Penny Mordaunt
Main Page: Penny Mordaunt (Conservative - Portsmouth North)Localism in Planning
Penny Mordaunt Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on securing this timely debate. I want briefly to give an example, make a request of the Minister, and put forward a suggestion.
The example I want to give is of a dementia care home, which was a high-rise building due to be built in my constituency on an undeveloped beach and unsurprisingly, also on a floodplain. It was an awful design, and in fact, the developer had to put in a subsequent application, because it had not realised that dementia patients might need nursing care and there was no provision for any nurses. The application reassured us that we could be relaxed about the flooding issue because—I am not making this up—it was a high-rise building, and therefore, in case of flooding, residents would be able to reach higher ground. The application was dismissed locally but overturned by the inspectorate. I give that example not only because it shows how the local voice has not been listened to, but to illustrate that this is about both the quality of services in our communities and the quality of the built environment.
The request I make of the Minister is that in his summing up, he emphasise how we can strengthen the local voice and give communities ownership of the quality of life that they want for their communities. In particular, that should happen through local plans, especially in communities such as mine, which do not have a great deal of capacity to develop such plans.
Finally, I suggest that where we have third parties, such as the Environment Agency, which is forming a view on such schemes and dismissing them as reckless and bonkers, we give some publicity to those decisions— there is definitely a gap in the market for “www.EAsaysno.com”. We should consider other ways in which we can provide the potential buyers of homes or care home places with information about what they are taking on; for example, whether they are built on floodplains. The more we can influence developers to be much more responsible and raise the quality of what they are proposing for our communities, the better. Transparency with regard to the Environment Agency and other organisations would go a long way towards doing that.