Criminal Law

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Philp]

The hon. Lady makes a fair point. Sentencing and more time in prison for serious offenders is very important, for the reasons that other Members have outlined, but rehabilitation is important as well. She will be aware that private community rehabilitation companies did some of that work, and that it is now being brought back in-house to be provided by the National Probation Service. She will be heartened to hear that the probation service and the Prison Service will be receiving significantly extra money in the next financial year, much of which will specifically address the matter of rehabilitation.

Let me outline in more detail exactly what this first step entails. I have defined a cohort of offenders and a cohort of offences. For standard determinate sentence offenders, we intend to apply the later release measure, in order to increase the amount of the sentence served from half to two thirds, where the sentence passed down is seven years or more. That applies to about one third of the 4,735 standard determinate sentences that I referred to earlier, so this measure will apply to 1,450 offenders per year, based on the 2018 figures. To be clear, of the 1,450 offenders affected directly by this measure, 30% were convicted of rape, and a further 30% were convicted of causing grievous bodily harm with intent—very serious assault. We will make sure that those rapists and serious violent offenders spend two thirds, not half, of their sentence in prison.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham asked about the prison population. These measures will start to bite in about three and a half years’ time, because any sentence in the categories that I have described handed down from 1 April this year onwards will have the later released provision applied, so it will take 50% of three and a half years, minus time on remand—just under three and a half years—for these measures to start affecting the prison population. The impact assessment, which I see that the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) has in her hand, shows that as a result of this measure, by March 2024, there will be an uplift in the prison population of 50, but by 2030, there will be 2,000 extra prisoners in the prison estate.

The Government are already taking action to increase the prison estate—action that will include accommodating the extra 2,000 prisoners that this measure will create. We are building 3,500 additional prison places at Glen Parva, Wellingborough and Stocken, and in the 2019 spending review, just a few months ago, the Government committed to building a further 10,000 new prison places. The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), is working hard on planning for those extra 10,000 places. In fact—this is very timely—she is at this very moment arriving in the Chamber. She has clearly been busily working on those extra 10,000 places as we have been speaking.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

Of course, what really matters to victims is that there is not reoffending, and that we are able to rehabilitate prisoners while they are in prison. The Minister was talking about rapists. Can he assure me that Horizon and Kaizen, the new sex offender training programmes—although they are no longer called that—are actually effective, and that we will have sufficient numbers of staff to deliver them to the new prisoners who will be spending longer inside?

[Chris Philp]

As always, my hon. Friend raises an extremely pertinent point. I can confirm that these programmes will be a focus both for Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and, of course, for Ministers at the Ministry of Justice. As I said, the Prison Service and the probation service will see significant increases in funding next year as a consequence of the 2019 spending review settlement, and material amounts of that funding will be applied to the programmes that we are providing.

In addition to the extra 10,000 prison places that my hon. Friend the Minister has been working on, we are spending an extra £100 million on prison security, and in the next financial year alone—the one due to start in a few months—we will spend an extra £156 million on prison maintenance. That is on top of the extra 4,581 prison officers who were recruited between October 2016 and September 2019. The Government are acutely conscious that the increase of 2,000 in the prison population needs to be catered for. Plans are in hand to do that, as well as to ensure that appropriate levels of resource are dedicated to rehabilitating those extra prisoners.

Self-build Housing

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

I wanted to call this debate “Kevin McCloud changed my life and I want him to change yours, too”, but I was told that was not entirely orderly.

What I do want to impress upon the House is that self-building produces houses that are better quality, cheaper and greener. My husband and I were gripped by “Grand Designs” when it was first shown about 20 years ago. I was aware that our French and German contemporaries had been brought up in houses that their parents had built, and they were starting to build their own at our sort of stage. We were thrilled when a run-down house on a large plot became available in our village. We definitely fall into the “creative” type, rather than the “engineering” one, so we got a local architect and a building firm in the village to do the work for us. But coping with the legal side of planning, as well as the design and organisation, was in itself a huge time commitment.

There were definitely television-worthy moments, and I am so glad we were not filmed: the day the glass wall broke into tiny shards as it was being installed; and when we moved in with two small children with only an outside loo and no floors. Thirteen years on, we still love our house. It was built for our needs: snooker, books and vinyl; and a large cooker. Where others have an eating area, we have a hose-down function room for community events. Most important to us are the incredible views of the Cherwell valley from every room.

Did the planners encourage us? No, they were horrified by discussions about reed beds and solar panels, and we had to appeal and argue. They did, however, eventually have the grace to commend the final result. But Cherwell District Council has come on in leaps and bounds since, and it is as passionate about building as I am.

