Planning

Debate between Bob Seely and Judith Cummins

Thursday 15th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of the planning system and the upcoming Planning Bill.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummings.

I thank the Minister for being present and Members for taking part in the debate. I am very respectful of the Minister and I do not underestimate the challenges that he faces in changing a complex system. We need sensible reform, but we need to get it right, and it is in that positive spirit that I intend to speak. I will speak for no more than 10 minutes, because I want to get as many people in as possible.

I will reiterate some concerns and, significantly, suggest as many solutions as I can; some have been made by me and some by near 100 Members on the WhatsApp group. I sent those ideas to the Prime Minister and to the Housing Department a few weeks ago for thought, and I look forward to a response. I put forward an approach to planning based on three principles: that it should be community led, levelling-up led and environment led. I commend those to Ministers. First, however, I will outline some concerns.

Reform, I believe, is better than scrapping and starting again. Scrapping threatens to misdiagnose the problem. Nine in 10 planning applications are approved, but only 60% of permissions are built, so there are more than 1 million unbuilt permissions in a decade. The basic fact is that we have a flawed market. The building cartels, which build the majority of homes, restrict supply. That is not a secret; it is in their building model. They act to prevent prices falling. That is why using housebuilding alone, or predominantly, to lower prices will not work.

Furthermore, the standard method damages the levelling-up agenda. That is critical, especially given the Prime Minister’s excellent speech today. Levelling up is a moral and economic imperative. It is also a political imperative for the Government. However, a flawed planning Bill will undermine that levelling-up process. Some red wall colleagues are now beginning to see that.

Knight Frank reported that the current methodology, the standard method,

“systematically disadvantages poorer parts of the country, particularly in the North and Midlands”.

The north has 23% of the nation’s population, but its housing need is estimated at not even 16% of the total, and its share of public expenditure on housing is barely 18% of the total. The housing infrastructure fund spends £115 per head in the east of England and an astonishingly low £4 per head in Yorkshire.

The standard method directs investment away from levelling up communities. It heats up the already hot and it cools down those people who need to be cooking on gas—pardon the analogy. Other people will talk about the potential loss of democracy and other concerns, so I will not dwell too much on them, because I want to focus on one or two specific issues, but it is clear from talking to colleagues that there is much variation in people’s concerns. For some it is green fields and damage to tourism or quality of life, and for others it is suburban density, building height or the absolute absurdity of building on floodplains. For others, it is a system that is simply not delivering affordable homes.

I will say that there is a slight frustration. Opponents of reform—well, opponents of scrapping the system rather than reforming it—are sometimes portrayed as nimbys. On the Island, on the Isle of Wight, we have been yimbys for 50 years—we have been in our backyard. We have increased our population by 50% in 50 years. In that time, the cities of Newcastle, Sunderland, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Birmingham and Stoke have all declined—not relatively declined but declined in absolute percentage and numbers. So when people say that opponents of a developer-led system in the south are nimbys, I respectfully argue that they should acquaint themselves with some basic facts about the history of development that has taken place in this country since world war two. We have barely no new infrastructure on the Isle of Wight, and our key gas supplies, water and electricity interconnectors are already operating at near capacity.

So what are the solutions? I want most of this speech to be positive. I will look at our three principles and suggest perhaps a dozen or 15 ideas in the time I have available. Some of them are community led, some environmentally led and some levelling-upled, but they all gel together to look at ways we can support the Minister in the important work that he is doing, which we want to support.

Our reforms are: first, enshrine the ability to object to individual planning applications; secondly, give greater weight to reforming neighbourhood plans; thirdly, outlaw gazumping. We know that communities with neighbourhood plans accept higher housing allocations because they see what is in it for them. We know that gazumping slows down the market and imposes costs. Good democracy and good law help good development.

On levelling up, there are many things one could say, but I will stick to one. We need to fundamentally reform the standard model and redirect infrastructure funding and house building jobs to levelling-up areas as a deliberate act of policy. Without that, we will have to explain to our voters in a few years’ time why all that infrastructure funding, or so much of it, is going down south, and it will not be a pretty conversation with southern colleagues and voters or red wall and levelling-up communities.

Finally, a series of ideas linked to the environment. We need to end the use of lazy greenfield development. I know Ministers want that, but it would be great if they could want it more. We need a recycling culture in land use. I am aware that some good ideas in the White Paper are about infrastructure levies, but it needs to price in the true cost of using up very valuable rare greenfield land. For many areas I fear that will be a markedly higher price than will be factored into the Bill. We need, in short, to change the economics of land use.

We need a greenfield tax so that money goes into brownfield clean-up in a dedicated way. If we are using, especially in a place such as the Isle of Wight, rare greenfield land, we need to get a greater good out of it than Persimmon’s bottom line. We need to zero-rate brownfield development, encourage it and build in financial incentives, especially for small-scale brownfield in small towns and communities, to make it work.

There are many loopholes that I could suggest closing, but I will not, given the time. I will just say that we need greater powers of compulsory purchase to force people to act more quickly. There are 600 unused and derelict properties on the Isle of Wight. If the Minister wants to get 600 extra properties on the Isle of Wight, he should give the Isle of Wight Council more power. Make it easier for us to enforce action on derelict and unused properties in order to force sale or to force use. Introduce a character test to screen out dodgy developers. If he wants to clean up the system, let him be the sheriff who gets rid of cowboy developers.

Buyers who turn homes—I think this was suggested by a colleague who will be speaking shortly—into Airbnb or holiday homes should be required to apply to councils for change of use. Councils should be allowed to frame localised plans to reverse and lower the percentage of long-term holiday and commercial holiday rentals in specific communities.

We help first-time buyers, so why not last-time sellers with stamp duty exemption? It will cost money. One in five over-65s would be, according to facts and figures, more likely to move. That could affect 2 million people—£900 billion-worth of property. That would free up the market and allow market-driven solutions where there is not market failure. Clearly, there is an element here.

Finally, land banking. If we want to boost supply, we need to create a use-it-or-lose-it rule for permissions within a realistic time bracket. That means more than starting a development by digging a trench six foot by six. Agreeing a start date means agreeing just that and making council tax payable on all plots after a given date, regardless of whether they are built. If the purpose of the Minister’s planning Bill is to help developers, these ideas will not be attractive to many of them, but if its purpose is to get people into homes and to help first-time buyers—I am sure it is—these ideas, and many others suggested by colleagues, will help him produce a markedly better planning Bill, or a planning Bill that is as good and as attractive as we all want it to be.

We need solid principles behind the planning Bill. It should be community led, levelling-up led, and environment led. We need to be sensitive to local democracy. We need a levelling-up agenda that spreads prosperity and hope around our country. To make it environment led, we have to move away from unsustainable, lazy, car-dependent and carbon-inefficient greenfield development, and we need to build for communities and in communities.

[Judith Cummins (in the Chair)]

I ask hon. Members to limit their contributions to around three to four minutes, because I plan to start calling the Front Benchers at 2.38 pm.