Housing and Planning

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O'Brien) on securing this timely and important debate. The standard of the contributions shows how important it is.

It is a truism to say that planning is a challenge and difficult. We have heard in the past hour or so of different experiences from around the country. My constituency is no different. We have a unique set of circumstances. The previous council administration was kicked out last May, having created problems that built up over a nearly 15-year period—without a plan, with too much speculative development, and with a failure to put infrastructure in place—and a new administration is trying to clear up the mess. The challenge is the relatively blunt instruments inherent to the planning system. In the two minutes I have left, I want to point out to the new Minister—whom I welcome to his position—three such blunt instruments. I hope that he will consider their implications on a larger scale.

The first is the overall framework. The challenge with some of the numbers going through the system, which are having an impact on districts such as mine, is that we are trying to use a national planning policy framework that is supposed to solve problems as disparate as those of Westmorland and Lonsdale, Ealing Central and Acton and North East Derbyshire. That means it does not work well. I should like some form of regional assessment within the NPPF so that we do not need, in the east midlands, to put 6,500 houses in a part of the world where real-terms house prices—the best proxy for demand—have not risen since 2008.

Secondly, I share some of my colleagues’ concerns about neighbourhood plans. When my area’s previous district council administration failed to discharge its responsibilities adequately, parish councils stepped up and tried to fill the gap by passing neighbourhood plans. That gave the unique opportunity of having them signed off by referendums in local communities. Yet, as a result, limited protections are offered. I hope that that can be considered in the future.

Finally, as to the adoption process, which is under way with the new administration in my district, there is a unique issue on which I hope we can somehow get a little more flexibility and pragmatism into the system as a whole. In our part of the world, too much speculative development over the past decade and a half means that we will significantly exceed our own, in my view overinflated, target, which was set by the previous council administration. Yet the inspector is showing only limited pragmatism, at the end of our local plan process, in terms of removing green belt, which still needs to be done to give confidence in the overall local plan process. I hope my remarks have been helpful for the Minister.

Park Home Residents: Legal Protection

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Tuesday 1st October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) on securing the debate and on all the work he does via the all-party parliamentary group on park homes. I have been part of several of the APPG’s meetings, and I am grateful that he continues to push the importance of reform—albeit there is a debate to be had about what form it might take.

I have been an MP for two and a half years, and this is an area of which I had no real knowledge or experience prior to becoming involved in local politics. I am very proud to represent, though, a number of park homes across the constituency of North East Derbyshire—in Old Tupton, Staveley, New Whittington, Tupton, and Marsh Lane. Those are the large park home sites, but there are a number of smaller sites across the constituency. I come from north east Derbyshire and north Derbyshire, and when we were driving past these sites, they looked superficially quiet, tranquil and well managed. I do not recall ever thinking that there would be the issues that I can now see, having taken an interest in the work that has been done by right hon. and hon. Members sitting in this Chamber and elsewhere, and having had the opportunity to talk to local residents about the challenges.

Fundamental for me is the fact that, at the moment, the processes, procedures and frameworks around park homes are largely personality driven. If there is a good owner of park homes who is willing to engage with local residents and have good interactions, the park is generally well run and, on the whole, people like and enjoy living there. When there is an owner who is not interested in working through the niceties, people can get into great difficulty in a very short time and it can become highly problematic—particularly for local residents who perhaps have moved there to enjoy a quieter time in their lives—to manage that.

As happened in our local area, we can see the difference when park home ownership changes from owners who have not necessarily given a focus—rightly or wrongly, for good or bad reasons and whatever the underlying purpose—to somebody who wants to engage with local residents and manage the park in concurrence with them. There can be an incredibly quick turnaround in perception, management and actuality on those sites; we have seen one of those in the last year or so.

There is an immensely personal element to this. As somebody who is somewhat “small-state”, who traditionally ascribes to the principles of regulation where necessary but not everywhere, and good regulation rather than just chucking it out and seeing what happens, and who is reluctant to introduce new forms of regulation, I think this is an area where further attention is needed. As hon. Friends and hon. Members have done in the last few minutes, I acknowledge the work of the Government over the last 10 years. There have been successive consultations and legislation has been brought forward, which park home owners on the sites that I am privileged to represent say has incrementally improved things.