We are building at an enormous rate locally, with three new homes finished every day in our area; we regularly top the leaderboard. But much of my casework is about problems with the quality of build of large developers. We have a wall of shame in my office where we rank how many complaints we get for each major builder. Occasionally, I get their representatives in, in small groups, to show them who is at the top of that wall of shame. I find that that is quite effective, with householders suddenly finding that defects are rectified—safety in numbers not working is effective in those meetings. The lack of quality, as well as the uniformity of type, of so much mass development is a real concern to me, as it should be to Members across this House.

In 2012, Cherwell District Council created Build! to look at alternative ways to deliver affordable houses for local people who buy a share in the property, which they self-finish to their own specification.

[Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her characteristically entertaining and thought-provoking speech. I only wish there was time for me to make a speech. [Interruption.] Oh, of course, given the time, there probably is.

When I was a district councillor, one of my most memorable visits was to my hon. Friend’s constituency to see that Build! project. Does she agree that there are two wonderful things about self-build that she has not yet had time to mention, although I am sure she will: first, it strips out the profit element and therefore means it is much cheaper; and, secondly, there is individuality in each build—the place-making and the village aspect that is so important to our constituents?

[Victoria Prentis]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Build! scheme is a good example of a halfway house before a full self-build, which we all know is quite a commitment to take on. The scheme enables people to self-finish, and brings many of the benefits that my hon. Friend just outlined, possibly without all the pain of a full self-build process.

We have quite a few examples of the Build! project throughout the constituency, but grouping is important, as I will come on to explain, and one great example is in Warwick Road in Banbury, where there is a 16-house development on the site of a former care home. In creating the project, we learned that instant community cohesion is a major bonus to grouping self-builds: by the time people move in, they know not just their neighbours but the location and type of their soil pipes. That makes for a diverse but energetic community who look out for each other right from the beginning. It is quite extraordinary, and it is one of the very real benefits of grouping self-builds, even in quite small developments, such as blocks of flats.

Another example is in a large building in a car park in Banbury town centre. People in flats next-door to each other look out for each other. They carry each other’s heavy pipes in for installation and help each other with other elements of building. It really makes a difference to how they go forward together as a community.

One of my newest town councillors has just bought a one-bedroom Build! flat near Bicester Village station. She told me:

“Without Build! and the support of CDC”—

Cherwell District Council—

“I would have really struggled to get on the property ladder. At 24, with a single income, I’m not very attractive to mortgage lenders. I bought a share in a self-finish flat. I pay a mortgage and a minimal amount of rent, and hope to work up to 100% ownership in a few years.”

She continued:

“This scheme has allowed me to finish my first property to my own specification. It was a bit of a shock to learn my doors wouldn’t fit over the new carpets and needed to be cut down. I’m in the process of tiling my bathroom, which has been a learning experience. It hasn’t been plain sailing but it will be an experience I’ll treasure.”

That is somebody with, to put it politely, no self-build skills. She is a young woman doing it on her own aged 24. That is really commendable. It has enabled her to have a cheaper property finished to her own spec, and it has given her the confidence to get on to the property ladder. It is exactly the sort of scheme that we should roll out nationally.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing this idea to the House for consideration. The Minister and I were just at a meeting of the all-party group on healthy homes and buildings. Some of the ideas that the hon. Lady refers to are coming through in the White Paper that the all-party group published.

Many years ago, before I got married, we did a project for my house back home. We referred to it as grip work—we employed a builder, a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber and so on to come in to do the work at each stage, thereby diminishing the cost factor at a time when, because we were younger, we were pushed for money and did not have very much. What does the hon. Lady feel that the House, and perhaps the Minister in particular—he is a good Minister—could do to help these projects and schemes for first-time new build owners?

[Victoria Prentis]

The hon. Gentleman has just helped—by telling us about his own experiences back home. What we can do is promote schemes such as Build! and the slightly more ambitious one that I am about to discuss, which are very easily rolled out across the country and which really can help new, young first-time buyers to realise their dream of property ownership.

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

I have a constituent who is interested in home building, but they had difficulty accessing the register of available land, which local authorities are required to keep. Can the hon. Lady advise me on how that was done in her local authority?

[Victoria Prentis]

Yes, I will come on to that. My local authority actually has provided enough houses—as indeed all local authorities are obliged to do—for people who want to build their own home. People wishing to build their own house must register with their local authority and a plot is supposed to become available in time. That is not always the case, and it is one of my real worries about people achieving their goals of self-build. I will cover that, and I am sure that the Minister will, too. That is one of the reasons for holding this debate: it is really important that we continue to press for plots to be made available so that people can begin to realise their dreams.

