Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Stuart Anderson Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Anderson (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)]

I am delighted to speak in this debate on the Queen’s Speech, and what better matter for me to speak about than housing, considering that the second office of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is currently in the process of moving to Wolverhampton? That news has been met with great delight across the city. I recently had a meeting with the local DWP, which is already recruiting for setting up the new MHCLG office. It is a credit to James Attwood and his team at the DWP, who are passionate about making sure that we get more people in Wolverhampton into jobs.

Why is that so important? Wolverhampton is looking to be at the forefront of brownfield-first development. We now have the National Brownfield Institute in Wolverhampton, and we want to pioneer new technologies, through modern methods of construction, to help protect our green belt but also ensure that we get affordable housing. We have just over 10% of green space in Wolverhampton, and we want to make sure that we keep it. We have prominent campaigns, such as Save the Seven Cornfields, the Lower Penn group and the Wolverhampton Environment Centre, which are trying to protect beautiful areas in and around Wolverhampton. They are a lifeline for so many people in our city to enjoy nature, but we also need houses. The argument always come back, “We don’t have enough brownfield”, but that is categorically not true in Wolverhampton, where we have a lot of brownfield sites, empty retail space and a large city centre that can be filled with a lot of residential accommodation. We are delighted by the towns fund, the future high streets fund and investment into our city, but more needs to be done to see a transformational shift of private investment into the city to help build those houses.

To summarise, this is very simple: we need more housing, especially affordable housing; we have an abundance of brownfield sites or underutilised buildings within our city; and we need to protect the small amount of green belt that we have. So I will fully support these planning reforms, because they provide all of that for Wolverhampton, to ensure that our city goes from strength to strength, keeps the green belt that we love so much and also provides the affordable housing that we need in our city.