Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Redwood and Roberta Blackman-Woods

Monday 17th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, not least because he has enabled me to have a coughing fit. I hope he agrees that the matters before us are much more serious than a split infinitive.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

On a more serious matter, new clause 5 states that planning should create sustainable development, and that “sustaining” means

“the potential of future generations to meet their own needs by respecting environmental limits.”

Does the hon. Lady think there is a limit to how many people England can accommodate, and does she think her Government exceeded that limit?

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an interesting intervention, but I will not be distracted and will talk about that issue, because we have a serious matter in front of us—the measures contained in clause 1.

As I was saying, despite the Minister being given a number of opportunities to improve the clause in Committee, alas he did not take any of them on board. That was a pity, because our amendments sought to make the designation system more transparent and more accountable than just relying on the thoughts of the Secretary of State. As we know from Communities and Local Government questions earlier, those thoughts can at times be a bit alarming. He was telling us today that green is brown and brown is green, and he has often told us that down is up and up is down, so I am not at all sure where the Secretary of State’s thoughts on the clause would lead us. We are saying that we need to define what requiring local authorities “to do things” could possibly mean. I will not rehearse our long and interesting discussion in Committee about what that could mean, but it is truly extraordinary that we are being asked to adopt legislation allowing the Secretary of State “to do things” that are as yet ill-defined.

I raise those points to demonstrate the need for amendments 42 and 43, which would remove clause 1 and schedule 1 respectively. The Opposition consider this an extremely important matter, and, if possible, unless the Minister provides reassurances that have not yet been forthcoming, we will, at the appropriate point, seek to divide the House on amendment 42. We are totally against local authorities being designated as failing in the way he suggests and we do not believe that it will improve the performance of local planning authorities. Instead, it is very likely to lead to inappropriate development, as the Town and Country Planning Association said so powerfully in its evidence. It also pointed out—he needs to take this on board—that it could lead to a breakdown in trust in the planning system. As the consultation paper looks to be seeking to rubber-stamp the criteria put forward for designation and as the Government have made no effort to improve the clause to make designation and its operation more democratic, we had no alternative but to table an amendment to remove this thoroughly bad clause.

New clause 5 would provide an alternative approach to planning that we think the planning Minister needs to adopt as soon as possible. It would include in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 a definition of the purpose of planning. As hon. Members have pointed out, it is important to change the whole debate about planning. Instead of being presented simply as a brake on growth or somehow preventing growth, we want planning to be used to develop sustainable communities. The new clause would set out the need for planning policy to

“positively identify suitable land for development in line with the economic, social and environmental objectives so as to improve the quality of life, wellbeing and health of people and communities”.

[Mr Redwood]

I would be grateful if the hon. Lady could explain who would judge civic beauty, which I understand is an important criterion in her proposed system.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

The right hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. It might be helpful if we discussed how to judge what is beautiful in civic terms. I will happily engage with the Minister on how we might set up such a system. We could have citizens’ panels and they could get advice from relevant bodies around the country. If the Minister were to adopt the new clause and discuss with us how the measures in it could be delivered, it would be a helpful and constructive way forward, so I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention.

As I was saying, we think that the system should look at

“the quality of life, wellbeing and health of people and communities... contribute to sustainable economic development…protect and enhance the natural and historic environment and quality of existing communities and the countryside…ensure long term sustainable patterns of resource use”

and, as I said and as the right hon. Gentleman just highlighted, it should

“positively promote civic beauty through high quality and inclusive design; and…ensure the planning system is open, transparent, participative and accountable.”

None of that, however, has been taken on board by the Minister. In fact, in their rush and desperation to be seen to be doing something to produce growth, the Government have forgotten the real purpose of planning. Planning is a tool for people to shape places positively and for communities to ensure that they have homes for their children and developments that are beneficial to them and the economy. The Government seem determined to characterise planning solely as an obstacle to growth—clearly an attempt to disguise the fact that their policies are the real brake on growth and what we should be resisting.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Redwood]

The Government are right to be concerned about the poor volume of house building that they inherited and that has continued for the past two and a bit years. It is right that they need to facilitate more development of more or less any kind. It will, by definition, be affordable because people will now build houses only if they can see a purchaser or tenant with reasonable security.

