Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the biggest problems is that developers can get out of their obligation to build affordable homes by using viability studies? They can submit a planning application, pick the executive homes that they want to build and then, halfway through, they can produce viability studies and say, “Whoops! We cannot afford to build affordable homes.” Will the hon. Gentleman call on his Government to do something about this shambles?

[Mr Robertson]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. The Minister is here and listening to all these points, which I am pleased to say are consistent with my speech. However, I am being glared at by Madam Deputy Speaker because I have spoken for longer than I had intended, so I will wind up my remarks.

I will conclude with the following suggestions. The Government should accept that London’s housing issues are not the same as those facing the rest of the country, that affordability and a change in lending practice is a significant factor in falling ownership levels among young people and that merely increasing the supply of houses will not address that. We need to ensure that more affordable houses are built for both younger and older people. Planning guidance for green-belt land is confused and needs clarifying. Decisions by the Planning Inspectorate often do not reflect Government policy or planning guidance, and its existence is an affront to democracy in itself. The housing White Paper needs revisiting to ensure that we build the right houses in the right places to give the younger generation a real prospect of being homeowners, while also protecting the countryside. Madam Deputy Speaker, thank you for the time today, and I look forward to hearing what other right hon. and hon. Members and the Minister have to say.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

My party has long campaigned for 300,000 new homes to be built every year. There is a compelling social reason for that. Millions of people are now priced out of ever buying a home, and for the lucky few, the only opportunity comes with money from their parents or a direct subsidy from the state. Even then, eight out of 10 new homes are out of the financial reach of working people throughout the country.

The housing market is broken. It is a market built for the few and designed to exclude. The lack of housing is a crisis that is denying people—especially young people and the most vulnerable, in my constituency and across the country—a place to call their own. It should not be a luxury to own a home; nor should it be a luxury to have a secure tenancy. Building 300,000 additional homes every year would at least begin to reverse the decades-long failure to match demand with supply. The Government, however, have only one solution, which is to leave house building to the private sector. The interests of private house builders are simple: high profitability sustained over a long period. That means the slow release of property on to the market, land banking, and—as has already been discussed this afternoon—the building of five-bedroom homes rather than affordable housing.

There is an alternative to that business model. Local authorities and other public organisations must build homes on the basis of different priorities: not profit, but social need and public good. Last Christmas, one in every 111 children in the UK was either homeless or in temporary bed-and-breakfast or rented accommodation. The private sector benefits from that financially, but the private sector does not solve a single problem.

I have raised the subject of social housing, built by the public sector, many times in the House since my election last June, but the Government have not reciprocated. When I talk about the need for social housing, they respond time and again by talking about affordable housing, which is built by the private sector with some levels of public subsidy. According to research by Shelter, such housing is unaffordable for eight out of 10 working families. It gets worse. In my constituency, the local authority has just shown all developers how not to include affordable homes in their planning applications and has set an example of how to get around their own planning obligations to provide affordable housing.

The Government’s Budget in November made some noises about empowering councils to build social housing. My party has long called for the housing revenue account borrowing cap to be lifted to allow councils to borrow in order to build social housing again, but my local authority, Bath and North East Somerset, transferred all its social housing stock more than 20 years ago—a move that the Government have encouraged many other authorities to adopt. There was nothing in the Budget for local authorities such as mine. Although the Budget announced the lifting of the cap, it will be lifted only in areas of high demand, and the process will not start for two years. A council’s ability to borrow will be conditional on the whims of the Government, and on what they deem to be high demand. The Government say that they will allow councils to borrow to build, but councils such as mine that have given away their housing stock have little to borrow against, and they will have to continue to go cap in hand to the Government.

In conclusion, the private sector is not going to fix the housing crisis. The state can embark on a big social housing building programme, and I hope the Minister is listening. The worsening problem of homelessness, as well as individuals and families living in temporary accommodation, is not going to be solved by the private sector. The solutions are there for all to see, but the current position of the Government is blocking any progress. I call on the Minister to listen: the public sector must build again.