There is no panacea here; the situation will not be fixed at a stroke, but we must continue to find ways incrementally to improve it. When I arrived here in Westminster, I was pleased to see some of the Government consultations, and I am pleased also that the Government have followed through on them over the last few months and years. I held a park homes forum in my constituency for a number of residents a few weeks ago, where we discussed the fit and proper person test that the Government were consulting on over the summer. Like others, I welcome the principle of a fit and proper person test, or something equivalent, which moves us on from the challenges we have at the moment—particularly around the personal nature of the difficulties that park home sites can get into.

At that forum with local residents, we quickly saw some of the pitfalls, challenges and difficulties that can arise when trying to create a fit and proper person test. I acknowledge the difficulties of making such a test watertight and am interested in the suggestion from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch around looking at alternatives.

The residents who came to talk to me can see holes in this proposal before it has even started: owners need either to take a fit and proper person test or to nominate somebody else to be a fit and proper person—which means that an entirely inappropriate person may be involved in park home site ownership. As long as they nominate somebody who nominally meets the local authority rules, they can continue to act, operate and manage with relative impunity. Furthermore, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch indicated, there are owners who refuse to engage with the regulations today, so they are therefore highly likely to refuse to engage with the regulations tomorrow, despite the threats that have been put into this consultation—if it is eventually turned into legislation.

We were also interested in the management order in the fit and proper person consultation. The logical extension could be that somebody was deemed not to be a fit and proper person and was, nominally, not allowed to run their own park, but the local authority might come along and nominate itself or somebody else to run the park, and the individual might still take the profits, even when somebody else was running the park.

There is then the additional question of how we apply the rules, which has been referred to. Enforcement is already incredibly varied across the country, and that is likely to continue. Even with some of the points in the fit and proper person test, it will be highly reliant on the local authority having not only the desire to make things better—I think most authorities do, and North East Derbyshire and Chesterfield in my constituency certainly do—but the resources and the willingness to fight what look like they could be incredibly long legal processes to resolve some of these issues, which are very vivid on a day-to-day basis.

There could also be these rather strange scenarios where, if I read the consultation correctly, one local authority could deem somebody not to be a fit and proper person and would not really have to publicise that information to a great extent, while another local authority somewhere else in the country where that individual owned a park could deem them to be fit and proper, and may not even find out that another local authority had suggested that they might not be.

Again, it is easy to take shots at legislation, and I mean all of what I have said in the positive spirit of recognising that these proposals have the potential to improve things, but I think Ministers will be giving them greater consideration in the coming months, as they consider the consultation.

The other thing local residents said when they came to the forum was that they were keen to see many of the other reforms that have been mooted over the past couple of years. Those relate to CPI and RPI changes, pitch fees and looking again at the 10% sale charge, although I absolutely acknowledge the challenge posed by the industry’s economic framework, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous).

I do not think we will ever achieve perfection in this area, given the structural problem of an extremely difficult tenure, management and legal framework that has the potential, through the interactions involved, to create tension and difficulties. I think most park home owners recognise that things will not be perfect, but they also understand—particularly when they deal every day with real and obvious difficulties in their local area and they just want to get on with their lives—that there are real challenges that need to be met.

I welcome the debate, and it is good that we have the opportunity to talk about these issues, which affect residents up and down the country. I welcome what the Government are doing to try to improve things, even if further consultation is required, as I have outlined. I hope we can make some progress in the coming months and years.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

We now come to the Front-Bench speakers, who have 10 minutes each. There will then be time for Sir Christopher to wind up.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Lee Rowley Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

Thank you for this opportunity to speak in the debate, Mr Deputy Speaker, and it is a pleasure to follow my fellow Public Accounts Committee member, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). We debate many of these things on a regular basis. I congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran), who is also a member of the Committee, on having organised this debate and ensuring that it occurred. I want to talk about a couple of points, primarily about policy perspectives relating to housing and planning, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) also mentioned.

