Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Winterton of Doncaster Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Munira Wilson]

I know the hon. Gentleman was desperate to get an extra minute. He is making a really impassioned speech and I agree with much of what he has said so far. He mentioned developers snapping up greenfield sites. In my constituency, the local community rose up to protect a site called Udney Park Playing Fields in Teddington, and thanks to a legal challenge it is now protected green space. The developer, however, will not now sell the site back to the community despite a good bid to turn it into playing fields, because they paid over the odds and they will wait years and years until planning policy changes. Meanwhile, the site is going to rack and ruin. Do we not need powers to tackle that?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. We need short interventions, because there are many people who wish to speak.

[Bob Seely]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point. She will probably have to wait 10 to 15 years. There will be a form of planning blight on that land. We have the same with an awful development on my patch called Pennyfeathers, which I wish had never been built. I wish the Secretary of State or, indeed, the wonderful Minister for Housing, had the powers to say no to it; we could go back to having a vineyard and green fields there, as there should be.

I am very supportive of my colleagues on the Conservative Benches who have made speeches this afternoon, but let me turn briefly to amendments. Targets are the bane of so many of my colleagues. They need to be advisory, not mandatory, and I remind the Government that neighbourhood plan areas tend to say yes to more developments because they get the chance to shape them. If we do not feel that developments are being shoved down our throats, and that we can shape them more, the Government will have greater success.

The Secretary of State has heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (David Johnston) and others about the pernicious loopholes, the vandalism of sites of special scientific interest and the way people corruptly game the system. Why is character not grounds for opposing development? Why can we not shut down those loopholes that do such damage to our countryside, national parks and AONBs?

I know this is not a tax Bill, but fundamentally we need to find an effective way of changing the economics from greenfield to brownfield sites, so that the half a million or a million properties on brownfield sites are developed. We also have a second homes problem, not only on the Island but in Cornwall, the lake district and other areas. We need to respect property rights, but communities in my patch such as Seaview, Bembridge and Yarmouth must not become Potemkin villages that are empty for much of the year. We must have a community that stays there.

There will be a series of amendments to the Bill, and I assure the Minister they will be as supportive as they can be, but I will finish with something close to my heart: compulsory purchase. I want the Government to give more powers to councils for compulsory purchase. In Sandown, a town in my patch, a Mr Steven Purvis owns the Ocean Hotel and is fighting forced redevelopment tooth and nail. Nick Spyker owns the Grand Hotel in Sandown. Those places sit empty year in, year out.

Sandown is crying out for investment. The Island cannot afford owners who, for whatever reason, keep those properties as empty eyesores, damaging our communities, our public health and our economy. We must ensure that our councils have the power to say to people such as Purvis and Spyker, “Invest, or jog on.” There will be a lot of amendments to this Bill, many of them supportive, but we need to get a grip and we need to drive development and levelling-up forward.

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[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

The Government’s levelling-up White Paper states:

“While talent is spread equally across our country, opportunity is not. Levelling up is a mission to challenge, and change, that unfairness.”

I want to talk about an unfairness that is at the heart of inequality in the UK, and why I think the Bill lacks the ambition to address it.

There is a housing crisis in Britain, and my city is at the sharp end of it. In 2021, there were 21,615 households on Sheffield’s housing waiting list. Between 2020 and 2021, nearly 3,000 Sheffield households were made homeless or threatened with homelessness. Sheffield has also experienced one of the largest increases in annual rental demands in the country. From 2020 to 2021, there was a 46% increase in the number of private renters claiming housing benefit to help pay the rent. A 2019 Sheffield and Rotherham housing market assessment found that, in 13 of the 19 areas in our region, one third of all households were priced out of private renting altogether. After 12 years of stagnating wages and savage cuts to our local services, and now soaring inflation, the situation is getting far worse, not better.

Without action to tackle the housing crisis, the words “levelling up” will ring hollow to many of my constituents and the 17.5 million people across the UK who are also affected. The failure to invest in good-quality, genuinely affordable social homes lies at the root of their problems and at the root of the housing emergency, so surely that is where the Government should start.

But that is not what the Bill proposes. Rather than mandate for a boom in affordable and social rents, the proposal for an infrastructure levy only guarantees that affordable housing will be built at the same rate as it is now. But the status quo clearly is not working. Between 2015 and 2020, there was a net loss of more than 1,500 social homes in Sheffield. Only 229 new homes could be built by the local authority, and 1,800 were lost through right to buy. Our city council is ambitious and has embarked on a programme to build more than 3,000 new council homes by 2029 but, without proper support, that will not be enough to tackle Sheffield’s housing emergency.

The conditions in the Government’s affordable homes programme have made building good-quality social housing in Sheffield almost impossible. Until 2021, geographical restrictions stopped us from receiving funding altogether, despite the great waiting lists that we have. Even though Sheffield is now eligible, the way in which money is allocated is still producing problems. To ration a small national pot of money, the Government have mandated that schemes with the cheapest cost per home be prioritised. Delivering good-quality, environmentally friendly, disability-accessible social homes is often not possible because they cost more to build than other types of affordable housing. Social housing should and could be a source of quality, innovation and even excitement for our communities, but the programme bakes in a lack of ambition for the delivery of our housing stock. We should be providing families with a home, the asylum for so many people. People cannot get on in life if they do not have access to good-quality housing. That is a fact that we need to acknowledge and take seriously, but the Bill does nothing to address it or to address the rapid decline in affordable housing. What Sheffield needs to level up is a plan to build good-quality affordable social homes, but, as ever with this Government, what we have is a wasted opportunity and more of the same.

I did not expect to come here today and hear light entertainment from Government Members, but I have to say that I am pleased that the Secretary of State seems to have given up on his ambitions to audition for—[Hon. Members: “Time!”] My apologies. I will stop.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Would the hon. Lady like to finish?

[Olivia Blake]

It is fine—don’t worry. They don’t want to hear it.

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[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call Angela Richardson.