Housing Targets: Planning System

Debate between Dan Poulter and Gordon Henderson

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered housing targets and the planning system.

This is not the first time I have raised the subject of overdevelopment in my constituency. In the last 12 years, I have done so on a number of occasions, so I will not repeat what I have said before, except to emphasise the problems that excessive housebuilding has caused my constituents. Our local roads are congested and cannot cope with the level of traffic generated by the new housing. My constituents struggle to get a GP appointment, because there are not enough doctors to service the thousands of extra people who have moved to the area. Many of our local schools are over-subscribed, and new arrivals struggle to get school places for their children.

The huge increase in housing development in my area has been driven by my local authority, Swale Borough Council, attempting to meet the top-down housing targets imposed by the Government. In past debates, successive Housing Ministers have insisted that the Government do not impose targets, and that it is up to local authorities to determine housing growth after consultation with the Planning Inspectorate, which of course is a Government quango. An example of the outcome of such consultation is that Swale Borough Council submitted its most recent local plan, which had a housing land allocation for 776 homes per year, only for the Planning Inspectorate to reject the proposal and insist that the figure should be increased to 1,048 per year.

The irony is that, despite the massive increases in housing in Swale over the past 30 years—17,000 new homes have been built in that time—developers have not once matched even the 776 figure in the past 10 years. The problem with nationally imposed mandatory housing targets is that they are arbitrary and lack supportable evidence of need. Officers and members of Swale Borough Council believe that targets should be set at local and sub-regional levels, and should take into account an area’s ability to deliver them. They believe that the housing delivery test, buffers, housing action plans and housing targets have served only to increase pressure on local authorities, rather than to deliver more housing.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate; he is making some important points. Does he agree that unless local housing targets are set according to local need, it is difficult to adequately provide the necessary infrastructure he referred to earlier—education, health and transport in particular? Will he join me in urging the Minister to consider that there should be a right of appeal for local communities against inappropriate housing applications? There is a right for the developer; there is not currently a right for communities.

[Gordon Henderson]

I could not agree more, and I will touch on one or two of those issues.

Ministers have recently made a number of encouraging remarks about scrapping mandatory top-down targets, but there is little concrete evidence to suggest that that will ever happen. The lack of clarity is causing uncertainty, which is crippling the ability of Swale—and, I am sure, other local authorities—to put together meaningful local plans. In addition to the uncertainty over targets, producing local plans is becoming much slower, because the overall process is getting more complicated. Swale Borough Council believes that the difficulties will increase with the burden of the Environment Act 2021, other emerging legislation, including the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, and revised national planning guidance.