Before I do that, I should like to refer gently to the points raised by the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). I do not want to get too political, but the problem with baselining everything at 2010 is that we all know in our heart of hearts that that is not the right place to start. I know that from the perspective of local government, because I was a councillor for four years before 2010 and I can recall the amount of money that was sloshing around in the system. Quite frankly, there was too much money in the system because some councils did not know how to spend it and were certainly not spending it effectively. We have to be careful when we go back to those kinds of baselines, not least because that arrangement was unsustainable on a national level and inopportune in many areas at local level.

Moving on to the policy points, I have a couple of suggestions for my hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench. One is about an issue that deserves greater attention in housing policy. The other about is fracking, which is a favourite interest of mine and which many Members are already bored by. On housing, I know from debates such as these, from discussions in the Select Committee and from watching what is happening across the midlands and the north of England that the national planning policy framework—useful though it is in many areas—is becoming a somewhat blunt tool in other parts, particularly around housing. We see the emphasis on house building, particularly in the midlands and the north, which I welcome. I welcome the 217,000 houses that were built last year and the 35,000 housing starts in the first quarter. We can also see the huge pipeline of planning permissions that has built up to an average of 350,000 a year over the past few years.

The policies are obviously working, but we have to ask ourselves whether they are becoming a slightly blunt tool. Areas in the midlands and the north are being asked to take large swathes of housing, but if we look at the best proxy for housing, which is house prices over the past 10 years or so, we see that there has been either no increase in house prices or a real-terms house price drop. I would like us to consider moving the national planning policy framework towards a more regional approach. We obviously have a problem in the south-east and around London, and it is absolutely appropriate that we should address that, but in other areas we might need to think again.

I shall move on to fracking, as I do on a semi-regular basis in this place. The reason that I bring it up regularly is that I do not think everyone in this place really understands the consequences of our fracking policy and where it might end up. If we do not understand it now, we run the risk of facing some very large bills in the future, along with the significant impact on many communities including mine, where we have a fracking application in Marsh Lane at the top of my constituency. No one in Government has ever been clear on what the purpose of fracking is.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

One of the problems that I have considered when thinking about fracking is that if we do it at scale, the impact on the environment and the countryside will be huge, but if we do not do it at scale, the benefit will be so small as to make it not worth pursuing.

[Lee Rowley]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I do not want us to get into too much of a debate on fracking. I recognise that it has an impact, but the danger is that we will end up with Members on both sides just discussing fracking.

[Lee Rowley]

I will absolutely take your steer on this, Mr Deputy Speaker.

The key point that I was coming to, without getting too generic about it, is that we do not yet know the outcome of the consultation that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government ran last year on loosening the planning rules around permitted development and the national significant infrastructure project. I would be very keen to see that outcome. We can discuss my wider concerns about fracking at another time, but I really hope that we can determine that this will not go ahead, because in communities such as mine, it is not wanted.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I do not want to upset Mr Deputy Speaker, but this is a very relevant issue, because fracking is part of local planning policy. Can I invite both my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake)—

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I certainly do not want to debate the matter with you, Mr Deputy Speaker, because you are obviously in the right, but I would just like to invite my hon. Friends to my constituency. I do not believe that fracking will industrialise the countryside. Some 90% of my constituency is covered by petroleum exploration and development licences, and fracking is perfectly compatible with current gas exploration in my constituency. Please come and see it.

[Lee Rowley]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I will move on from this subject quickly, having made my points. I hope that those on the Treasury Bench will consider my points about fracking, decommissioning costs and the NPPF.

There is an awful lot of discussion about the distribution of money, and I recognise that Derbyshire County Council, which is ably led by Barry Lewis, and North East Derbyshire District Council, which is now Conservative-led for the first time in 40 years, are now having to grapple with many of the issues talked about in this debate. I accept that there is a real debate about distribution, but there is also a debate about the overall funding envelope for local government.

