Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Robert Courts Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to contribute to this very important debate. It is also a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), who, if I may say so, spoke with clarity and force this afternoon. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) on securing the debate.

We have a challenge in this country: in one word, affordability. I see that quite clearly in my constituency of Witney and west Oxfordshire. We are very lucky that, statistically, we have almost full employment. It is a very pleasant part of the country in which to live—it is very green, with beautiful buildings, lots of jobs and Oxford nearby—and it has relatively good transport links, although more of that, perhaps, in a moment. However, that means there is a real challenge, because for very many people, the cost of housing has simply outstripped the ability to pay. This has an impact on all sorts of services that my constituents need. To give just one example, it affects the recruitment of GPs and teachers. This is a very real challenge. For swathes of young people—when I say that, I mean people under 40—owning a home, a dream almost universally shared, has become out of reach, and we absolutely must tackle this challenge.

There is certainly an issue with supply. I am well aware, as all hon. Members will be, of the statistic showing that, for many years under Governments of all colours, insufficient houses have been built. We have been building approximately a half of what we need. However, it is very important that we do not become fixated and obsessed simply with numbers. This is not all about supply or simply numbers, not least—I am very glad that the Government are reassessing the NPPF—because there is a question mark over how the supply figure reached through the strategic housing market assessment is calculated. There is a suspicion that it is too reliant on developers, who in due course drive the figure higher than it actually is.

We sometimes get the terminology wrong in this House. We tend to talk about developments when we should really be talking about communities, and we tend to talk about houses when we should really be talking about homes, because they are precisely what we are building in this country. We need to remember that we are building communities, and these will be the communities of the future. It is in 20 or 30 years’ time, when the builders have long since moved out and other MPs are representing the area, that the success of the rules we are putting in place now will be judged.

In my constituency, I am very keen that we do not just look at the green belt, important though it is to protect it. A relatively small amount of my constituency is green-belt land, but I have some of the most beautiful countryside in the country. Communities simply will not accept a cavalier approach to house building in such areas, and we need to guard against such an approach.

I am glad that the White Paper has been published and has addressed a great many of these issues and that the NPPF is being looked at. I have spoken about how the need figures are calculated and I am glad, too, that the issue of building on brownfield lands first is being looked at as a priority by the Government.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), who is not in his place, who really hit the nail on the head in talking about the build-out rate. It is crucial that when planning permissions have been granted the developers build them out, that there is not a practice of land banking and that they do not, for reasons of profit or any other reason, fail to build those out. This simply must happen. It must be built into the planning system. There might be things that the Government can do to help or that local government can do to help, such as bringing in small builders or local builders to ensure that those areas can be built out as and when local communities need them.

We need robust local plans throughout the country, and I would also like neighbourhood plans to have teeth. One of my hon. Friends referred to the fact that if local communities are asked where they think the housing ought to go to serve their needs, more housing might be built, but what is crucial is that local communities are consulted and listened to about those homes. They know which areas are likely to be flooded and which areas are unlikely to be able to take any traffic growth. They are therefore able to advise district councils—and, in due course, the Government as well—on where housing should go.

I would like those neighbourhood plans to have more teeth because nothing is more infuriating for a community than to spend months and thousands of pounds developing a neighbourhood plan—they are not cheap—only to find that it is given next to no weight in the local plan process. Those plans simply must be given weight. I suggest that the results would be good for everyone as we look at tackling this affordability challenge.

In the short time remaining, I want to look a little more at infrastructure. Communities, quite reasonably, oppose housing developments nearby when people worry about how they are going to get to work, where their children are going to go to school and which GP surgery they will go to if they are ill. The garden village scheme in many ways has a lot to commend it, because for many years we have seen penny packeting, where housing is put on the edge of a village but nothing else is added, so there is no increase in road provision, no increase in the number of GP surgeries and so forth. However, it is crucial that the schemes are well planned and the garden villages indeed have GP surgeries and shops and that the infrastructure, particularly around roads, is introduced at the same time.

There is such an example in my constituency, just to the north of Eynsham. Hon. Members who have heard me speak on just about any subject in the House will know that I will almost certainly mention the A40 at some point, and I do so again now. I am well aware that there is a lot of concern about the development in Eynsham, because anybody leaving Witney or any of the towns and villages in that area—I do not live far away myself, so I am well aware of the problem—or anybody leaving Eynsham spends hours in traffic as things are now. If thousands of houses are built in Witney and thousands are built to the north of Eynsham, people understandably fear that the infrastructure simply will not cope—and it really will not when we are talking about the A40, which is a single-track road heading into Oxford.

It is crucial that, across the whole of planning, that infrastructure is built in first, so that we have the schools and GP surgeries that we are going to need and that we do not have thousands more people trying to pile into the same local Co-op. Crucially in my case, the A40 must be addressed.

I am grateful to the relevant Department, which is well aware of my submissions on this subject. I am grateful, too, that my local county council has put in a strong housing infrastructure fund bid and that the major road network consultation is taking place at the moment.

I want to talk about innovation. In this country, we have not made anything like enough use of what are called prefabs or timber-frames, and we must do much more. There is a real challenge of affordability here that can be addressed through using technology and innovation. In my constituency, I have examples of companies that build just such structures.

On architecture, people expect that if housing is being built it will reflect the nature of the area in which it is being built. Having that would mean that we also had the consent for the housing that we need. That must never be forgotten.

I end by noting that we are building communities—places—and it is the people who live in them who really matter.