Long-Term National Housing Strategy

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I concur heartily with my noble friend Lord Lilley: we have to look at demand as well as supply, and there has to be a plan to do so. I disagree with the idea of a quango to look after this issue; Parliament must take responsibility for the failures in housing policy. Although I welcome the Government’s long-term plan for housing in areas such as brownfield development presumption and helping small and medium-sized businesses in the supply of permitted development rights, it is not enough.

I heartily deprecate the capitulation in December 2022 to the nimby wing of my party in destroying the Government’s laudable aim to build many more houses. We need to revisit the National Planning Policy Framework. In some respects, the levelling-up Bill was a missed opportunity.

I urge noble Lords to look at the CMA report published on 26 February—the focus on aesthetics and beauty, the possibility of a statutory code for the quality of homes, fairness and equality in the management of private estates, and the encumbrances and obligations of public space on people who buy homes on new estates.

There has also been quango overreach. It is a fact that 41,000 homes in Norfolk and 18,000 in Somerset are not being built because of the nutrient neutrality regulations. The Labour Party missed a trick in not supporting the Government on that issue; significant safeguards were put in place to get those houses built.

There are other issues which time does not permit me to develop, but in the long term we need to reiterate our support for public sector land being released for all types of housing tenure. That has not happened. In the other place I served on the Public Accounts Committee and, year after year, we had reports of the failure of government departments to release land properly.

We also need fiscal measures to enable, through the tax system, the building of extra care facilities for older people, in order to release the pressure on acute hospital care and to enable older people to release larger homes for young working families, for instance. Finally, we still have not done the work we should have properly done on residential estate investment trusts. International comparisons show that they work abroad to leverage serious amounts of money into good-quality, sustainable private sector lettings.

We will have an opportunity to develop these issues in the debate on 14 March, sponsored by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, in which I very much hope to take part.