’s sake, but I am happy to give way.

[Oliver Colvile]

Surely this is about making sure that we fulfil aspiration, because what a large number of people actually want to do is to own their own homes.

[Tim Farron]

Indeed, and I have a great aspiration for the 1.6 million people in this country who are rotting on a social housing waiting list, and that number will grow larger as the years go on. I want to bring down house prices so that they are affordable to people, but this is a displacement proposal that will help better-off private renters and will not help a much larger number of people who are in a much worse situation.