Homes and Planning Bill

Scott Arthur Excerpts

Friday 13th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

In that case, the Minister has not explained that to his planning inspectors. If he looks at the appeal reference APP/D0840/W/25/3367358 for land east of Meneth, Bonallack Lane, Gweek in my constituency, he will see that Inspector Harrington was very clear on 23 February 2025 that a location that previously had permission for an all-affordable rural exception site was converted to an open market site, purely as a result of the lack of a five-year land supply. I think the Minister needs to look at this again. We need additional tools to address the housing need of local people because the current tools are simply not working; indeed, they have been undermined by the Government’s own policy.

The problem with the house building target approach is that it is built on a delusion that private developers will collude with Government in driving down the price of their finished product. We have found over a decade—certainly in Cornwall—that developers will only deliver their homes at times when the market is buoyant, and they will not collude with Government in order to achieve those outcomes.

I know the Government have a series of concerns with the Bill and, in the interests of time, I will quickly rattle through them. They say there is a risk it is not compatible with property rights under the European convention on human rights. I do not think that applies as far as the powers of my Bill are concerned. In any case, there would be other measures that we could introduce that would resolve these issues and provide additional safeguards.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

The way the Bill has been presented is interesting. The hon. Gentleman says he does not think that the ECHR guidelines apply—surely we need more reassurance than just his thoughts. We are talking about a housing crisis here. I have been listening carefully to all the points being made, and I can see the benefits, but they all seem quite incremental. Can he outline the scale of the difference that he thinks the Bill will make, bearing in mind that we face a housing crisis?

[Andrew George]

Well, that was a very interesting intervention. This is a private Member’s Bill and I am a Back Bencher. I do not have a magic wand—neither do the Government, evidently—with which I can change things overnight. This is not going to change the tectonic plates of policy; it is a private Member’s Bill dealing with one element of how communities can respond to their own desperate housing needs. It is a tool that would be available to them. The hon. Member needs to wake up to the reality of the scope of private Members’ Bills.

[Dr Arthur]

I absolutely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point, but he is presenting the Bill in the context of a massive housing emergency. It would be good to get some clarity on how many additional homes would become available in Cornwall, say, if the Bill were passed—not a precise number, just an estimate so that we can get a feel for the impact that it would have.

[Andrew George]

If one person were housed, would the hon. Member think that a waste of time? Of course I would want to see the approach scaled up, because it is a principle that could be adopted in every single community. We are talking about a potential impact on a high scale.

I disagree with the hon. Member’s point about the ECHR. In any case, that could be ironed out in Committee. As I say, if I need to find alternative routes to achieve the Bill’s aims, I will. If necessary, I will take the relevant provisions out of the Bill rather than allowing progress to be stalled on a good idea that we should pursue—in my view, obviously.

I know that the Government will say that there are already powers in the planning framework and routes to identifying and assembling land for development, but those are not as properly and fully available to community-led projects as they are to larger developers. The community-led homes sector has not found that the Government’s measures have assisted it in achieving the outcomes that it needs.

On holiday homes, clauses 5 and 6 would provide communities with powers of control, to be adopted in areas that wish to pursue this approach. I emphasise that this is driven not by the politics of envy, but by the politics of social justice, as I hope I have already made clear. I spoke recently to someone on the Isles of Scilly who is in his early 50s. His parents separated when he was eight, and since then he has moved more than 60 times on the islands, from garages to winter lets to temporary accommodation. He holds down an important job on the island, as does his partner, who works in the public sector. Those are not unusual circumstances. [Interruption.] I know that some hon. Members think that is funny, but it is a serious issue in our area.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on doing so well in the private Member’s Bill ballot and on bringing forward this Bill. He first brought his Affordable Homes Bill to this House back in 2014. While we have many differences on what the remedies to this challenge might be, his persistence on this issue deserves respect.

As the House knows, the planning provisions in this Bill would not apply in Scotland, where housing and planning are devolved to the Scottish Government, but the problems that it tries to tackle do not stop at the border. Families in the Scottish Borders face the same struggle as those in west Cornwall. Young people cannot find a home in the town that they grew up in, and key workers cannot live where they work. Communities need new homes, but they find the system stacked against them. I will use this debate to set out what that looks like in the Scottish Borders and the lessons that it holds for both Governments.

