Housing Development: Cumulative Impacts

Gregory Stafford Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), my constituency neighbour, for securing this debate.

Housing and planning are among the issues I hear about most from my constituents across Farnham, Bordon, Haslemere, Liphook and the surrounding villages. I do not hear about it in the abstract or as a theory, but in the very practical terms of pressure on schools, GP surgeries, roads and the character of their towns and villages. As my right hon. Friend said, this debate is not really about whether we need more homes. Of course we do; it is about where, how and at what cost.

Targets that ignore local reality do not solve the housing problem; they export it. In my constituency, which spans East Hampshire and Waverley councils, housing targets have more than doubled under the Government’s planning framework. Councils are left with a stark choice: rewrite their local plans at speed or have them overridden by the system. In East Hampshire, the annual requirement has jumped from around 570 homes a year to well over 1,100. In Waverley, it has risen from over 700 to nearly 1,500 homes a year. That is not gentle growth; it is a near doubling of development in a predominantly rural or semi-rural area.

The consequences are entirely predictable. Schools are already full. GP practices are struggling to recruit. Hospitals are under strain. Roads designed for villages and market towns are now expected to function like urban arteries. Yet the infrastructure is simply not there. We are being asked to build the homes first and hope that the roads, schools and GP surgeries turn up later.

What makes matters worse is the sheer imbalance in where this pressure is being applied, as has already been mentioned in this debate. In London, housing targets have been significantly reduced, in some cases by around half, despite London facing the greatest housing demand in the country. Cities are best placed to absorb growth—higher density, established public transport, major hospitals and universities, and the ability to scale infrastructure alongside development. By contrast, market towns and rural districts are being told to carry a disproportionate burden. That does not fix the problem; it just shifts it on to communities that are least able to cope.

Take East Hampshire. Around 57% of the district lies within the South Downs national park, which means the remaining land outside the park is absorbing an ever-greater concentration of development. Places like Liphook in my constituency are being stretched to breaking point, and even towns that are ripe for development, such as Whitehill and Bordon, are under pressure because housing development is accelerating faster than services can keep up. Protected countryside on one side, relentless development on the other—that is not planning; it is pressure cooking our communities.

If we are serious about meeting housing need, targets must be fair, realistic and aligned with local capacity. Growth should go where infrastructure already exists, not where it is weakest.

There is also a serious issue of public confidence. Where councils cannot demonstrate a five-year housing land supply, the Planning Inspectorate almost invariably sides with the developers, regardless of the strength of local objection. In those circumstances, residents rely on their local authority to defend them robustly. I was deeply concerned when a controversial development in Haslemere was approved on appeal, despite well-documented objections and its location within the Surrey hills national landscape. What compounded that concern was the response of the Liberal Democrat leadership of Waverley borough council, which wrote to residents telling them to “move on” before all reasonable avenues to challenge the decision had been explored. That is simply unacceptable. When residents are fighting for their community, “move on” is not leadership; it is surrender.

Labour’s new targets risk collapsing trust in the planning system, rather than restoring it. Councils that claim to stand up for local people must actually do so when it matters. We will not build the homes we need by riding roughshod over communities, overwhelming infrastructure and eroding faith in our local democracy. We need a planning system that is credible, balanced and rooted in reality—one that builds homes in the right places and at the right pace, with the infrastructure alongside them. If we fail to do that, we will not just fail to meet the housing need, we will leave communities paying the price for decades to come.