Property Market

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Turner, for inviting me to speak in this Westminster Hall debate and for giving me the opportunity to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Richard Harrington) on successfully securing this very important debate. I need to declare an interest. Before I was elected to this House, I ran and was a director of a communications company, which specifically dealt with issues of public consultation. I no longer have an executive role in that company. I hope that over the course of the past 20 years, I have gained some understanding of the market.

The ability to deliver development hinges on the cost of land—how much it costs a developer to buy so that they can develop it. Last week, we debated the Localism Bill. I was delighted to be able to support it because it is exactly the right road for us to go down. I tried, unsuccessfully, to speak in that debate. Had I done so, I would have reminded the House that when it comes to reforming planning legislation, every Government have always thought that they could speed up the process. Unfortunately, that never seems to have happened, and the process has got progressively slower. If we monitor the whole process now and find that it is slower, will the Minister ensure that we can revisit it and try to reform it?

The key issue for developers is the land and the ability to put together land sites and attract political commitment for development so that regeneration and investment can come forward. The previous Labour Government started off on the right foot. They talked about how important it was to encourage both commercial and housing development. Unfortunately, during the course of their 13 years in power, the process got slower and slower to the point that we were literally looking at only one issue, which was making sure that housing development came forward. In any approach that the Government may take, it is important that they include not only housing but commercial development.

As has been said, we are now building fewer homes than we were in the 1920s and 1930s. The previous Government’s top-down approach has not been as successful as we would have liked it to have been. That is why I feel that the coalition Government’s proposals to introduce incentives so that local authorities can encourage development are incredibly important. I firmly support a carrot approach rather than the stick. It will encourage local authorities such as mine and that of the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck) to bring brownfield sites back into use and fulfil their full economic potential.

In Plymouth, 38% of the local employed population works in the public sector. Although they do a good job, we have failed to ensure that we rebalance the economy, and we must try to do so. The largest private-sector employer is Babcock, at the dockyard, but that is of course public-sector employment by proxy. I am therefore keen to encourage more private investment in Plymouth. Just yesterday, the deputy leader of my council reminded me that Plymouth is open for business and can deliver. That is good news, but to achieve it in our part of the south-west, we must not only ensure that we have good transport and infrastructure, as my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) mentioned; we must ensure that we have a good skills base. If we are to attract inward investment, we need good infrastructure, a good skills base—people move where the jobs are—and the right general design for the area. Plymouth has a low-skills and low-wage economy. To rebalance it, we must ensure that we have the right conditions to attract inward investment.

Last Friday, Plymouth city council organised an event at which I spoke, as did the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View and, I am delighted to say, my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry). We considered the whole business of how to attract investment and so on, and we discussed affordable housing. My hon. Friend did an excellent job and spoke incredibly well. All the reports that I heard said that he certainly hit the issue. It was an opportunity to consider the regeneration that has taken place in Devonport, which we all found interesting and worthwhile.

[Alison Seabeck]

Will the hon. Gentleman at least acknowledge that the development in Devonport, which has been fantastic in turning that community around, was the result of investment by the last Labour Government?

[Oliver Colvile]

Yes. I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. That investment has continued, and it is impressive how the scheme is progressing. It is developing mixed communities with not only housing but business and commercial opportunities.

Plymouth has about 12,000 people, mainly single, sitting on the city council’s housing waiting list. It has a significant population and a chronic shortage of affordable housing, and we must rebalance our public finances. Registered social landlords and housing associations will not necessarily have as much money available as they do at the moment, so we must consider other ways to develop an affordable housing market.

Many rural communities have decided to go down the route of creating community land trusts, and we should consider that for conurbations. I was elected on a campaign of saying to Ministers that Plymouth is not Portsmouth. We are not 20 minutes away from Bristol, and we should not be ignored. We have a good story to tell. We would welcome a visit by the Minister to Plymouth, which is a happening place, as they say.

[Mel Stride]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in rural settings—particularly villages, where it is important that younger people can afford to stay in their communities in order to keep them vibrant and sustainable—land trusts could perhaps allow covenants to ensure that those who occupy the properties come from the local area and can stay there in perpetuity?

[Oliver Colvile]

I will not pretend that I have a brilliant knowledge of rural development—after all, I represent the largest conurbation west of Bristol—but my hon. Friend is quite right.

We have to look at an imaginative way of doing things, and I have one suggestion, which the Minister might like to take on board. Where we have community land trusts—where the local authority or the local community can own the land, and putting the housing, the bricks and the mortar on it is the least expensive aspect—we might look at returning to an old leasehold arrangement, under which developers could sell the building but hold on to the ownership of the land itself, which would mean that it remained in community use during the course of the leasehold.

I have two final points. If we are to do a significant amount of development and encourage inward investment, can we also make sure that we have good design? One big problem, which we have had in various parts of the country, is that we have not produced the design. Secondly, can we make sure that the local community gets involved? When I did some work in the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea, I was struck by the fact that the local community was involved in the process of deciding what the master plan would look like. When the planning application was eventually submitted, it went through without touching the sides. My right hon. Friend the Minister has a civil servant in his Department who was very much involved in all that as the borough’s director of planning, and that approach worked in a very big way. In this way, we can begin to undertake decent, sustainable development that combines housing and commercial opportunities that deliver employment.