Let me start with the scale of the problem. In 2024, the Scottish Parliament declared a national housing emergency. More than two years on, the figures continue to head in the wrong direction. In the year to March 2026, some 17,268 new homes were completed in Scotland, almost 2,000 fewer than in the year before. Completions of affordable homes fell to their lowest level in a decade. In the year to June, social sector completions were at their lowest level since 2007. The SNP Scottish Government have promised 110,000 affordable homes by 2032. By the end of June this year, 36,518 had been delivered—barely a third of that target. Shelter Scotland, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and the Chartered Institute of Housing say that Scotland needs almost 15,700 social and affordable homes every single year, but less than half of that number are being delivered.

Behind those numbers are real families. At the end of September last year, some 10,480 children in Scotland were left living in temporary accommodation. That is more than 10,000 children without a safe, reliable and stable place to call home. It does not have to be that way. When the SNP Government cut the affordable housing budget in 2024, housing associations and councils explicitly warned them of the serious consequences of that decision. They were right, but their warning went ignored at the time, and while funding has since been restored, we cannot get back the years wasted or the projects stalled or abandoned.

[Dr Arthur]

I want to add a little bit of detail for the people who still think that the SNP-Green Government, as they were, were somehow virtuous. The cut that the hon. Member refers to was 26% of the affordable housing budget. It was absolutely incredible. The 2007 date is very important, because that was the year in which the SNP Government first came to power, and housing starts and completions are lower today than they were back then. Is that not an absolute disgrace?

[John Lamont]

I agree. What the SNP Scottish Government have done to housing in Scotland is an absolute scandal, and it is affecting the hon. Member’s constituency, just as it affects my own.

I want to dwell a bit on how the national picture has been felt in my constituency. Scottish Borders council has declared a local housing emergency, which is not a phrase any council uses lightly. I pay tribute to my local housing associations in the borders— Eildon, Berwickshire Housing Association, Scottish Borders Housing Association and Waverley. Since the council transferred its housing stock, they have been the only providers of social rented homes in the borders, and they build homes of real quality. However, looking at last year’s figures, it is just not enough.

The Scottish Government allocated £16.2 million to the borders for affordable housing, yet only £10.8 million of that was actually spent. Just 94 affordable homes were delivered against a target of 141. When the money allocated to fix the housing crisis cannot be spent, something in the system is broken. Maybe it is the availability of land, maybe it is the cost of building in rural areas, or maybe it is the inability of planning and infrastructure to keep up; most likely, it is all of them. Those are the questions that I am going to keep pursuing, in order to get answers.

That brings me to rural housing. Too many national housing programmes are designed with cities and big towns in mind. In a village in Berwickshire or in the Teviot valley, a development is six or 10 homes, not 600. There are fewer contractors, connecting to water and electricity costs more, and the cost of building each home is higher. Too often, the numbers simply do not stack up. Rural communities need support for small sites and small local builders. They need backing for community-led housing, and they need flexibility for homes tied to local jobs—farm workers, care staff and people working in tourism and hospitality, whose employers cannot recruit because there is nowhere for staff to live. Without those homes, young people leave, the school rolls fall, the bus service is cut, and the shops close. Housing is not just about bricks and mortar; it is about the future of rural communities.

The Bill puts a particular focus on second homes. I understand why—in parts of Cornwall, the concentration of second homes is extraordinary—but I want to offer a slightly different perspective from the Scottish Borders. I am not opposed to second homes. In many of our smaller and more isolated communities, second home owners are a lifeline. They shop in the village store, eat in the local pub, hire local tradespeople, and support businesses that would otherwise struggle through the quieter months. Many have deep family roots in the borders, and many go on to make them their permanent home. Second homes already make a contribution in the Scottish Borders: Scottish Borders council charges a council tax premium on them, and uses that money to help fund affordable housing and bring empty homes back into use.

As such, I suggest that the answer is a balance. Where second homes become so concentrated that a community is hollowed out, councils should have the tools to act, but in the borders, the main problem is not too many second homes—it is too few new homes. Blaming second home owners is easy; building the homes we need is harder, and that is the task in front of us.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)]

I primarily want to talk about the first four clauses of the Bill and community-led housing. Second homes exist in Mid Sussex—of course they do—but the scale of the challenge is nowhere near that faced by colleagues in parts of the country that are more frequented by tourists, such as Cornwall in the south-west, Cumbria and so on.

When I think about my constituency, I think about the district as a whole. There are about 2,000 households on the social housing register, and about 100 homes where families are living in temporary accommodation. I am well aware that those are quite small numbers compared with other parts of the country, but when we go out knocking on doors in Mid Sussex and have a conversation about the need for housing and the housing crisis, people in my community often do not realise that even 100 families are in temporary accommodation in our area.

