National Planning Policy Framework

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

I begin by thanking the Secretary of State for early sight of his statement.

Today, once again, we have seen the Government bringing forward proposals that tinker with the planning system in yet another vain attempt to look as though they are doing something about the housing and infrastructure crisis that the country is facing, which is largely of their making. Let us be clear about the scale of the problem. Many communities up and down the country do not have the homes that they need. Since 2010, the number of rough sleepers in England has nearly trebled from 1,700 to almost 5,000 last year. The number of households living in temporary accommodation has also risen almost continuously since 2010, with the latest stats showing that there are 79,000 households in temporary accommodation, including 121,000 children. For many areas, wages-to-mortgage differentials are as high as one to 10, leaving those on or below average wages unable to afford to buy a house of their own—that is happening under a Tory Government.

New house building rates have, for many years, been only half of what we need, and nowhere near the 300,000 homes needed to keep pace with demand. Planning needs to deliver not only new homes, but new communities. Planning should be about designing places in which people want to live and work where there are environmental and leisure amenities, and where quality of life is high on the agenda, but the Government are failing at that, too.

As the Local Government Association has pointed out, planning departments have borne the brunt of cuts to local government, leaving many hugely under-resourced to meet the everyday tasks of assessing planning applications, building control and place-based policy- making. This results in poor planning and a lack of engagement with the communities that are most affected by planning decisions. As the Conservative chair of the LGA, Lord Porter, has said, the problem is not about planning and planning permissions. In the past year, councils and their communities granted nearly twice as many planning permissions as the number of new homes that were completed. More than 423,000 homes with planning permission are still waiting to be built. The truth is that councils are approving nine in 10 planning applications, which shows that the planning system is not a barrier to building, so the Government’s proposal of stripping councils of their right to decide where development takes place is not only unhelpful, but misguided.

The increase in permitted development, as set out in today’s proposals, takes the community voice out of planning altogether, so that the general view of people is that planning is something that is done to them, not something that they have any say in whatsoever. By contrast, Labour wants to empower communities, putting them at the heart of decision making, with neighbourhood plans central to a new streamlined system of plan making. What we need is a radical approach to deliver 21st century communities, and that is what Labour would do. We would invest in a new generation of garden cities and new towns, putting local councils in the driving seat of spearheading new settlements, unlike the Conservative party, which has talked warm words about new towns and garden cities for many years but, despite more than seven years in office, has barely produced enough homes for a new street, never mind a new town. The Secretary of State has said that

“along that corridor, there is an opportunity to build at least four or five garden towns and villages.”

What does he mean by “along that corridor”? How long will it take for us to see the start of a new settlement, never mind it being built?

Labour will look at the Government’s proposals in detail, but we know that we need something much bolder than what we have seen today. I am talking about real policies to address land banking, as set out in our Lyons report almost a decade ago, with incentives for timely delivery and sanctions on developers whose build-out rate is too slow. We need a reformed planning system that puts communities and brownfield first and does not bypass local people with more and more permitted development and a lack of involvement in policy making.

We also need a robust policy platform that addresses not just the quantity of new homes, but their quality, and that delivers the infrastructure they need to work as sustainable and inclusive communities. An investment programme in local authority housing is needed, so that good-quality housing can once again be provided for working people, not at the Government’s inflated “affordable” rents, but at social rents that people can afford. We will make viability assessments transparent, so that developers cannot avoid their obligations to deliver affordable housing and other community benefits.

We have a vision of a built environment for the future, not a set of outdated measures that have so spectacularly failed to deliver in the past. If the Secretary of State really wants to spearhead a housing revolution, he will need to do much better than this.

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady started by saying that many communities do not have the homes that they need—I agree. I have been saying that for a long time, which is why we have been taking action on many fronts and why we have announced this action today. Let us explore what the hon. Lady meant, because she cannot ignore the huge role that the Government of which she was a part, formed by the party that she supports, played in the housing crisis facing this country.

From 1997 to 2010, the average house price rose from three and a half times average earnings to seven times such earnings. That is Labour’s legacy. Labour, more than anyone else, has created that crisis of unaffordability. When the shadow Secretary of State was Housing Minister, house building fell to its lowest level in our peacetime history since the 1920s, and social housing fell by 421,000 units. We will not take any lectures from the Opposition about how to deal with a housing crisis that they helped to create. Their policies are about rent controls and the requisition of private property. They have no ideas.

The hon. Lady is right that there is an issue with resources in planning departments, but she is also wrong, because we have already dealt with that issue. Perhaps she did not notice that local authorities are able to increase their planning fees by at least 20% as long as that money is put back into their planning departments. That measure has been welcomed not just by local authorities, but throughout the industry.

The hon. Lady says that the planning process is not part of the problem, but she has clearly not been listening to what the problem is. She has not been out there talking to local authorities and developers, or finding out what communities actually think. If she had, she would know that local authorities in England are together planning for 169,000 houses a year, which is nowhere near the number that we need. We need a change in the formula, so that we get the right number of homes in the right places.

The hon. Lady talked about the importance of giving communities a greater say. That is great, because this is the first time that I have heard that she is supporting our neighbourhood planning process—thank you very much. She also talked about garden cities, towns and villages, and she was right, so I thank her again for supporting our policy, as that is exactly what we are proposing up and down the country. Lastly, she mentioned that brownfield land must be the priority. Again, that is our policy—thank you very much for your support.