Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Theresa Villiers Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

One of my constituents suggested to me that breaking up some of the bigger house builders might improve competition in the market, deliver a better deal for people buying homes and enable us to deliver more homes. I would be interested to hear the hon. Gentleman’s views about that suggestion.

[Justin Madders]

That is an interesting point. Over recent years, the number of developers has contracted. The sums involved and the years of advance planning needed to build some of these developments tend to favour the bigger builders. I am not sure how we would go about achieving that, but it needs to be looked at.

The Communities and Local Government Committee should also consider this issue because developers—big and small—must explain how their duping of customers was allowed to start in the first place, how much profit they have made from this scam, who drew up the leases that nobody will now sign, how many properties were made leasehold needlessly, what role lenders and solicitors played in allowing through leases that nobody will now sign, and exactly who the beneficiaries of these leases are? Until we know the answers to these questions, we cannot be sure that the new homes we need will by owned with no strings attached by the people who buy them.

I want to say a few words about enforcement, because the rules of the planning system have value only if they can be effectively enforced. The significant funding cuts that local authorities have experienced in recent years are bound to have had an impact on the number and extent of enforcement activities that a council can undertake.

The classic example is the Mostyn House development in Parkgate in my constituency. Originally, the site was a boarding school in a listed building, but once the school ceased, the site was certainly an attractive one for developers to consider—and so they did. The site is now an impressive mix of new builds and apartments woven into the fabric of the old school, but it suffers from one major disadvantage. Despite some people having lived there for over four years, there is still no planning permission in place.

The reason for that is that revised plans were submitted halfway through the redevelopment, and despite the best efforts of the local authority enforcement officers, the developer, P. J. Livesey, constantly drags its heels, with the result that there is a list of outstanding works as long as your arm. From what I understand, the developer has a similar patchy record elsewhere in the country, but it seems to be able to get away with it, because there just is no capacity to follow through enforcement consistently.

As Mostyn House is a listed building, it is a pretty technical job to keep on top of it all. Fortunately, however, some of the residents have a surveying background, so they have been meticulous in logging the issues. Despite that, P. J. Livesey has still not met the required standards, and I wonder where we would be if we did not have such proactive and knowledgeable residents.

What about bringing roads up to an acceptable standard, so that they can be adopted by a local authority? There is an estate in my constituency that people started moving into almost a decade ago, and the developer—in this case, Bellway—still has not done the necessary works that would enable the local authority to adopt the roads. I do not blame the local authority. It has set out what needs to be done, but it does not have the resources or the time to constantly chase the developer, which has now sold the homes and moved on. What is the incentive for the developer to go back and complete the work it should have done?

I am pleased to say that, after many years of stagnation, there is a significant amount of house building in my constituency, particularly on brownfield sites, but very little of that housing is affordable. That is because the permissions were all granted some time ago, and the developers used the coalition Government’s rules on viability assessments to argue that it was not cost-effective for them to keep to their affordable housing obligations on individual sites. They plead poverty as they tell us that the requirement to build affordable homes means they cannot maintain their 20% profit margins.

As a result, no affordable housing is currently being built on just about every development site. Most developers sought release from their obligations three or four years ago, and many have only started building in the past six to 12 months, so it is quite clear that the affordable housing requirements were not stopping developments from proceeding. There is more than a suspicion that developers have played the system to maximise profit and had no intention of proceeding with their buildings previously. We have had empty sites for three or four years longer than needed, and an opportunity to build much-needed affordable housing has been lost.

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[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

The case for the green belt was put very powerfully by former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion. He said:

“Since about 1940, the population of Los Angeles has grown at about the same rate as the population of London. Los Angeles is now so enormous that if you somehow managed to pick it up and plonk it down on England, it would extend from Brighton on the south coast to Cambridge in the north-east. That’s what happens if you don’t have a green belt.”

In a densely populated island, the green belt enriches our lives in many ways. It provides a precious opportunity to reconnect with the natural environment and spend time with friends and family outdoors. A substantial part of my constituency is in the green belt, and protecting it will always be one of my highest priorities. When media reports in advance of the Budget indicated, therefore, that the Government were considering dismantling green-belt rules, I argued strongly against this and raised it during Prime Minister’s questions. Thankfully, my right hon. Friend’s answer confirmed her support for green-belt protections, and no plans to rip them up appeared in the Budget after all.

We must build more homes in this country, but we do not have to sacrifice the green belt to do it. The Conservative council in Barnet, for example, is delivering more new homes than any other borough in London, and its main means of doing so is through regeneration of the borough’s major estates. It is in the process of delivering 27,000 new homes under a 15-year plan adopted in 2012. In 2015-16, 1,460 new homes were built in Barnet—4.7% of the total for Greater London. Across its regeneration projects, the council is meeting the affordable homes target of 40%. I support this regeneration programme and other projects, such as the Victoria Quarter development in New Barnet, which is being taken forward by social landlord One Housing on a former industrial site.

Like my Conservative colleagues on Barnet Council, however, I am unhappy about plans brought forward by developers for high-density development squeezed into low-rise suburban areas where it is completely inappropriate, so I have been part of a number of successful campaigns against the demolition of houses to make way for blocks of flats. I am opposing plans for tower blocks of luxury flats in North London business park, which were rejected unanimously by Barnet’s planning committee, and I am fighting against proposals to build on the agricultural fields at Whalebones in High Barnet. I also oppose the planning application being considered this week for Barnet House in Whetstone. Barnet House hit the national news when the owners of the block proposed to use permitted development rights to convert it into hundreds of tiny flats. Described by some as dog kennel flats, some would have been only 16 square metres. Thankfully, the proposal was defeated, but I remain concerned about the scale of the plans that have replaced it.

I appeal to the Government to restrict or abolish the permitted development rights that allow the conversion of offices to residential use without a planning application. They deprive local residents of a say in whether such developments go ahead and mean that the people profiting from the development do not have to make any contribution to the services or infrastructure needed to support the new homes because no section 106 or other contribution can be obtained. This is a particular problem around the Station Road area in my constituency and was raised by residents when I was knocking on doors only a couple of weeks ago.

Another grave concern, I am afraid, is the Mayor of London’s development plan. If this draft plan is approved, not only will it remove protection for gardens; it will actively encourage building over them, which would make it far harder to resist the kind of garden-grabbing development that Barnet Council was recently able to turn down for Crescent Road in New Barnet. The housing density matrix seems to have been completely removed from the London plan. If that goes ahead, there will be no limits on appropriate density in particular areas, which will place huge pressure on councils to approve denser and taller development. The targets for the building of family-sized affordable homes which were introduced by the last Mayor are also to go. The current Labour Mayor wants to prevent new developments within reach of public transport from including parking spaces, which would inevitably displace cars into surrounding streets, thus adding to the problems already faced by my constituents.

The draft London plan was described by a Conservative Member of the London Assembly, Andrew Boff, as a declaration of war on the suburbs. That is strong language, but there is no doubt that the Mayor’s London plan is further evidence that Labour does not care about the suburbs and does not understand them—which is another good reason for Barnet to re-elect its Conservative council on 3 May.