Town and Country Planning

Robert Neill Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I start by endorsing what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers). We both represent London suburban seats. I give the Ministers credit for having moved to meet some of our concerns in a number of areas, but I have to say that they have not gone far enough. There is a real problem here and a broad-brush approach does not meet the needs of the particular pressures faced by many London suburbs. I welcome, for example, that we are limiting this to post-1948. That is some protection for the between-the-wars semis and terraces, which are a great feature of much of suburban London and many other cities, but there are still many streets with good-quality post-war developments that could be damaged, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) said, so we still have further to go. That is why, although I will not oppose these measures, like my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet, I cannot join the Government in the Lobby tonight to support them either, because we have concerns.

The big rub will be that we cannot go down the route of linking these measures to the wholly unacceptable growth in the housing requirement, be it through an algorithm or a formula. Bromley is already building to its current requirement and simply cannot take the wholly unrealistic numbers that are proposed. My concern is that diminishing local control will not assist in that. I was glad to see the reference to Harold Macmillan. I am a great Macmillan fan—after all, he was MP for Bromley for the second half of his career—and he got it right in building 300,000 houses. I gently say to the Secretary of State that Harold did that while respecting the local rights that were provided for in the Housing Act 1949. He did not do it by relaxing development controls; he did it through other means and determination, so this is not the route we have to go down. That is why I think that the extension of permitted development is a false route for us to be taking. It has its place, but it needs careful constraints, and I do not think we have quite achieved that.

I also endorse what my hon. Friend Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) said about the serious failure—from my point of view, perhaps the most serious—of these SIs, which offer no protection for leaseholders in flats. Constituents of mine in Northpoint, which I have raised in the House on a number of occasions, suffer from having the freehold owned by an offshoot of the Tchenguiz property empire, whose behaviour towards those people has been disgraceful. The idea of enriching them is, I am afraid, simply not something that I can countenance. I cannot support a set of orders that do not yet give adequate protection to leaseholders.

What we really need in Bromley is affordable family housing. That is where the pressure is. People want to move to the London suburbs—they will endure the commute in and out—because they want space for their kids, gardens, and easy accessibility to parks and so forth. The trouble is that these SIs are making it easier to build yet more flatted units, which is not what we need to maintain the proper social mix in outer London suburbs such as ours.

I welcome the fact that the Minister has moved on space standards. I give credit for that, but again there is still a real concern about whether the prior approval regime will be sufficient to maintain high standards, because in both Bromley and Beckenham town centres we have seen too many instances of low-quality development. I have a real problem with the idea of taking a semi-detached house and putting two storeys on top, as a separate, self-contained dwelling. That is creating a separate house effectively, turning it into flats in all but name, which should not be done through a waiver of the permitted development process. There should be a proper planning application for that.