I have difficulty with the amendments proposed by the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford). He and I would probably agree that we need more affordable housing of all kinds in this country. The biggest shortage is probably in affordable housing for sale. A large number of people would like to own their own home. It is one of the tragedies of the current situation that people in their 20s and quite a lot of people in their 30s are no longer able to obtain a large enough mortgage to afford the prices of homes in many parts of the country. We therefore have a new generation of people who do not have the access to home ownership that previous generations have enjoyed and taken advantage of.

That has come about because of a mighty land and property price bubble, generated primarily by the mortgage excesses of the previous decade and, to a lesser extent, by the capitalisation of the subsidies that the Government tipped into the housing sector to try to keep pace with the inflationary bubble that the banking and monetary policy was creating. We are using public money to chase a bubble, which makes it very difficult to get affordable housing to people. The public money then does not go around as far as it should, because land and property prices are so high.

How are we going to break into that conundrum? The Government are trying many things. They are trying to get a freer flow of mortgage money and cash to people at cheap prices, so that they can afford more. They are also working on the supply side to try to puncture the land bubble at a sensible rate, so that all homes become more affordable.

The danger with concentrating on so-called affordable homes for rent in the public sector is that, as the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich says, there is a big lottery element to it. If one was born in the right village or has lived in the right village for long enough, one might qualify for such property, but if one has moved around too much or has lived in a different village, there is no such opportunity. The lottery element is one problem with what the right hon. Gentleman is suggesting.

The right hon. Gentleman said that affordable homes would always be available, but of course they will not, because they will mainly be lived in by the people who first get them. Those people might decide to live in them for 20, 30, 40 or 50 years, so they will not be available to anybody else because they will be providing family accommodation to those people. We might say that that is fine, because that is the purpose of such homes, but they cannot both fulfil the intended role for the family who are lucky enough to get them and be available to a family that does not have them.

That leads to a distributional problem, because if somebody who takes on a heavily subsidised affordable rented house becomes very successful, we rightly do not tell them that they have to leave. That means that someone quite rich and successful can be living in a heavily subsidised house, which does not seem fair. It is better to move to a system of subsidising people rather than properties, by giving them income support and the means to achieve what they need—a house to buy, a flat to rent or whatever. It is subsidising property that has got us into all these awful arguments, and it is sending the wrong signals and drying up the market in all sorts of ways. There are not enough affordable properties, and an awful lot of developers are being put off.

I hope that the Minister will build on the ideas that are currently in circulation to allow some development to take place, and that he will not allow previous plans from better financial times to prevent that development. I hope he will consider the two important points that I have made—that it is surely better to subsidise people in need than particular homes, which can lead to the maldistribution of results both geographically and by individual; and that it is surely better to work on the land market, because it must be our ultimate aim to have a land market at prices that people can afford. Thanks to the mortgage and subsidy boom of the previous decade we are a long way from that, with the result that many of our constituents cannot access the housing that they need and would like.

[Roberta Blackman-Woods]

I wish to speak to amendments 45 to 48. Clause 6 greatly exercised us in Committee because of the threat that it presents to the future supply of affordable housing delivered through the application of section 106 agreements. No evidence has been provided in Committee or elsewhere of the necessity of the clause or of why section 106 agreements, as they relate to affordable housing, should be singled out for such treatment. Ministers and other Government Members seemed blasé about what the clause could mean for the development of housing, and particularly about the need to create communities that are both balanced and mixed.

I want to make it clear from the outset that we dislike clause 6 very much indeed, and that in tabling our amendments we have sought to curtail its worst excesses. The Minister was not able to provide an evidence base for it, a point noted by many witnesses, such as the National Housing Federation, which stated that

“no evidence has been provided to suggest that Section 106 generally, and its affordable housing component specifically, are routinely stalling developments.”

The Minister has not explained why the clause is necessary given that local authorities are already renegotiating section 106 agreements. The Local Government Association has emphasised that point, and as I have already pointed out to the Minister, the LGA is currently—I stress that word to my hon. Friends—under the control of the Conservative party. It stated that it believed the whole of clause 6 to be

“unnecessary because councils are already responding to changed economic circumstances by renegotiating Section 106…agreements voluntarily.”

Case studies exist from a range of councils, including Cheshire West and Chester, Exeter and Haringey. Given the relatively short time available I will not go into them in much detail, but it is worth pointing out that Cheshire West and Chester council has already renegotiated the section 106 agreement for Winnington urban village, and that Exeter city council has done the same for a series of new developments. There are a lot of examples of that across the country, and I am happy to pass the information on to the Minister if necessary.