Planning Reform

Sarah Newton Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) on securing this timely debate. It is a great pleasure to follow a fellow Cornish MP, my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George), who has in a nutshell articulated our dilemma in Cornwall. We have welcomed a lot of people into Cornwall; there has been a lot of inward migration and a lot of house building, but we still have a chronic housing situation. People who are born and bred in Cornwall, who work in our local economy and contribute a great deal to it, cannot afford to live there. Because so many colleagues want to contribute to this debate, I shall take the lead from my right hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) and say that my speech will be on my website in its entirety. I associate myself very much with the comments that he has made.

With brevity in mind, I seek some simple assurances from the Minister. As my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives has said, Cornwall council will meet next week to attempt to agree its plan, and some specific assurances from the Minister today would help the councillors in that process. Our councillors are being told by the planners that unless they accept a projected housing target based on what Cornwall has delivered over the past 10 years, the planning inspector simply will not agree the plan. To help the plan-making process, I urged Cornwall council to undertake a local needs assessment, which it has done. That assessment looked at the number of homes that are needed in Cornwall for those who currently do not have the right type of genuinely affordable housing, and the number needed to support the growing businesses in Cornwall. The local needs assessment demonstrated that Cornwall has been over-delivering properties at a rate of up to 1,000 a year, and that we need a much smaller number in order to meet our obligations and our desire to provide the right sorts of homes and achieve sustainable growth.

Cornwall councillors are being told that the good evidence base that has been gathered in that local needs assessment cannot be used, or the planning inspectors will throw out the resulting plan. I seek an absolute assurance that if Cornwall councillors, when they meet next week, can provide an adequate evidence base that supports the building of a certain number of homes based on realistic population growth and observed household composition rates, the planning inspector will accept that number. Any reassuring words that the Minister can give about the methodology that councillors can use in making their decision next week would be most welcome, because we desperately need to agree the plan. There has been a huge amount of consultation and very good work is going on in neighbourhood planning, but that plan has to be agreed.

As so many other hon. Members have described today, a developers’ free-for-all is going on in Cornwall and a huge number of speculative planning applications are being made. We need to use the tools that the Government have laid out in a new plan-making process to ensure that we have development in Cornwall, but that it is sustainable and fits in with our unique environment. Our key industries are tourism, farming, fishing and food production. Only yesterday the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs quite rightly pointed out how much more food we need to produce in our own country, and how food security will become an increasing issue. Those are key industries for Cornwall, and we can make a key contribution to the nation if councillors are given the tools to balance the need for housing with the need for a sustainable environment.