[Jim Shannon]

I am listening very intently to the hon. Lady. We also have a co-ownership scheme in Northern Ireland, which enables people who are financially restricted in getting a mortgage to buy half a house, and the co-ownership scheme gets the other half. It is also another way of enabling people to get on the first rung of the ladder and to move forward to get their own place, which is probably similar to the self-build project that the hon. Lady refers to.

[Victoria Prentis]

That is really important. Often, those help-to-buy schemes, or similar schemes, are not available to self-builders. They are in my constituency, because of a forward-thinking local authority, but they are not available across the country, and that is of real concern to me. The way mortgage lenders lend money is often not very helpful to self-builders, either.

I come on to Cherwell District Council’s most ambitious project and the one about which we really do want to sing from the rooftops. Graven Hill, which is former Ministry of Defence land, is a 188-hectare site south of Bicester. It is the UK’s, and possibly the world’s, largest custom build site. Plots with services already installed are easy to buy, and planning regulations—I cannot believe that I am saying this sentence—are relaxed and user-friendly. Two thousand custom build homes are being created, and those with a local connection have the chance to buy first.

I encourage everyone, particularly those involved in planning, to watch the fabulous programme “The Street”, on Channel 4, the final episode of which aired last week during Self-Build Week. It is available to watch on catch-up for the next 30 days. There is a shortened taster programme, but you would miss the full experience, Madam Deputy Speaker, if you did not watch the whole thing. Watching the programme is six hours of your life very well spent.

In the programme, Kevin McCloud—need I say more?—provides gentle commentary on the construction process of the first 10 builds on Graven Hill, demonstrating the positives and the stresses and how these houses meet the specific needs of the young, the old, the disabled and the unwell. These homes are definitely cheaper—around 20% cheaper—than other new builds. They are definitely ecologically sound. Just as the build quality is much better when a person does it themselves, individuals are consistently keener to take risks and try new ecologically interesting ideas in a way that big developers simply will not. So far the site as a whole has saved a significant quantity of carbon by sourcing tarmac from a local plant and by recycling aggregate on site. Some 90% of the waste generated at Graven Hill has been recycled, which is extraordinary on a big building site. McCloud does not shy away from the problems—this is very good telly—causing the reviewer of the series in The Daily Telegraph to call for a solid Victorian terrace to live in. However, what is clear is that what has been created is much greater than the sum of its parts. These are not just houses, but Graven Hill custom build houses. Their builders feel a pride in what they have achieved and that really shines through. They will definitely help to build a fantastic community.

There are three major barriers to intrepid self-builders, the first of which is access to land, mentioned by the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous). All planning authorities are required to maintain a register of those seeking to self-build, and to ensure that sufficient permissions are granted. Some 18,000 plots have been promised by Right to Build Day on 30 October. Will the Minister assure me that this is on track and will happen?

The second barrier is mortgage and financing issues. When we inevitably went over budget in our own build, I remember that our mortgage company was distinctly unimpressed by our application for further funding and told us that our plot was worth less with our half-built house on it than it had been at the beginning. That was a low moment. My husband was self-employed, which also caused problems for the mortgage company. Low-deposit mortgages are not usually available to self-builders, and neither is Help to Buy because it relies on the purchase of a completed property by a single payment at legal completion. It is, however, available at Graven Hill for custom built homes. Central Government really could work more creatively with lenders to address those issues, and I would be grateful if the Minister thought further about that.

The third major barrier is undoubtedly planning. At Graven Hill, the council has adopted contemporary planning regulations to ensure a fast approval process of a self-build plot in 28 days. This is revolutionary, and I do not see why every local authority in the country cannot follow suit. I remember the thousands of pounds in rent that we wasted while waiting for planners. I do not really know what they were doing, but whatever it was they did it very slowly. Addressing this issue is critical to the future promotion of self-building.

The Government and the Minister are making all the right noises in policy terms, but real change has to come from creative thinking by local authorities and mortgage lenders. Without it, we will not see the revolution in self-building that I seek. The UK has one of the lowest self and custom build sectors in the developed world, running at about 8% of the market. This is a real way to solve our housing problems, build communities, and ensure good quality and ecologically sound architecture. To Cherwell District Council led by the quietly inspirational Barry Wood, the Graven Hill pioneers and Kevin McCloud —I salute you.

Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

This is the first time I rise to contribute to a debate since my recovery from cancer and my return to active duty. I hope that you will therefore forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, if I divert for a moment to thank right hon. and hon. Members of the House, from all parts and all parties, for their kindness in the time I was ill. You know all too well, Madam Deputy Speaker, that Whips can sometimes come in for a bit of a bad rap, but I would just like to put on record the unstinting support that our Whips Office gave me while I was ill. In particular, I wish to single out my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), who, as Deputy Chief Whip, was constantly inquiring after my health and making sure I had everything I needed, and my current Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), whom I hope will always be my Whip and my friend.

