Housing and Planning Bill

Rebecca Harris Excerpts

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Commons Chamber

On a regional basis, at any one time the level of real competition between house builders is frankly non-existent. This is far from a perfect market, and the current system of quality oversight was put in place when the local reputation of a builder was critical to a purchaser: builders were as good as their last build. Times have changed, and now a buyer may have little or no choice, and little or no information to go on other than national advertising campaigns. National builders seldom employ their own plumbers, bricklayers and electricians, and use subcontractors in their place. This change in market conditions means it is right that there should be a change in the independent quality monitoring scheme that is in place so that those changes can be reflected in full.

[Rebecca Harris (Castle Point) (Con)]

On the point about restriction of choice and the rise of the big unit developers, does my right hon. Friend feel this might explain why we are not getting all the builds we need in the timely way we need, and that it may well not be in the interests of the big unit developers to build fast enough to stop the prices rising?

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that point, and I was very pleased to see the Minister, and I think the Prime Minister as well, underlining the importance of encouraging more small house builders to be involved, particularly in self-build schemes where they can increase the supply of housing far faster than some of the national builders.

Good building plans are not enough; there needs to be a watertight process to ensure that at each stage every home is built to standard. Few who buy one of the 200,000 new starter homes that the Minister is talking about today will be expert house builders, plumbers or electricians, and by definition none will have purchased a house before. If these people were buying a second-hand house—one that somebody else had lived in before—most would be relying on the professional services of a surveyor. They would therefore be relying on a professional who would give their potential new home a structural health check before the sale was completed.

For the most part, those buying new starter homes will not have that structural health check because it is a new house, a glossy, shiny, perfect new show home that the salespeople are promising them. They therefore think, “Surely there’s no need for a quality check. There are quality checks built into the processes, aren’t there? There are building regulations set out in law, building control performance standards, independent approved inspectors whose only reason to be is to safeguard quality—in essence to safeguard the buyer in this imperfect market.” Yet those who experience problems with new homes quickly discover that too many of those quality checks are not as watertight as they might at first appear. Independent oversight of the building process may not be working in practice as the rules and regulations might imply.