Planning and Housing Supply

Debate between Graham Brady and Laurence Robertson

Thursday 24th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Laurence Robertson]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Brady. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, and to have served under that of Mr Havard earlier.

I thank all the Members who have attended Westminster Hall today and contributed to this very lively debate. I thank the Minister for his attendance and his answers. I am not completely satisfied, as he would imagine, by some of the answers he has given, particularly about this so-called “housing crisis”. He said that we are an ageing population. Of course we will age during the next 20 years, but we aged during the past 20 years as well, so I am not convinced that the projections should jump up so much because of that single factor. Of course, families go their own separate ways and people unfortunately have divorced, but again I am not aware that the projection will go up in the way that it would need to in order to justify the additional housing figures that are being talked about.

The Minister was perhaps talking about people being unable to buy houses, and ignoring the financial constraints. In my experience, it is not necessarily that the houses are not there. We went through a situation where some lenders were lending 125% of the house price, which had the effect of inflating those house prices. Now we have the opposite, where there is a very tight lending policy, and that is making it difficult for people to borrow. I accept the philosophy of price elasticity, of course—demand and supply—but there is more to it than that, so I am a little concerned that the Government are still clinging to the “housing crisis” phrase.

I will rattle through one or two final points. I am very much in favour of neighbourhood plans, of course, but they have to be in conformity with the local plan, so they are not actually that valuable.

My final point is the one raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) about infrastructure. Does that mean that numbers can be reduced? What about the green belt? What about flood risk areas? All these provide great difficulties, certainly in my constituency, to coming up with the sort of numbers that are being proposed by the Government—

[Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

Order.