Planning

James Daly Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con) [V]]

It is a pleasure, Mrs Cummins, to serve under your chairmanship, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing such an important debate.

In the short amount of time available to me, I will talk about two issues: first, the green belt; and, secondly, the standard method for calculating housing need. I will speak in support of the Government position, in many ways. I think the Government are being unfairly blamed by many local authorities who use the blame game to get away from their individual responsibility to set housing need in their own areas. My constituency in Bury North is very different from those of other hon. Members. We have different needs and priorities. We are not an area with many second homes. The best place for decision making lies in a localised planning system that responds to local needs. Our local politicians have to step up to the mark to decide what housing is required, where it should be built, and the type of housing that we need. That is why we elect local politicians.

In the planning White Paper, three categories of land type are identified: growth areas, renewal areas and protected areas. Green belt is part of a protected area. “Planning for the Future” states that the standard method will determine housing requirement, but the green belt will be a constraint on that. In discussing the standard method, the White Paper goes on to say,

“The standard method would make it the responsibility of individual authorities to allocate land suitable for housing to meet the requirement”.

However, the existing policy on green belt will remain in place.

That is taken even further in the Government’s response to the consultation on local housing need proposals, which was updated on 1 April this year, and which makes it clear that

“meeting housing need is never a reason to cause unacceptable harm”

to the green belt. I think all hon. Members would agree with that. It is further made clear that the standard method—the use of 2014 figures—

“does not present a ‘target’ in plan-making, but instead provides a starting point for determining the level of need for the area, and it is only after consideration of this, alongside…constraints…such as the Green Belt, and the land that is actually available for development, that the decision on how many homes should be planned for is made.”

So the position is crystal clear. It is for local authorities to determine precisely how many homes to plan for and where those homes are most appropriately located, taking into account the local circumstances and constraints.

Too often we see local authorities, as I said at the start of my speech, avoiding responsibility. In Bury we have not had a local plan since 1997. Not one elected ruling body at Bury Council has been able to come up with a thoughtful, ambitious plan for jobs, growth or infrastructure for the housing that we need—we need affordable housing—and that is an indictment of local democracy rather than an indictment of the Government, who are handing the decisions for building, the green belt, and how a local area wishes to view itself to local councils and officers who are actually employed to do that.

The standard method is from 2014. There is an argument that the figures are out of date, and I would prefer the 2018 Office for National Statistics figures to be used. We cannot ignore the fact that the Government are giving each local authority in this country the legal tools to protect the green belt and to ensure that the housing that is required for our areas meets local need. If local authorities are incapable of meeting that responsibility, that is not the Government’s fault.