Social Housing Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Danny Beales and Edward Argar

Committee stage
Thursday 29th October 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Edward Argar (Melton and Syston) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of new clause 34, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington. I have listened very carefully to hon. Members’ exchanges, and I have to say that I do not see what is particularly contentious about my hon. Friend’s proposal. It is not unreasonable to focus on the development of brownfield land first, as the previous Government did. We should therefore have a strategy to draw the strands together as we look towards the future. However many more years of this Government we have, the power is in their hands to do this. I do not see what is contentious about doing what my hon. Friend’s new clause proposes.

I listened carefully to the hon. Member for Rugby, but I have a counterpoint to his point about development on brownfield sites. My constituency has a couple of towns in it and is right on the edge of Leicester, but it goes way up into rural north-east Leicestershire. The reality is that the developments on the edges of the towns or nearer the city often work most effectively, because there are bus routes and there is access to more schools, shops, businesses and employment opportunities.

The challenge that we face locally is that in Leicester city, which has a Labour mayor and which I go through on my way from the station to my constituency, there are undeveloped, unmodernised and un-utilised brownfield sites or commercial sites that have fallen into disuse. Nevertheless, the mayor says that he cannot meet his housing targets and has therefore farmed them out to the rural areas in the county. That means a significant amount of development on the edges of villages—often with no bus route or only a sparse service, a full village primary school and a GP practice serving a whole range of rural communities—that are unable to meet the needs of the additional development. The pressure on local services is a real challenge. I have been pushing for a long time to see whether, when these applications are brought forward, there is a way of having “i” before “e”—infrastructure before expansion—so that at least we know the services are there.

There is one big challenge that previous Governments I served in did not solve, and which I suspect this Government will struggle to solve, because it comes down to the viability of development. We can, and local authorities do, ask developers for capital contributions for those services, but often the problem is the ongoing revenue cost of running them. That means that we can get an extra room in a surgery, but will the local NHS integrated care board be willing to fund the salary costs and commission extra GP practice services?

[Danny Beales]

Perhaps I am going to get in trouble, but once again I agree with a lot of what the right hon. Member says. It is frustrating that the future benefits of infrastructure have not often been realised because of the funding models in place. Local leaders and local mayors have said, “The case is clear for this infrastructure: it will unleash housing and growth,” but to get that capital they have to go to the Treasury to make a business case, with begging bowl in hand. It takes too long.

This Government are changing that. The Budget yesterday gave significant new powers to mayors: in London and around my patch, they include the tax increment financing scheme for Euston, the Bakerloo extension and a number of other projects. The Government are looking to give mayors a greater share of business rates and taxation to invest up front in infrastructure and the benefits of growth to come. Are the Government not doing exactly what the right hon. Member is saying should happen?

[Edward Argar]

I hesitate to disagree with the hon. Gentleman, for whom I have a lot of time, but no, they are not doing that, certainly not in my constituency. There is a Mayor of Leicester, but there is no mayor of Leicestershire, so we do not get any of the benefits. The Minister’s colleague—the Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon)—will make a statement in the Chamber in about 20 minutes, so he may be about to change the position, but currently we do not have those benefits.

A lot of the challenges around service provision are not addressed by what the Chancellor set out yesterday. Take the NHS funding model, for example: in my area, the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland integrated care board is having to make in-year savings to live within its financial envelope. We have GP practices that are full—one practice in Melton Mowbray has 37,000 patients on its books—and yet the ICB says it sees no reason to expand to meet the need. The development has not happened yet in Melton, so it will not expand until the need is demonstrably there, by which time a whole range of people will have moved into the new development but will not be able to get on the list for the surgery, or will be waiting a very long time. I am not saying that this is a challenge that suddenly appeared in July 2024. Governments of all political complexions have grappled with it. I have a lot of time for the Minister; I hope this issue is on his radar.

On brownfield sites, the proposal from my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington should not be contentious; it is a sensible approach to draw together all the different strands of work that the previous Government did to push the development of brownfield sites. Let me give a few examples. The national policy planning framework had a clear focus on the issue. We required local authorities to publish reports and registers of available brownfield sites for development. We reviewed permitted development rights and changes in use class rules to make it easier for commercial sites to be repurposed for development into housing. Alongside that, we put £4.3 billion into the housing infrastructure fund and £550 million into the brownfield housing fund. That is tangible investment to persuade and support local authorities to prioritise brownfield first.

The problem in my patch is that the Labour Mayor of Leicester simply did not do it. We can see the brownfield sites everywhere, and we can see the development being pushed out into the county because the city has failed to do what it needs to do.

My hon. Friend’s modest amendment would compel the Government to draw together all the strands of work that the previous Government did, and that this Government are also doing, into a clear and coherent strategy that would prioritise brownfield sites much, much more and would give local authorities and others the means, the support and the policy back-up to make this work a genuine reality on the ground. I will finish by simply emphasising my support for my hon. Friend.

Social Housing Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Danny Beales and Edward Argar

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Edward Argar]

Over many years, I have found that consultation done properly leaves very limited legal risk. Where Governments get it wrong—I do not want to overly speculate on what has happened with the Government’s consultations and process around local government reorganisation—the hon. Member is right that there is a potential for JRs, although I would highlight that a judicial review can focus only on process, not on whether the decision should be relitigated.

If consultation is done well—I would have thought that consultation on this issue should be fairly simple—I believe it can enhance the transparency that is important in bringing our constituents with us and in ensuring that the Government are directly accountable to hon. and right hon. Members in this House. When the legislation is introduced, under our amendments as a regulation, that consultation is there to be drawn on. I genuinely believe—I have seen it for myself—that when a Government are willing to listen to a consultation response, they can, if they do things openly, often come up with a slightly better or tweaked outcome.

[Danny Beales]

The right hon. Gentleman is being very generous with his time. My experience is that local councils that are seeking to deliver new council homes have been calling for right-to-buy receipt reform for a long time. The previous Government had an overly restrictive approach to right-to-buy receipts. Councils were only allowed to keep a third of them for three years, and if they could not spend them within that time, they had to return them to the Treasury with interest. As a result, many decided not to take their receipts at all.

It therefore seems quite sensible not to tie up councils that are trying to build new homes, which is quite a complicated and time-consuming process, in consultations and discussions, but to give the Secretary of State the flexibility to work with local authorities, to give them more receipts, to increase the period within which receipts can be used or to reallocate them to schemes and councils that can build within an acceptable period. Does the right hon. Gentleman not agree?

[Edward Argar]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that point, but he makes the same point, in a sense, as the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster, and it is not what I am speaking about, which is the process. I do not believe that a consultation would tie councils up in knots or delay things inordinately, or indeed that introducing these changes through regulations rather than by diktat of the Secretary of State would cause unnecessary delays.

This process is about transparency and accountability. We have done it before in Government; indeed, this Government have done it with regulations. I have sat on a number of DLs; maybe I have upset the Whips at some point, because I sit on a DL almost every week, when I am not sitting in a Bill Committee—such is the fate of a former Cabinet Minister on the Back Benches. However, the point I am making is that this Government and other Governments have used the delegated legislation system to get things through quickly but none the less with democratic accountability to this House. That is the point being made by my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington in these amendments. It is about giving our constituents the confidence to trust that this House has debated what the Secretary of State recommends. Knowing the majority in the House at the moment, I have no doubt that the Minister would easily win any votes in a DL on matters such as this.