Affordable Housing in the South-West

Debate between David Warburton and Selaine Saxby

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[David Warburton]

My hon. Friend makes a tremendously good point. It is important that planning applications are seen in the round. As I will go on to describe, we need to maintain the beauty and special qualities of our rural towns and villages, while at the same time providing the homes that people so badly need.

In 2019-20, the total housing stock in England increased by about 244,000 homes. The number of new homes each year has indeed been growing for several years, but still not quickly enough to meet the demand. Estimates put the number of new homes needed at up to 345,000 per year. That means 42,000 new homes are needed each year in the south-west alone, and yet we are building fewer than half the homes required to plug the gap. We must do more, not only to match supply to demand but crucially to ensure that new homes are genuinely affordable and built where they are needed most—and, yes, that does mean protecting our rural villages from overdevelopment.

As Mrs Thatcher said, borrowing the words of the Scottish Unionist Noel Skelton, Britain should be a “property-owning democracy”. Back in the 1960s, when the Government were building more than 300,000 new houses a year, that ambition was achievable, but the same is not true today. Annual supply needs to increase by a further 23% by the mid-2020s to meet the Government’s own housing target, and by another 39% to reach the National Housing Federation’s recommendations.

There is general agreement that we need more homes, but there is less agreement, both in politics and in the housing industry, about how best to achieve that step change. I believe that there are three key areas where the Government and industry can work together to meet housing need. The first is public sector land reform. Priority for public land sales should change from maximising cash to the provision of public housing.

Secondly, we must adequately invest in building new affordable and sustainable homes where they are needed, creating jobs across construction and the supply chain and building the confidence of consumers, investors and developers. The recent £8.6 billion funding allocation from the affordable homes programme is a good start, but it does not cover the long-term funding gap and the structural barriers that have to be addressed.

Thirdly, there needs to be greater flexibility in the delivery of affordable homes. The most effective way to do that would be for the Government to allow developers to decide what tenure their homes should be on completion of a property so that we generate solutions that respond to the latest local need and allow the building of the right homes to continue in all economic conditions.

[Selaine Saxby (North Devon) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. Does he agree that in coastal constituencies such as mine, it is about not just building homes but the people living in those homes? At least one in five new properties becomes an Airbnb or a second home, and we are increasingly looking at ghost towns in the winter. We need to address that in the planning Bill.

[David Warburton]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The growth of second homes that are rented out and do not become family homes is a problem throughout the south-west. That is precisely the opposite of what we require, so I could not agree more.

I hope that the reforms in the forthcoming planning Bill will have a significant impact on that and much else, and a positive one on housing delivery. There is anxiety in rural Somerset, where we suffer from predatory applications by developers. Our current planning system has too much bureaucracy and too little engagement with local communities, and too much advantage is given to large property developers to the detriment of local businesses and our town and village communities.

The way to address the housing shortage is through developing brownfield sites and easing the process determining change of use designations, rather than through giving an automatic zoned presumption in favour and removing mechanisms for democratic oversight.

There also needs to be greater clarity in the three land categories, with stronger safeguards against unwanted development. The permission in principle approach must be improved, with a final say from our local planning authorities, to protect our communities. I look forward to the Bill being published and will look at it closely, because at the heart of planning are the homes we live in, the schools for our children and the protection of our countryside.

This debate is about the entire south-west region, but across most of Somerset there is a particular and urgent issue preventing almost all new housing delivery. Somerset is in the midst of a phosphate neutrality crisis, which is preventing housing development and creating a significant backlog. This issue, which relates to the protection of the Somerset moors and levels under the Ramsar convention, is costing the Somerset economy millions of pounds and derailing house building in our county. However, it is also of broader national importance, with nutrient issues affecting 34 local authorities in England, delaying the construction of 30,000 to 40,000 homes at the last count.

The publication of a phosphorous budget calculator, which has been approved by Natural England, is a positive step, but the issue very much still rumbles on. In the short term, it looks as though Somerset would benefit from the development of a phosphorous trading auction platform, like that being trialled for nitrates in the Solent, to give small and medium-sized developers a mechanism to provide mitigation. I know that efforts in this area are already under way, but providing mitigation typically involves nature-based projects that take land from agricultural production. This land-hungry approach would negatively impact the farming industry and be slow to become operational. In Somerset, for example, the construction of a colossal 630 hectares of wetland would be needed to offset the 11,000 homes currently delayed across the four affected local authorities. It can take at least three years to construct an established wetland and assess its effectiveness before anyone would be able to move into their new homes, creating more delay and worsening the local housing crisis.

It appears that the more expedient solution is rapid capital investment in sewage treatment works to capture nutrients closer to the source before they enter our watercourses and reducing the mitigation required for new developments. I would ask the Minister to work closely with his colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as I am sure he is doing, to find a solution to this problem as a matter of urgency.

The south-west has suffered from a historical fiscal concentration on London and the south-east, alongside soaring house prices, so if we are to rebalance our economy and properly level up, investment in genuinely affordable housing will be key. I am ready to work with groups such as Homes for the South West, a coalition of the south-west’s largest housing associations, to help to facilitate that and generate not just new homes but the jobs and investment that our region and communities need so urgently.