As a member of the Public Accounts Committee—there are many esteemed colleagues in the Chamber who are or have been members of the Committee—I know that it is charged with looking at value for money in the public sector, and we regularly see millions or billions of pounds not being spent effectively or efficiently or not securing the correct outcomes. If we lose that from the debates around topics such as this, we lose a key part of what we should be doing as Members of Parliament. We should be discussing not only how much we spend, but what we spend, where we spend it and what the outcomes are. That focus on outcomes has been lost in political discourse since at least 2017, if not before, and I hope it returns not just to this debate, but to wider British politics as a whole.

Permitted Development and Shale Gas Exploration

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak today. It is a pleasure to follow my near neighbour, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh). It is also a pleasure to see so many people who have been involved in this discussion ever since I joined this place, particularly in my capacity as chair of the all-party group on the impact of shale gas. I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on selecting this debate and the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) on securing it.

This is an incredibly important debate. Already, we have heard fantastic contributions from those on the Government Benches, and, in fairness, from those on the Opposition Benches. I think what we are seeing is the emergence of a cross-party consensus that we have a problem with fracking in our country. If there was a traffic light system to be applied today to this House, it would be flashing red that there is no majority for permitted development NSIPs—nationally significant infrastructure projects—or probably even for pursuing fracking in general in this country.

I say that not because I am an anti-fracker per se. I did not start in that place. My second job after I left university was as an oil and gas analyst for three years, so I came at this issue, like others in this debate, from an agnostic perspective. The problem with fracking is that when we unpick it and the economic prospectus on which it is based, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey) indicated a moment ago, it falls apart. I am a pro-business Conservative. I believe in trying to fix our energy solution, and I believe that we cannot move straight to renewables, however laudable that may be, but if the prospectus on which we are talking does not work then at some point we have to say practically and pragmatically that we should go no further, and that we should invest our personal energies, our money, our capital and our effort in something else. That is why I am convinced that fracking does not have a place in the future energy mix of the United Kingdom and that the Government should abandon it. It is wasting time.

There are three problems with fracking. One is a people problem. The knowledge that people have about fracking has increased. As it has increased, support for fracking has decreased. The problem now is that there is a perception that the system is being pranged. The Government’s NSIP and PD proposals suggest that we could get them in in the same way as if we were building a kitchen extension.

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this process has to be more organic, and that if people want this it should come from the ground up, rather than from the top down?

[Lee Rowley]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We absolutely have to give local communities their own say. The community I represent in Marsh Lane has been clear that it does not want this proposal. It should not be forced upon them. It should not be compelled to take the 14,000 lorry movements over the next five years just for exploration. It should not be required that a light industrial estate be plonked in green belt that has been largely unchanged for the past 200 years and in a village of 800 people.

In the time I have left, I am going to read into the record again the actual bulk that will be there for five years: a 2 metre high perimeter fence; an additional 4.8 metre high combination of bunding and fencing; two to three cabins of up to 3 metres in height; acoustic screenings of up to 5 metres in height; up to four security cameras of 5.5 metres in height; a lighting rig of 9 metres in height; a 2.9 metre high power generator; two water tanks of up to 3 metres in height; a 10 metre high emergency vent; a 4.5 metre high Kooney pressure controller; a 4 metre high blow out preventer and skid choke manifold; and, for six months, a 60 metre high rig. That is in the middle of green belt. That is next to a field which, just a few years ago, was rejected as the site of a car boot sale for 14 days a year, but apparently we can stick a light industrial estate in the field next door. Fracking does not work in this country practically, economically or for the landscape.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

11. What steps his Department is taking to deliver economic growth through the midlands engine.

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (James Brokenshire)]

My recent visit to India provided an important opportunity to promote the midlands engine in that significant market. This month, we announced funding to support the creation of a new locally led development body for Toton, as well as £70 million for the Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre, and we will refresh the midlands engine strategy.

[Lee Rowley]

A great example of the potential economic development in the midlands is the shortlisting of Barrow Hill in my constituency as the next potential site for the Spanish train manufacturer Talgo. Will my right hon. Friend join me in welcoming that shortlisting and—fingers crossed—hoping that we get it?

