Planning for the Future

Theresa Villiers Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I thank the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) for securing this debate.

The proposed algorithm linked to the White Paper would more than double the annual housing target for the borough of Barnet to 5,744 units a year. That would place intolerable pressure on an area that is already building thousands of new homes—it is already playing its part in tackling the housing shortage. The numbers proposed in the algorithm for London and the south east would be impossible to deliver without significant urbanisation of the suburbs, encroachment on the green belt, or both. They would inevitably mean the construction of hundreds of high-rise blocks of flats, changing the landscape and the skyline forever and permanently blighting the local communities that we represent in this House; the open, low-rise, leafy suburban environment could become a thing of the past.

Even before these reforms come into operation, there are currently around 3,500 new homes proposed, and at various stages in the planning process, just in my Chipping Barnet constituency. Strong opposition is felt, for example, towards development proposals for Victoria Quarter, Colney Hatch Lane, Whalebones and—most controversially of all—for the station car parks at High Barnet and Cockfosters, just over the borough boundary. The reality is that more or less every brownfield site is already in the pipeline for development; there is simply no space for thousands more flats.

Page 54 of the White Paper suggests that these astonishingly high targets might be delivered by redeveloping streets of semi-detached homes. They call it “gentle densification”. To come anywhere near delivering these numbers using such a method would require the mass compulsory purchase and demolition of suburban streets. That is not remotely realistic, is not acceptable, and would be anything but gentle.

It is also unacceptable for the White Paper to deprive local communities of a say over building in designated growth zones. A faster process for creating a local plan is no substitute for input by residents and the local councillors they elect in a formal planning application process.

Finally, the White Paper indicates that as long as a building meets certain design standards, it should go ahead—even if it is far more dense than was previously acceptable under longstanding planning principles. This is an attempt to substitute nationally set design standards for rules on character, height, massing and bulk. However, as the Barnet Residents Association points out in its response to the consultation,

“a block of flats is still a block, no matter how tastefully it might be presented”.

This tendency is already evident in the Mayor of London’s draft plan, and I am deeply worried that if we pursue it in the White Paper as well, it would lead to the removal of the vital protections enshrined in planning rules. In conclusion, our suburbs, extolled by John Betjeman in his Metroland poems, are often underappreciated, but the people who live there form the bedrock of much our economic and civic life. Today, I call on the Minister to give us an early Christmas present. Tinkering with the algorithm will not be enough; let us junk that algorithm and scrap much of the White Paper, so that we can save the suburbs and defend our local environment.