Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Ruth Edwards Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Edwards (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

For too long, communities in Rushcliffe have felt that the planning system is not on their side. For too long, councils such as Rushcliffe Borough Council have not been able to get the backing they need to prevent overdevelopment and inappropriate development. For too long, developers have used the planning system to their advantage, not listening to local people and only building out developments when it suits them. This Bill offers a huge correction.

The Bill resolves many of the concerns that my constituents have most often raised with me, including the fact that too many homes are built in the countryside, rather than on brownfield sites. It strikes the balance between building the homes we need and ensuring that they are built in the right places: strengthening local plans and providing greater protections for the environment.

Local communities do not get enough say about development in their area and cannot prevent ugly development. The Bill will give more weight to local and neighbourhood plans and make them simpler to produce. It introduces mandatory local design codes, so that developers have to respect styles drawn up locally, from the layout and materials used to the provision of green spaces.

There is a perception that developers buy land and then do not build on it. This Bill strengthens the requirement for commencement and completion notices, addressing land banking and slow build out by larger developers, and the worry that we do not have the roads, GP provision or school places that we need for new development, and that developers do not pay their fair share. This Bill reforms developer payments through a locally set, non-negotiable infrastructure levy that means that developers would always have to pay their share. As other hon. Members have said, this must come with development, not after it.

Rushcliffe Borough Council’s biggest concern is the abuse of the duty to co-operate, which has enabled Labour-run Nottingham City Council to shirk its responsibility to build houses and regenerate the city centre of Nottingham. It has used this national policy to push nearly 5,000 houses away from brownfield city sites into the countryside of Rushcliffe, and that is on top of Rushcliffe’s own housing target. So I am delighted, I am relieved, I am jubilant that the pernicious blunt instrument that is the duty to co-operate is being abolished in this Bill, especially as right now in Nottinghamshire, Nottingham City Council is gearing up to try it all over again this autumn. Authorities should of course co-operate with each other, but not in a way that can be abused. True co-operation means a system that works for all parties, and we must make sure that the replacement for the duty guards against this abuse in the future.

This Bill represents the turn of the tide—an important and transformational step forward for the hard-pressed communities who have seen unwelcome development and who feel powerless in the face of large developers. I thank Ministers for listening to our concerns along the way. I know they will continue to do so on many of the issues raised today, such as a more flexible approach to housing numbers and national development management policies.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Ruth Edwards Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer]

Our houses are not just bricks and mortar; they are homes. And those who live around us are not just our neighbours; they are our communities. We all want to live in streets that uplift our spirits and where our children, and their children, can afford to live and own their own homes alongside us. Churchill once said:

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”—[Official Report, 28 October 1943; Vol. 393, c. 403.]

So too, if we empower our communities, they will empower us.

We know that we can do more to ensure that, when we expand our communities, we do so in the right places, with the right infrastructure, and with the support of local people and local representatives. The think-tank Demos asked people whether they would prefer to have more say over how money is spent in their area, or to have more money. People were twice as likely to say that they would prefer to have more say and less money. Our Bill seeks to provide opportunities for collaboration and empowerment. It provides more opportunity for more homes that are beautiful, supported by infrastructure, delivered with democracy, which level up across our country.

I thank all colleagues for their extensive engagement, highlighting to me, to the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan), and to the Secretary of State the issues and concerns in their local areas. All represent different and diverse areas across the country: rural and urban, coastal and remote, island and inner city. I thank in particular my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for their constructive contribution on this issue and their unwavering commitment to our planning system and their constituents.

I also thank my right hon. Friends the Members for Ashford (Damian Green) and for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), my hon. Friends the Members for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), for Aylesbury (Rob Butler), for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards), for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) and for Buckingham (Greg Smith), and the many Members across the House who have contributed significantly to our policy decisions on these issues.

It is important that we build homes this country needs in the places that we need homes most. We have a moral responsibility to get on and build, but we also have a responsibility to our existing communities to do so in the right way and with community support.

[Ruth Edwards (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

My constituents in Rushcliffe are supportive of house building, but they rightly object to being forced to build 660% of the national average, as they were last year, often on greenfield sites and without the infrastructure to match. Can my right hon. and learned Friend confirm that the Bill will give real teeth to our brownfield-first policy and give power back to local people to shape the future of their communities?

[Lucy Frazer]

I was pleased to discuss these issues with my hon. Friend, and she is absolutely right that we must build on brownfield first. That is what local communities want. Through not just this Bill, but the consultation that we will bring forward on the national planning policy framework, we will identify how we can encourage local communities to do just that, with incentives through the infrastructure levy, for example, but through other measures too.

The way for a community and local representatives to shape their area’s future is through the local plan. At the moment, local plans are taking too long. The system is too onerous and councils feel that their local constraints are not properly taken into account. The result is that fewer than 40% of planning authorities have adopted a plan in the last five years. That means that, instead of developments being delivered coherently and in collaboration with communities, new houses are being imposed on local people through successive planning applications. Through the Bill and the consultation on the NPPF, which we intend to launch before Christmas, we will ensure that the needs of the community are taken into account when a plan is designed. Once the plan is in place, it will provide protection against other unwanted development.