[James Brokenshire]

I note my hon. Friend’s fingers are crossed. I am delighted to hear that Talgo is considering investing in the UK. I hope he will understand that as there are still a number of locations under consideration, it would be wrong for me to comment further—although, having visited the potential site in his constituency this summer, I can say that it is clearly an excellent site for investment.

Budget Resolutions

Lee Rowley Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Thursday 1st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), who made a powerful speech.

I welcome many elements of the Budget: the relief for business rates; the reduction in tax on the personal side, and help for coalfield communities such as mine. Those sorts of changes and the economic environment that the Government have created in the past eight years have allowed us to become so attractive that even in a historically challenging part of my constituency like Barrow Hill, there is now the opportunity for Spanish train manufacturers to come and open factories that could create hundreds of jobs. I very much welcome what the Government have done in this and previous Budgets.

Today, we have talked a lot about the challenges in our fiscal policy and the problems in our budget. I would like to draw attention to several points made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who is not in his place. The macroeconomic indicators are moving in the right direction. Our deficit is reducing and our debt is finally going down, but by the end of the period covered by the predications in the Red Book we will still be spending more than we take in as a country, and we will have done so for 20 years.

The challenge we face in western democracies such as ours is that we spend in the good times, we spend in the bad times and we spend in the in-between times. Whatever our views are about spending—I recognise that there are respectful and different views in all parts of the House about the levels of spending we need—we cannot continue to spend in the way we are without paying for it. We are writing cheques in this House without any responsibility for how we are going to cash them. We talked a moment ago about the morality of some of the decisions we have made here. I think the morality before us now is that of not continuing to load problems on to our children and our grandchildren.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) is no longer in his place, but he made a powerful speech about the yawning chasm between certain elements and communities in our country. In my view, there is a yawning chasm between what we are deciding to do here and now, and the money we are choosing to spend, and the people who will have to pick up the tab and pay for that in 20 or 30 years’ time. In the limited time I have left, I would like to draw attention to a number of countries that have decided to say, “Wherever we are and whatever Government we have, we should put in place fiscal rules that mean that should not happen.” Chile did it, the United States tried to do it—not very well, honestly—and Switzerland has done it through its debt break. We should consider fiscal changes that ensure we do not load a lot more debt on to our children and grandchildren in years to come.

Shale Gas Development

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. My interest in this topic stems from the village of Marsh Lane in my constituency—a village of fewer than 1,000 people, who have been impacted by an application for exploratory drilling since the end of 2016. I started without any fixed view on fracking, but I stand here today to say that the proposal on permitted development and the proposal on NSIP are ludicrous and need to be stopped, and that fracking will not work in this country.

I am simply not clear from the consultation that has run over the summer about what the problem is, what we are trying to achieve, and how we will achieve it. Speaking as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the impact of shale gas, I can say that we have heard from a significant number of people that it will be technically extremely difficult, if not impossible, to confuse the planning process in the way the Government are proposing. I urge them to withdraw the proposal immediately, as did the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron)—he is a friend in this regard.

I am also unclear about what, as a country, we are seeking to achieve through fracking in general. The Government have not outlined any serious objectives beyond energy security, jobs and growth, and ultimately, price reductions. They have not made clear how any of those objectives can be achieved, and none of them can be achieved unless fracking is done at a scale that requires thousands of well pads, with a well pad in every village like Marsh Lane. People will not stand for it, and the proposal needs to be stopped.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Adams]

That was why I mentioned the issue of transparency. It is very important that leaseholders get as much information as is practically possible. We are currently working with the Law Commission on how best to support current leaseholders because we want to make buying a freehold easier for people going forward, but we also want to ensure that those with leases are helped out.

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

10. What steps his Department is taking to reduce the time taken to build new homes.

[Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)]

18. What steps his Department is taking to reduce the time taken to build new homes.

[The Minister for Housing (Kit Malthouse)]

New homes should be built out as soon as possible once planning permission is granted, and under this Government net additional dwellings are at their highest since 2007-08. We are building on progress made so far by revising the national planning policy framework and diversifying the market to increase the pace of development, and I have commissioned my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) to lead a review of build-out rates.

