Planning for the Future

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to be called in today’s debate, Sir Charles, yet again discussing “Planning for the Future”. I am surprised we are still here after the debate in the Chamber a few weeks ago, when there was deep concern across the House about the proposals, since the language painted a very different picture from the reality of what they would bring.

I want to focus on York, my constituency, and the real challenges we are facing with the whole planning system that will be exacerbated by “Planning for the Future”. The Government talk about giving back control and local people having a say, but when it comes to “Planning for the Future”, there is virtually no meaningful involvement. There may be consultation but certainly no involvement in the depth of planning decisions about their local environment.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

Public engagement seems to be higher for individual planning applications than broader planning consultations. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be more democratic to encourage and facilitate public engagement at every stage and at every level, and that these changes will lead to more decisions being made behind closed doors and make things worse, not better?

[Rachael Maskell]

I absolutely do agree with my hon. Friend, not least when infill housing development proposals come forward and there is actually very little accountability. That is why it is so important that local people have a say about their community—they know it best.

The reality is that whoever holds the cheque book holds the power in planning, and it is set to get worse under the proposed changes. I want to set out the problem that we are facing in York Central, in what would be a renewable area, and why the current system and “Planning for the Future” will fail York for generations.

Some 80% of housing need is for family housing, and I do not know a family that does not want a house with a garden, yet the planning for York Central will mean that 80% of housing is unaffordable one or two-bedroom flats—nothing that our constituency needs, despite over £155 million of public money being poured into the scheme—built on 45 hectares of public land. Already, under the current system, the housing is for investors, not residents.

That is nothing short of immoral when people are living in damp, overcrowded, poor-quality private rented sector houses. I was just looking at the figures: in York we have lost 45 socially rented homes, and that situation is getting worse with right to buy. We have a real housing crisis here, and this paper does not match our needs. These people have nowhere to go in York: if they cannot move out, which is the only option, they are left in this housing crisis; if they do move out, our local economy suffers, because we do not have the skills mix that our city needs.

York Central is adjacent to the rail station, which is one of the best-connected locations in the country; it is the mid-point between Edinburgh and London, a destination for HS2, if that is still going ahead—although today that looks uncertain—and at the intersection with the trans-Pennine route. If I look across to places such as Crewe or Curzon Street in Birmingham, the opportunity for creating jobs on these sites has been realised, and economic investment has been prioritised. However, York Central will provide just 6,500 jobs because the majority of the site is being handed over to housing.

The way the partnership has been set out means that Network Rail, Homes England and the National Railway Museum own the site and control the decisions. These bodies are not based in York. The Lib Dem-Green council, bizarrely, extracted itself from any decision making on the site. We now have the largest brownfield site in Europe, in the northern powerhouse, having its future determined by three national organisations with no interest in the future of the city.

The National Railway Museum rightly wants to see an upgrade to the museum by 2025 to celebrate 200 years of the railway, but Homes England has the power and money, and is certainly not putting forward the proposals our city needs. Homes England has a responsibility not only for developing housing, but for the economic future of our city, yet it has no understanding of our current economic situation. It is talking about putting low-wage, low-skill jobs on the site, when we need high-value jobs. We have a great opportunity with the bioscience industry, the digital creative sector and rail jobs for the future, and we know that there is investment interest. However, those things will be locked out of the site because of this imbalance, with Homes England holding the cards.

What we want to do is truly build back better by ensuring that we have good-quality jobs and the homes that people need in our city for the wider economy. “Planning for the Future” fails to address the situation. We must first address local need and then local opportunities to drive development. “Planning for the Future” further takes away powers of local scrutiny and will mean that those with the power, money and opportunity end up recreating our cities in a way that meets their short-term financial interests and undermines the long-term economic health of our city.

When it comes to the incredible city of York, it will result in future generations not having the good-quality jobs that I want them to have. Families will not have the housing they need, our local economy will be completely skewed, we will not have the skills we need and we will be overrun by speculative investors. Surely that is not what the Minister wants, and yet that will be the outcome of “Planning for the Future”.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani. I shall do my utmost to respond to this wide-ranging debate in nine minutes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on securing this debate. For her, Christmas has come early, as it has for other right hon. and hon. Members around the Chamber who have been able to express themselves eloquently and passionately on a matter that should concern us all. I will try to address all the points raised by colleagues.

I shall begin by trying to clear up a misunderstanding that has been abroad in this debate and has also been around for some time, which is about what happens to the existing planning system. What we are trying to do through the proposals that we have tabled is to create a quicker, more transparent planning system. When applications that vary from the local plan are made, however, they will still need to be made through the present planning application process. In conservation and protected areas, all applications will require a bespoke approach through the present planning system, so it does not go away. We simply want a quicker and faster process that we can also apply. I hope that clears up that particular matter.

