Richard Bacon
Main Page: Richard Bacon (Conservative - South Norfolk)
Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), although I disagree with one of the last things he said: that this Government are putting all their eggs in the starter home basket. With respect, no they are not. The most exciting part of this Bill—one alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), but otherwise not mentioned at all by any of the six speakers in this debate, or the eight including the two Front Benchers—is chapter 2 on self-build and custom house building. The Bill amends the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act 2015, which was my private Member’s Bill that I steered through Parliament and became law on 26 March. I have listened for several years now in this House to debates in which people from different sides have taken their part and shouted statistics at each other. I find it very frustrating, because the system has failed our constituents for at least 30 to 40 years, if not longer.
No one talks about a national chair crisis or a national shoe service to solve the problem we have with our shoes. No one says we need a help-to-sit campaign funded by Government so that we have enough chairs. That is because the supply of chairs and shoes rises to meet demand. The problem for 30 or 40 years—if not longer—is that the supply of houses has not risen to meet demand, and that is the problem we have to solve.
Some 1.2% of the land area of this country is taken up with houses. If we add in gardens, it is probably slightly over 2%. We could double the number of houses in this country, which no one is suggesting doing, and still 97.6% of the land area of the country would not be taken up houses.
Of the first six speakers from the Back Benches, four represent London constituencies. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is a debate about London, and no one denies that there are acute and special problems in London, but of the 65 million people who live in the United Kingdom, 57 million do not live in London and they also need to have their voice heard in this debate.
Richard Graham
Since my hon. Friend encouraged us who do not represent London to offer up our voices, may I point out to him that, just as he has his problems in his part of the country, we in Gloucester have ours, with not a single new unit of social housing built by Gloucester City Homes or the city council during the entire 13 years of the previous Labour Government?
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.
Mr Bacon
I cannot give way. I am so sorry; I would love to, but there is no more time.
Germany has 20 million more people than us and one third of its land area is covered by forest, yet anyone who wants to buy a piece of land there can go along to their local council and say, “I would like a piece of land, please.” The reply will be, “Would you like a big one or a small one?” The smaller ones are disproportionately slightly subsidised by the big ones, which are disproportionately slightly more expensive. There is an equilibrium between the supply of land and those who want to buy it, so anyone can get a piece of land.
I have mentioned the fact that it is possible to construct a house for between £140,000 and £160,000. Through the community land trusts scheme, it is possible to remove from the equation the actual value of the land. There are many landowners who would happily come forward to help in rural areas such as mine in Norfolk if they thought that the land was not going to be used by a volume house builder to build on spec and then sell. The very fact that people use the word “spec”—as in “speculative”—is quite extraordinary. I was sitting next to a representative of a major house builder at a dinner recently, and I said, “We don’t talk about spec shoes or spec chairs. The very word ‘spec’ is pejorative. Why do you use it? Why aren’t you loved? You provide the dwelling places where people live their lives, rear their children, conceive their children and bring about the next generation. Given what you do, why are you not loved? Why do you call it ‘spec’?” He looked at me as though I was mad and said, “Well, I suppose we always have.”
We need a revolution in how we do this, and my simple plan is to put the customer at the centre of the equation. I know that that is old-fashioned and traditional. It might even sound simple, but it works for shoes, it works for chairs and it works for most things. There are many good measures in the Bill that will help to promote supply, including the registration of brownfield land, the reduction of uncertainty in the planning process, the simplification of compulsory purchases and the speeding up of neighbourhood planning.
Many of those measures are welcome, but the most welcome aspect of the Bill is the opportunity provided in chapter 2 to make it easier for a person to get a piece of land and build a house on it. That could affect everyone. It could have huge benefits for social cohesion, for skills and even for the prevention of reoffending. Stella Clarke in the Community Self-Build Agency in Bristol is getting young black men who were rioting 20 years ago to literally build their own stake in the community. We need a revolution in this country, and it is this Government who are going to bring it about.
Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)
Half of my exceptionally beautiful constituency consists of the South Downs national park. Much of the development is therefore forced outside the park, which rightly has high levels of landscape protection. This creates a great deal of pressure on the communities outside the park, and it is therefore unsurprising that planning matters are the single biggest issue in my constituency. That reflects the tension with which we as policy makers have to deal. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that it is in the national interest to build more houses. The Secretary of State has rightly identified the fall in home ownership and the lack of affordable housing as a serious national problem—perhaps our most pressing one. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that it is in the national interest to protect the countryside and our communities.
I agreed with a great deal of what my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) said, but the difference between the countryside and shoes is that the supply of land in the countryside has been deliberately constrained by planning legislation for a very good reason—namely, to prevent random development. The challenge for us is to find a way of increasing supply while protecting the countryside as far as possible.
Mr Bacon
I represent a rural constituency and I have yet to meet anyone who does not want to live in a house, even in a rural area. Is not the problem that people do not have enough of a voice in what gets built, where it is built, what it looks like and who gets the chance to live in it? If we can change all that, we can change the conversation about development and environmental protection.
Nick Herbert
I agree with my hon. Friend about that. People often have legitimate reasons for being concerned about development, but a silent group of voters, perhaps a majority, cannot get their foot on the property ladder—those who face high rents, for whom the dream of home ownership is a long way away— and we need to ensure that their interest is represented, too.
