Houses in Multiple Occupation: Planning Consent Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Jonathan Brash
Main Page: Jonathan Brash (Labour - Hartlepool)Department Debates - View all Jonathan Brash's debates with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Houses in Multiple Occupation: Planning Consent
Jonathan Brash Excerpts(1 day, 13 hours ago)
Westminster HallRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. If I had to choose three letters to sum up my inbox when it comes to planning matters, it would be HMO. Nowhere in my constituency illustrates that more starkly than Windsor Street. I first saw the challenges there when I served the area as a local councillor, and they have not gone away. On a street of around 40 Victorian terraces, as many as seven are now HMOs. For the 20 years that I have been involved in Hartlepool politics, HMOs have been a perennial source of concern for local people.
As we have heard, there are good HMOs, but there are also far too many bad ones—ones that are poorly managed, in a state of disrepair, magnets for crime and antisocial behaviour and a blight on communities, and that erode social cohesion.
There are two things I want to raise in my brief time. First, Hartlepool effectively has two planning authorities. The first is the council, which is democratically elected, with officers who understand the streets, our history and our needs. The second is the mayoral development corporation, which covers a large part of the town centre and outsources most of its decisions to a private company based in Manchester.
My first plea to the Minister is that she please review these development corporations and not allow local authorities to have their planning powers stripped and exercised by a private company. My second plea is around article 4. One of the perverse aspects of applying for an article 4 direction is the 12-month notice period. We are applying, but in those 12 months developers rush to get as many HMOs through as they possibly can before the direction comes into force. My second plea to the Minister is therefore to review that timescale and reduce it to a matter of weeks, so that democratically elected people in Hartlepool can protect their communities from bad HMOs.