Planning

Selaine Saxby Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con) [V]]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for securing this debate. He has already highlighted many of the points that I intend to raise. Like him, I am keen to work with the Minister to ensure that we have a solution that works for local communities.

Planning is broken in North Devon. We can illustrate why we need reform quite dramatically. We have a local plan, yet our local community does not believe in it; our local council votes against developments in the local plan, even though it is on brownfield sites. We have exceeded the number of houses that are built in the community, yet we have nowhere for local people to live. For over four years we have built more than we required, yet we still do not have places local people can live in. We have a conservation office and a planning department from which most developments take up to a decade to emerge.

We have always been a community that welcomes tourists and second home owners, but unfortunately that dynamic is now slightly tilted in the wrong direction. New builds are snapped up as second homes or holiday lets, sometimes by locals because they can make so much money. Why would they rent out a property for a few hundred pounds a month when you can make several thousand a week up here in North Devon?

Post pandemic, North Devon is one of the top 10 places in the country to move to, and I agree that it is a fantastic place to live. However, as the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) said, we need people to move here, to get jobs, to stay here and to build communities here with their families. Building homes is not about houses; it is about communities. It is not about a winter ghost town. Croyde, which boasts one of the best surf beaches in the country, is currently 64% second home-owned. During the pandemic, in the village where I live—where I am speaking from this afternoon—mine was one of just six houses out of the 30 in my close that was occupied. We also have derelict homes, as well as second homes and Airbnbs.

We really need the council to have more teeth to stop new developments going to more second homes or additional Airbnbs and put in place covenants to ensure that local communities can build more family homes here in North Devon. We need them to be affordable so people can live here. Developing in North Devon is difficult; we are remote, we are rural, we do not have a big work force and it is hard to transport materials here. Overlay that with the time it takes to get things out of planning, and actually it is quite a hostile environment for developers. That is not to mention the opposition from many locals, who see that we do not need additional homes; we need the ones we have here already to be available to local people. We have developers facing death threats here in North Devon. We really do need some interventions to enable communities to reform.

The market is broken. In the village where I am this afternoon, a two-bedroom apartment in need of renovation is currently on the market at £750,000—with a communal garden. Something is not working here in North Devon. The final point I will make is that we need to find a way to ensure that councils can raise revenue when people wish to convert a property into a holiday let, and that there are more protections in the market. The private rental sector is now non-existent here; we need to find a way to ensure that there are more privately rented properties, as well as homes that are affordable for local families to buy. There is no point in coming on holiday to North Devon if we have nobody working in our bars and restaurants and nobody able to service visitors when they get here. Communities should not be full of empty houses for half of the year, they should be full of family homes.