There is perhaps something of an ambivalence at the heart of government policy making now. We started off, rightly, with the Localism Bill, the theory being that we should devolve power to local communities and that would be a better way of incentivising house building. There is some evidence, particularly through neighbourhood planning, that that policy approach works, but more recent Bills have sought to take more powers to the centre as a means of driving through house building. That approach will not work, any more than it worked under the previous Government.
That policy ambivalence is perhaps reflected in a split personality on the part of the Government. Kindly Dr Jekyll rightly comes to the House to say that regional spatial strategies are to be scrapped, but at night the Treasury doors are unlocked and Mr Hyde emerges. He uses the Planning Inspectorate to drive up housing numbers, but that interference by the Planning Inspectorate can cause delays in the system, preventing plans from being completed. Kindly Dr Jekyll believes in neighbourhood planning and wants to speed it up, but evil Mr Hyde is allowing a system where speculative planning applications can be allowed against the wishes of local communities. Kindly Dr Jekyll remains committed to a plan-led system, but Mr Hyde, in this Bill, is allowing the Secretary of State to take powers to grant planning permission directly for major infrastructure projects and give permission in principle, perhaps not just on brownfield land, but for other sites too. We need clarity about that.
I suggest to Ministers that we need to address four issues if we want to encourage public support for house building rather than see continuing resistance. First, we need to keep faith in localism. Neighbourhood plans give people power and responsibility to determine what they want rather than what they do not want, and they have resulted in people electing to have more houses than expected. Secondly, people have legitimate concerns about the provision of infrastructure to support housing—not just major infrastructure, which is dealt with under this Bill, but local infrastructure. People need to be assured that there will be adequate school places, that GP waiting lists will not increase and that there will not be excessive traffic on their roads.
Thirdly, good design is at the heart of building public support for housing, and in that respect I strongly agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk about the value of “self-build”. That perhaps wrongly suggests that people are going to be encouraged literally to build houses themselves; we are talking about opening up the market to a broader range of suppliers. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State presided over the national planning policy framework, and we must recall that he explicitly said in his foreword that there were three dimensions to that framework: the social, the economic and the environmental. We must not lose sight of that environmental dimension as an important factor that the planning system must address.
Finally, we need to look at more fundamental barriers in our planning system, and again I find myself in agreement with my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk about that. There is a real question as to whether we will ever be able to build in the south-east at the rate that will be required to lower house prices and make housing more affordable. We face serious regional imbalances in this country, as much of the demand for housing is focused on areas in the south. We need to look more radically, not just at the rebalancing of the economy that is needed, but at the whole operation of the planning system, to ensure that it meets the needs of people and that housing can be made affordable for everyone.
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.
Mr Jackson
My hon. Friend, in his normal astute and erudite way, puts his finger on it. One lesson was that the methodology was not as robust as it should have been in following through from the allocation of land to the actual construction of houses that people live in.
On tackling slum landlords, I strongly support and endorse part 2 of the Bill. In Peterborough, we have an issue with the degradation of large residential areas by slum landlords, which is very bad news for vulnerable tenants. This provision and the database are very welcome news, along with selective licensing, which is already in place under the Housing Act 2004.
We have scarce resources in government, and we need to focus them in the most efficient and effective way. We need to provide supported housing for people with long-term needs, such as mental illness. We need to look at extra care facilities and we need to keep our bargain or contract with working families who struggle to get on the housing ladder. In order to drive the market, it is vital that we look at removing SME builders from responsibilities and obligations on the community infrastructure levy and on section 106. There has been too much consolidation by large oligopolistic construction companies. We need to bring some of those smaller companies back into the market. I urge the Minister to look again at vacant building credit and to challenge the High Court decision, because this is about getting marginal brownfield site developments that will deliver hundreds and thousands of homes to people. It is a grave disappointment that the Conservative council saw fit to challenge the Department on that issue.
I agree with permitted development rights for the conversion of commercial and office premises to residential development, and there should be greater clarity on that before article 4 is used by some local authorities to prevent such a move. I welcome part 6 of the Bill, and challenge the shadow Minister to say what else could be done when 18% of local plans have not been published, 35% are not fully adopted, and one in five local authorities does not have a land supply plan. Needs must—we must tackle these issues. I am not in favour of big government, but I am in favour of more homes for people in my constituency and across the country. I support clause 107 on nationally significant infrastructure projects, but we need more clarity on that.
We must also consider the wider context and the demographic changes that are affecting our country. The number of single person households doubled between 1961 and 2014, and immigration is an important issue. I accept that owner occupation may not be for everyone, and we must look at residential estate investment trusts and give tax breaks to extra care facilities to help with that hugely important issue of adult social care and acute care in hospitals. We must tackle the skills crisis in construction. Two thirds of small construction companies said in August that they turn down work because people do not have the skills—plasterers, carpenters, bricklayers, scaffolders and apprenticeships are important.
We must consider access to capital, infrastructure, brownfield regeneration, complex remediation issues, and bringing on to the market many more intermediate mortgage products so that we support do-it-yourself conveyancing, shared ownership, and other forms of intermediate tenure. Social renting is important in some areas, but we are moving away from that model.
In conclusion, the Bill is much needed and will revolutionise construction, housing, and planning in our country. I will be supporting it tonight.