Town and Country Planning

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

This set of SIs is an answer to a massively important question about how we build more homes that are fit for communities, but the answer is blindingly obviously the wrong one. There is no evidence that planning logjams such as those to which the SIs are meant to be a solution are the problem. Some 40% of homes with planning permission over the past 10 years have not been built.

We need to look instead at some of the other reasons we are not building the houses that we need. It is about, for example, the lack of funding for local authorities—the lack of understanding that we need to directly intervene through council housing and social rented housing to provide the homes that we need. It is also about the fact that the price of land is so utterly prohibitive. It would be much more sensible in this time of rapid and urgent legislation to tackle the Land Compensation Act 1961 and reduce the value of land as a whole so that we get more houses built that are affordable.

The relaxation of permitted development rights has, as we heard from the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), already reduced quality.   The Government’s own commission reported that seven out of 10 buildings built under the existing rights lacked adequate light and ventilation, and were, as the hon. Gentleman said, creating the slums of tomorrow.

That was not always the way the Conservative party approached social rented housing, by the way. Harold Macmillan, when housing Minister, did tremendous work. He was the one behind the Parker Morris standard: really good quality council houses, with lots of good space around them. Council houses can be good houses, and that is what they need to be. [Interruption.] If I have got something wrong there, I will give way.

[Mr Betts]

Macmillan homes, built after the Bevan homes in the 1950s, were actually built to smaller space standards. I know that because I was actually brought up in one.

[Tim Farron]

I am delighted to take the correction. And there was me praising a Conservative! What Macmillan did do was build numbers, and the estates of the ’50s were certainly better than the estates of the ’60s, but I do indeed stand corrected.

The biggest concern I think many of us will have is the undermining of democracy: communities having what will be done to them dictated to them, without them having the ability to contradict or to say otherwise. If you are somebody who represents two national parks, the lakes and the dales, and the wonderful communities within them—Grange, Kendal and others—you will be particularly worried about what that means. We are not nimbys, by the way.

[Andrew Griffith]

As someone who also represents an area of national beauty, if we do not build houses in brownfield sites where dwellings already are, where does the hon. Gentleman think we will build those homes?

[Tim Farron]

I am grateful for that intervention, because I am about to talk about that.

The key point is simply this. South Lakeland District Council, a Liberal Democrat majority authority, has built well over 1,000 social rented homes. What we are talking about is not saying no to development; we are talking about saying yes to the right kind of development, and being able to have power and community control over where those houses are built and what kind of houses are built. Local control means better quality.

That is what worries me most about not just these proposals today, but the suite of proposals they sit alongside in the White Paper. We need to able to build the homes we need. It is absolutely infuriating that we have to say yes to private developments of executive homes that we do not need in order to crowbar in a handful of affordables. The average house price in my constituency is £260,000. The average household income is £26,000. It is obvious why we lose a third of our young people. Our communities, our council, our national parks want to be able to build houses, but build the right houses so that there are homes for local people in the lakes, the dales and the rest of the south lakes. The replacement of section 106, as proposed separately by the Government, risks, as has been reported to me by our local housing associations, at least 50% of their developments. That will not do anything to meet the needs of people in my communities.

There is also a particular concern—I will finish with this—that the Government are planning to say that developments of up to 50 units would not have to take any affordables as part of that proposal. I can tell hon. Members that in our communities we very rarely get developments of larger than 50 units. This set of proposals would lead to the removal of any affordable homes being built in the south lakes for the foreseeable future. It seems to me that there are many stakeholders the Government could have listened to when bringing forward these and similar proposals. The only stakeholders they have listened to appear to be the biggest of the developers. They have carved out our communities and caved into the big developers.