Local Housing Need Assessment Reform

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[John Milne]

Yes, it makes strategic planning very difficult. Provision of infrastructure, particularly in rural areas, is a major problem and not sufficiently built into the planning system to compensate for it. It is easier in urban centres where the infrastructure is already in place.

This is the reason we have contrived to have perhaps as many as 1.5 million unbuilt permissions nationally, at the same time as a national housing shortage. That is because too many of them are permissions for unaffordable and, therefore, unbuildable homes. There is a degree of land banking but, for the most part, developers build as fast as they can sell. If they are serving only the top end of the market, that will be slowly. As Oliver Letwin described in his excellent 2018 report, sadly unacted on by the Government of the day, we need far greater variety in housing type.

As much as 80% of housebuilding is aimed at the top 20% of the market. The fastest way to fix that is to build a guaranteed quota of social housing. My party is asking for 150,000 a year. I guarantee they would be snapped up like hot cakes, as fast as they could be built. There is a fundamental difference between permissions and actual, physical houses. If all we ever think about is permissions and alleged impediments to permissions, we will never get to grips with the problem. Wrong permissions do not increase supply, they suppress it. Wrong permissions bake high land prices into the system. Handing out more permissions like confetti simply chokes the system with unbuildable sites that will hang over the market for a generation. There are lots of ways the standard method could be reinvented, but any future form must empower local authorities to deliver social housing in significant numbers from day one. How we do that is up for grabs, but somehow it must be done.

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

I intend to give the lead Member two minutes at the end of the debate at 3.58 pm. I will call the spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats at 3.28 pm. I will not impose a formal speech limit for the time being. I hope there is time for everybody to come in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Good for the hon. Gentleman for reading our manifesto—not enough people did, I am afraid. He is right: we did set a more ambitious target, which I am not against. As I said right at the start, I am in no shape or form a nimby. However, I am for honesty and fairness. The point is that the housing targets have been moved away from certain types of area where people tend to move. They tend to move from rural to urban to take their first job or start their first business, as I did, but the targets are going from urban to rural.

The Minister faces many challenges alongside the huge number he has set himself. The Office for Budget Responsibility and Homes England have said that the number targeted is impossible. Let us see. I wish him well for delivery, although not on the skewed figures that we have discussed today. There are real challenges here, as the Minister knows: things such as the Building Safety Regulator; the skills issue; small and medium-sized enterprises, which build a far smaller proportion of homes than they used to; and making sure that we get first-time buyers on to the housing ladder.

We have tabled a number of amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill that will solve all these problems, and I very much hope that the Minister will look at them. One of them proposes no solar on any best and most versatile land. I am sure that the Minister will look at that, because it would potentially leave space for more British farmland to produce fantastic food. We have also tabled amendments on protected landscapes—my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire has a significant section of protected landscape in his patch, which is bound to constrain supply, but no recognition has been made of that—and on ensuring that there is no plus or minus beyond 20% in any of these targets, which would be fairer. We will also seek to amend the national scheme of delegation, which disgracefully removes votes from councillors, and restore the protections for the green belt. As some in this excellent debate have said, we need a better mix that is more suited to demand in local areas.

I very much hope that the Minister will support those amendments, but, because I feel that he will not, I will make one plea to him: please, look at the Building Safety Regulator. There is a queue of 18,000 homes with planning consent that are waiting six months or more for an answer from the Building Safety Regulator. That is a huge bottleneck in supply. I hope that the Minister will at least touch on that point.

[Wera Hobhouse (in the Chair)]

I know that the Minister has quite a lot of time, but I ask him to leave two minutes for the Member in charge to wind up.