Housing: Long-term Plan

Debate between Richard Bacon and Kevin Foster

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bacon]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The only thing I would question is his use of the word “if”. Councils have a legal obligation to take the lists seriously. A planning inspector would be quite right to find a local plan unsound if it failed to contain provision for serviced plots commensurate with demand as evidenced on the register.

When Councillor Barry Wood, the leader of Cherwell District Council came to our self-build summit in Downing Street last month, he talked about one of the sites in the National Audit Office report that the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead mentioned, which has 109,500 potential houses. I spent some time explaining to the permanent secretary of the Department that our constituents liked living in real houses rather than potential houses. The list is a bit distorted, because on some of that land nothing has happened at all, and on some of it a great deal has happened. There are 1,900 serviced plots in Bicester, at Graven Hill. Anybody can look at that scheme by going to gravenhill.co.uk. Once it gets off the ground, as Councillor Wood explained in his presentation, it will make a significant difference to the marketplace because people will start looking at it and saying, “They have that in their area—why can’t we have it in ours?”

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

As always, my hon. Friend is speaking as a passionate advocate of self-build. He talks about local authorities taking this seriously. He will pleased to hear that my authority, Torbay Council, is already looking to identify sites for self-build projects.

[Mr Bacon]

I am very pleased to hear that. There is quite a lot going on in the south-west, and I hope it will spread right across the country to all corners of our great kingdom.

According to a YouGov survey, 75% of people do not particularly want to buy the product of the volume house builders. That probably has something to do with the quality of the offer and the fact that there is not enough choice. However, they sometimes have to do so even though they would prefer to do something else. An Ipsos MORI survey discovered that 53% of people would like to build their own house at some point in their lives, that 7 million people would like to do it in the next five years, and that 1 million would like to start in the next 12 months.

There are a whole range of benefits in this approach. We get much better quality building standards—I am sure the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead would approve of this—because people who are investing in their own homes are not doing it to get a margin that they can sell on in the way that, perfectly understandably, a volume house builder tries to do. Rather, they will try to get the highest quality fabric, and the highest thermal performance standards, that they can possibly afford. It also helps the skills agenda. Some people are doing it themselves, while some are commissioning others to do it but often still get involved at some level or other. There is a tremendous opportunity for the apprenticeships programme. Locally built housing causes money to stay in the local economy.

Self-builders are often much more community-spirited. They are much more likely to stay and to become pillars of their local communities; they are the ones who get on to the parish council. It is great for helping the vulnerable. What I find so depressing about the droning I have heard from the Opposition Benches for some years now is that there is no sign of radicalism. Somebody who goes on to the Community Self-Build Agency’s website—I encourage anyone to do this—will read the following on the front page:

“I was encouraged by the local council to apply for the CSBA Scheme, I rang them and said; ‘I am disabled, unemployed, on benefits and I know nothing of building.’ They said; ‘You fit all the criteria!’ I have never looked back.”

Rod Hackney said:

“It is a dangerous thing to underestimate human potential and the energy which can be generated when people are given the opportunity to help themselves.”

That is what this is really about.

I recently spoke to the headteacher of a small, rural high school in my constituency. It is always going to be a small school, because of the demographics, and it finds it difficult to recruit teachers. I told him, “You and the governors could tell a potential recruit in a difficult-to-fill subject, ‘If you come to our school, we’ll help you create your own house, which you could either rent or perhaps buy from us in the future.’ A history teacher could have a library for a couple of thousand books, and an arts and crafts teacher could have a workshop. Do you think that would help you recruit teachers?” He said, “God, yes, it would.”

The head of children’s services at Norfolk County Council recently told me that it is very difficult to recruit senior social workers with lots of experience of leading teams. Under the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act, a county council could register as an association of individuals; a planning authority would then be required to provide them with serviced plots. The potential of the Act is extraordinary. It gives us a chance to change the equation and how things are done.

The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale said in his opening remarks that we cannot rely on the dysfunctional market. Of course we cannot. It is touching that there are people who think we have a functioning housing market, and the fact that he refers to the market in that way suggests that he is one of them. What we have to do is fix it. In markets, people have real choice. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) said earlier that there have been decades of under-investment. I was going to intervene on him, but I did not, to ask him why he thinks we have managed to have enough shoes for everyone without decades of Government investment in the shoe industry. No one says that we need a national shoe service in order to solve the problem of not having enough shoes. What we need is a market that actually works.