Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Debate between Theresa Villiers and Justin Madders

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.