Planning Decisions: Local Involvement

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab) [V]]

The Labour party and I understand and accept that the planning system in its current form is problematic and needs to be reformed, but the plans this Government have presented just hand power over to the developers—those developers who have donated loads of money to the Tory party recently—and away from communities such as mine in Bolton South East.

The Tory Government’s proposals fail to address the wider issues that face our country. The climate crisis is more acute than ever, and without a concerted effort to integrate planning infrastructure and development, we will struggle to achieve our net zero targets. We need sustainable transport. Bolton South East has a disproportionate number of people who are reliant on public transport—70% of them do not have a car—yet none of these plans talk about integrated solutions for the community. It is only Labour with Andy Burnham in power in Greater Manchester that is leading the way on an integrated transport network and the public ownership of buses.

There are currently 1.6 million people on housing waiting lists, and the Government’s projection is to build 100,000 to 340,000 homes per year for the next 10 years, but these do not appear to be homes for social renting, affordable homes, retirement home or sheltered accommodation. There is a huge need for those types of accommodation, and I would encourage the Government to plan for those types of houses as well as those for first-time buyers. We need to concentrate on the people who are the most vulnerable economically and in many other ways. They need to be accommodated.

The new planning laws will be on top of the national planning policy framework introduced in 2012, which allowed green belt land to be used to build homes. We have seen that in my constituency, where a local developer, Peel Holdings, was able to get permission to build thousands of homes on the green belt even though it owned many brownfield sites that it had acquired over the years and that it could quite easily have built on. However, everyone knows that brownfield sites are more expensive. We need social housing, and there are brownfield sites in my constituency that could easily benefit from development, so I would like the Government to set a target to ensure that these houses are built. As the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) said, housing is required, but it is required in the right areas. We cannot have thousands of houses in the salubrious parts of a town or community while people in the inner cities or towns do not have homes.