I need to warn the Whips Office that, like many people who recover from a serious illness, I have returned a slightly different man, with a slightly different perspective. I have returned with a determination no longer to draw a veil over awkward truths and no longer to avoid thinking clearly and speaking openly about the mistakes we have made. The truth is that, for 20 years, Governments of all parties and politicians of all stripes have failed to build enough new homes to meet the housing needs of our fellow citizens. We have done that even though almost every single one of us in this House knows that happy feeling of living in a home that we own. In all our constituencies, for huge numbers of the people we represent, the dream of home ownership has turned into a tantalising mirage—a nightmare which they can never hope to get out of. We have failed through a combination of cowardice, complacency, laziness and incomprehension.

The roots of this problem lie in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of our housing market and house building industry. We talk of them as if it were a free market and all the problems that emanate from it are a result of free market operation, but that is not the case. This is a market in which the Government have made the most extraordinary intervention. Back in the 1930s, the house building market used to generate, in a country with a much smaller population, well over 300,000 homes every year. That was a free market, but the problem was that it led to unstoppable urban sprawl, as cities reached out into the countryside in a never-ending way.

As a result, as a Parliament and as a people we decided to introduce the Town and Country Planning Act 1932 to constrain that sprawl and introduce some order into the development process. That was an extraordinary intervention. We went from a situation in which someone could buy a plot of land, put up a few homes and sell them, to a situation in which the right to develop land was nationalised. The landowner has no innate right to build anything on their land. They have to apply to the Government for permission. That is an intervention that I support. I believe that the British people were entirely within their rights—as my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) is entirely within his rights—to want to defend the precious English countryside, but we need to acknowledge the effect of that intervention and be willing to embrace the measures to ensure that we nevertheless build enough homes for our people.

In France, they have a planning system, yet every single year they build 300,000 or 400,000 homes and they have very much less in the way of house-price inflation than we do. In Germany, they have a planning system, and every single year, routinely, they build 300,000 or 400,000 units, and they too have managed to avoid the UK’s curse: house-price inflation.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is fantastic to see my hon. Friend back in his place, making his customary important points. Does he accept that in Cherwell we too have a planning system, and we are still able to build three houses a day on average, because of positive local leadership? We just have to work harder to make sure that we have the infrastructure to back that up.

[Nick Boles]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. The new Minister for Housing, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), will discover, as I did when I was Planning Minister in the same Department, that Cherwell is one of the most progressive authorities on house building and sets an example that many other authorities could do well to study.

When we have made an intervention of the kind we have by nationalising the right to build and introducing a planning system, we need to follow through with the kinds of interventions that the French and the Germans allow themselves, to ensure that land prices do not become the constant fuel of ever-rising house prices, that major house builders are not in the business of eking out their supply as slowly as possible to keep prices as high as possible and that every year we build enough truly affordable housing units—housing that people on average and below-average incomes can afford to rent or buy. That is something that is achieved in Germany and France, and it is something that we comprehensively fail to do.

There will be some on these Benches of the more pure free market cast of mind who would rather that we scrap our planning controls and revert to a system of the 1930s. If we were to do that, it is true that the number of units that we would build every year would go up, that house prices would fall and that more people would be able to own their own homes. It is also true that we would have cities merging with one another and that we would lose huge swathes of precious English countryside, and I simply do not believe that the British people would wear it. The alternative therefore is for this party in government, which believes in the free market and in free enterprise, nevertheless to grasp that further state intervention is necessary if we are to have a house building industry that delivers enough homes for our citizens.

I know that there will be other hon. Members who would like to say more about some of these ideas, but the key interventions that we need to make are these. We need to give ourselves the power to acquire land at a price that is fair to the community as well as to the landowner. Why should landowners benefit from the fluke that gives them planning permission to build on their land when none of their neighbours receives it? Why should the taxpayer bear the cost of the infrastructure—the roads, the sewerage and the schools—that makes land developable in the first place? We need to revert to the situation that led to Milton Keynes and the other new towns, where we were able to acquire the land at a reasonable price, a small multiple of its agricultural land value, and then use the uplift in that land value to fund the infrastructure that the community needs.

We also need to intervene with major house builders to ensure that they build out the sites with planning permission on the schedule that they agreed with the planning authority. My suggestion for how we enforce this is to ask them to offer any sites that they had refused to build out to any other house builder to build on. This is such an important subject, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I hope to return to it in future, but I thank you for your time.