Five-year Land Supply
Debate between Scott Mann and James Cartlidge(6 years, 5 months ago)
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James Cartlidge
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. That chimes with the situation in my area and many others, as I have heard from colleagues. I will come back to that point.
To understand why the system leads to speculative development, it is important to understand that when I say local policy becomes less important in the absence of a five-year land supply, I basically mean that it becomes far easier for a developer to get an application through on appeal. That is the nub of the issue. The district may still reject the application, but the point is that a developer with savvy lawyers and all the rest of it can game the system and get their application through on appeal. When it goes to appeal, the local community and local democracy have almost no say and the system becomes unaccountable. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about that.
One might say, “Hold on a minute, we want to build more homes. Isn’t that the way we should be doing things?” Let me use as an example the district of Babergh, which is entirely within my constituency. Babergh has been charged with providing 7,820 homes over the next 20 years. It has already granted unbuilt permissions for almost 5,000, so almost two thirds of 20 years’ worth of permissions have already been granted, yet we are seen as not having a five-year housing supply. That is extraordinary.
Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
The irony is that that land is sitting on balance sheets rather than being delivered. That precludes smaller builders and developers from taking on sites. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to find a way to resolve that and allow some of our smaller builders to deliver?
James Cartlidge
I know that my hon. Friend is passionate about that issue and has come up with some radical suggestions in that regard.
The experience in Babergh is common around the country, and it underlines my main point. It sounds good in principle to say to councils, “Nimby councils will be held to account—you must deliver the homes,” but they are doing the right thing. They are granting permissions—in fact, they are granting way more than they are meant to—and going through the pain of taking controversial decisions in planning committees and so on, but sites are not being built out.