[Lee Rowley]

One of the councils in my area has been without a local plan since 2005 and is currently consulting on a draft plan that over-inflates housing need and unnecessarily builds on the green belt. Does my hon. Friend agree that one way to speed up house building is to put in place local plans that have the confidence of local people?

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend fights hard for his constituents’ interests, as he does at all times. He is right to say that a local plan is vital not only to progress housing in an area but to protect residents from the predations of speculative developers. I find it astonishing that authorities can be so dilatory in producing such plans.

Planning: Local Communities

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Rishi Sunak]

I applaud the work in support of local democracy not only of my fantastic PPS, but of my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall. Indeed, it was a pleasure to attend the conference for star councils held by the National Association of Local Councils, which highlights the important work of parish councils. I am happy to look into the matter he raises, but he will forgive me for not giving a specific answer right now.

Through neighbourhood planning, communities may have an even greater say in how their areas are planned and real power to shape the future development of their areas. Neighbourhood planning provides communities with a powerful set of tools to say where developments such as homes, shops and offices should go, what they should look like and what facilities should be provided. I am delighted that more than 2,400 communities have begun to shape the future of their areas. Some 13 million people across England now live in a neighbourhood planning area, and four of those areas, including Barrow upon Soar, are in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough. I am grateful for her previous contributions in the House, which have demonstrated her support for community-led planning.

My right hon. Friend asked about support. The Government continue to support groups not just through the valiant efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley, but financially, too—£23 million has been made available for various support programmes, from this year through to 2022. Support is also given through regulation: when a planning application conflicts with a neighbourhood plan that has been brought into force, planning permission should not normally be granted.

We recognised, however, that some neighbourhood plans were being undermined because the local planning authority could not demonstrate the five-year land supply. To remedy that, in December 2016 the Government issued a written ministerial statement to ensure that national planning policies provide additional protection to such communities. The specific change was to protect neighbourhood plans that are less than two years old and that allocate sites for housing, as long as the local planning authority has more than three years of deliverable housing sites. That was the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley made. I understand that the local authority of my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough has a supply for more than three years, so that protection should be particularly helpful in her case.

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

In councils such as mine, which have not particularly pushed neighbourhood plans, when a parish council does not want to take up the opportunity of such a plan, will the Government look at the potential for other interested resident groups in the area to do something similar to a neighbourhood plan even when the parish council is unwilling or unable to propose one?

[Rishi Sunak]

I suggest that my hon. Friend should, in short order, invite my hon. Friend the Member for Henley to visit his area. I honestly believe that when we bring together people from the parish council and the local area to listen to my hon. Friend, they will be galvanised into action. The powers contained in neighbourhood planning are significant, and a local community would be hard-pressed not to want to seize those powers and to shape its own destiny once it has received my hon. Friend’s wisdom.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lee Rowley Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

Let’s not overdo it, Mr Speaker.

I hoped that the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) would welcome the additional funds that have been given to councils for core spending. They constitute an important statement from the Government, who have given councils a real-terms increase in recognition of the challenges that they face. I hope the hon. Gentleman will also note the forthcoming social care Green Paper, which will enable us to engage in a further and broader debate about long-term funding for social care.

[Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)]

3. What steps his Department is taking to deliver economic growth through the midlands engine.

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

5. What steps his Department is taking to deliver economic growth through the midlands engine.

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (James Brokenshire)]

In recent months, we have launched the £250 million midlands engine investment fund and agreed on a second devolution deal with the West Midlands combined authority.

[Lee Rowley]

I, too, congratulate the Secretary of State on his appointment. Does he agree that the right infrastructure must be provided to support the economic growth to which he has referred? Although he is new to his post, may I give a quick plug to a bid from my part of the world, north-east Derbyshire, for a housing infrastructure fund to regenerate the Staveley area further, and will he commit himself to reviewing that closely when he comes to make a decision?