First as a councillor, and now as a Member of the House, I think about what that means for people’s day-to-day lives. I think about the mum and her daughter who spent the first five years of that child’s life sharing a one-bedroom flat in a rural village. I think about the family of six I tried and failed to help, and who were facing eviction about 18 months ago. They were unable to find anywhere suitable for rent either privately or socially, and critically, there was nowhere near the school that the children attended. Too many people are inadequately or insecurely housed in my constituency, as is the case across the country.

Mid Sussex has a mixture of towns, large villages and small hamlets. It is by no means the most rural or largest constituency, but if someone who has an established network of family and friends around them in one area, in that village, is moved to accommodation at the other end of the district, that is devastating. It strains family ties, breaks friendships and support networks, and makes it next to impossible for people to stay in work, or for children to remain in the school where they are settled and happy. For those families who do not have access to a car, or perhaps two cars in a rural area with no buses, it is absolutely awful when somebody cannot find a decent home. For those reasons, we should be doing everything we can to enable people to stay in the place they call home. Community matters, villages matter, being near our family and friends matters, and the Bill goes with the grain of what communities are already trying to do.

In our area, we are lucky to have a network of town and parish councils, and their councillors—particularly the parish councillors—are unpaid volunteers, but they go above and beyond for their communities in a variety of ways. Over the years, I have seen how they have tried, with mixed success, to secure assets of community value for their communities.

When I first moved to Mid Sussex in 2012, it was the time of the neighbourhood plan. I saw my parish council, and subsequently other parish councils, do everything it could in good faith to meet the requirements for neighbourhood planning, only to be told a few years later that the need for local plans trumped that neighbourhood plan, which it believed provided the housing that its community needed, and which the community felt able to support. Those parish councillors were acting on a voluntary basis, and they were acting in good faith.

In the last week or so, we have had the latest examination of the Mid Sussex district plan and, again, these volunteers have worked tirelessly to represent the interests of their communities. Mid Sussex council is currently led by the Liberal Democrats, although we do not have a majority, and it was previously run by the Conservatives. It has actually done what has been asked of it by successive Governments and delivered housing at scale, generally over 1,000 homes a year, 30% of which have been for affordable and social housing. As a council, we have not shied away from building the homes required of us, which is evidenced by the fact that Mid Sussex has the highest rate of population growth across the whole of Sussex.

If last week’s examination were to go ahead, it looks like another 24,000 homes will be allocated, despite them being predicated on having an adequate water supply. Ardingly reservoir, on which the constituency relies for its water, currently contains less than 20% of its capacity. When I talk to residents, they are in disbelief that another 24,000 homes could be provided for, when there has been a hosepipe ban in place for 10 of the last 16 months, and when there is a severe drought, a knackered and leaking pipe network and a reservoir that seems to empty quicker than water down a plughole.

[Dr Arthur]

Can the hon. Lady confirm that, if it is shown that the water supply can be maintained, she will support this development?

[Alison Bennett]

The last time I had—

[Dr Arthur]

Yes or no is fine.

[Alison Bennett]

Last time I had a PMQ, the question was about water companies being statutory consultees on planning applications. I think there is a bigger challenge in that water companies are not properly engaging in the planning system, and I would be really appreciative if the Minister looked into that issue. In my estimation, the housing sector works on five-year timescales, with a five-year housing land supply being in place. However, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the water industry work on 20-year timescales. Those two are in gross mismatch, which means that there is constant pressure for more housing, but the water infrastructure is in no way keeping up with it.

Against all that backdrop, the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) would put in place provisions to allow a real path forward for communities that want to provide the homes that their own residents need. That means that housing local people, affordably and in the place they already call home, would be made possible by the Bill’s proposals.

I do not see this as an either/or with the current planning framework and the reforms that this Government are bringing forward; it is in addition to them. It is something that those volunteers on parish and town councils want, as they want to do what is right for their communities, so I fully support my hon. Friend’s proposals. The purpose of the Bill is clear and simple: it strengthens the ability of communities to meet unmet local housing need through parish and town councils, community land trusts and other community-led organisations.

In my time in this House, when Government Members start talking about the coalition, I have observed that it is because they are on the wrong side of the argument, and it is the only argument they have left. These are good proposals that would benefit the country, and I ask the Government to think again.