Two consultations were launched on 6 August. The first, on the local housing need calculation, closed on 1 October, and the second, on the broader, more forward-looking reforms in our White Paper, closed on 29 October. We received 2,500 responses to the local housing need calculation and some 44,000 to the White Paper. The local housing need calculation was all about making sure that we address the issue of affordability, which we know is a challenge in many communities around our country where housing is simply too expensive for many people to achieve. We all recognise that we need to do something about that.

We also need to make sure that we regenerate our communities and level up, and ensure the best use of brownfield. Those are considerations in our local housing need calculation. We also, to address the points raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and others, need to be very clear about the challenge of building tall buildings in places that do not have them and do not want them because they are simply not appropriate.

It is not for me to try to play Santa Claus in this debate. My ministerial portfolio does not include responsibility for the festive season, but I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be able to say something soon about local housing need. This debate is focused particularly on the White Paper on planning reform. I am sure all of us will recognise that with so many responses to the consultation, it will take us a while to work through them. We want to do that because it is a genuine consultation, as I have said to colleagues across the Chamber on numerous occasions.

The consultation was not the end of the process of working through our reform proposals; it is the beginning. Through the first several months of next year, we will need to kick off workstreams on specific themes that develop out of the consultation, and to refine our proposals such that they are good and tight for the legislation that must and will come. That will enable us to table a Bill to deliver quickly the planning reforms we want, begin the systemic and cultural change necessary in our planning system, and ensure that the proposals are embedded, with public consent, as quickly as possible.

When I became the Minister with responsibility for housing and planning, I learned how long it took to implement the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which we rely on for the majority of our planning decisions. I assumed that by 1948 everything was working effectively and quickly and everybody knew what to do. In fact, that particular Act was not fully enforced until the early 1960s. The Town and Country Planning Act 1990 took 14 or 15 years to fully roll out. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 and the Localism Act 2011 have still not been fully implemented. My point is that we need to approach this with care, think through our proposals with as much consensus as possible, and ready all the stakeholders in the planning process so that we can effect that cultural and systemic shift. That is our approach and it will remain as such over the coming weeks and months.

We all agree that we must reform our planning system. My hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan) was kind in her remarks: she said that the Government have done very well in building new homes for people over several years. Our target is to build 300,000 new homes a year by the middle of this decade. That is a manifesto commitment that we will deliver.

The fact is that our present local planning system accounts for only 178,000 new homes a year, so the system must improve. Organisations as disparate as Crisis and KPMG all say that we need to build more than 250,000 homes a year if we are going to meet our needs. Therefore, a system that takes seven years to adopt a local plan, and which can take a further five years to develop large-scale housing and the infrastructure that supports it, is simply not going to build the homes we need.

[Rachael Maskell]

York has not had a local plan for over 50 years, so we have other difficulties. Does the Minister recognise that it is not just about quantum? Tenure of housing is also important and needs to match the need that is out there.

[Christopher Pincher]

The hon. Lady makes a fair point. It is for local councils and local authorities to determine what sorts of housing they need in their local communities. The whole point of our proposal is to give local authorities and communities much more power to design their communities strategically and holistically, so that they can say where they want homes to be built; the types of homes they want them to be; what they are going to look like; what sort of infrastructure is going to support them; and what the building requirement controls will be.

We want to make sure that we build more affordable housing. Members will know that our affordable homes programme injects £12.2 billion of funds into affordable housing, which is the biggest cash injection in 50 years. More than 50% of the properties that will be built under that programme in the next five years will be for affordable or social rent. Some 32,000 of them will be for social rent—double the number built under the previous programme and substantially more than the number of council houses built in Wales last year. Only 12 council houses were built in Labour-run Wales in 2019. Thanks to its approach to council housing, the Labour party cannot even house a Welsh rugby team in Wales, so we will take no lectures from the Opposition about our approach to affordable housing.

In the short time I have left, let me say a word about the environment, because it is important. Through the Environment Bill, we want to make sure that we offer a net gain in biodiversity. That will form the basis of our approach to housing proposals, as adumbrated in our White Paper, including the future homes standard, which will drive a 75% improvement in carbon emissions from our new housing stock. The green homes grant will invest in and retrofit about 600,000 homes around our country, ensuring that they are more fuel efficient and effective in delivering for their residents.

We are determined to make our proposals work and to ensure that all our colleagues around the House of Commons, of whatever stripe, as well as other stakeholders, understand and support them, whether they be planning professionals, local councillors, local communities with neighbourhood plans—which I am keen to build into our process—or developers, big or small. We are determined to make sure that these plans have the wholehearted support of all those involved in them, because only through that mechanism can we make them work.