Budget Resolutions — House of Commons, 2017-11-23
Topic: Housing
Richard Michael Bacon (Conservative, Centre-right): After 13 minutes of what I am sure we all agree was pure gold from the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), I am going to make a more focused and narrow-cast speech. I particularly welcome this opportunity to follow a fellow graduate of the London School of Economics, although before he started slating soft social science degrees, he might have declared his own interest, in that he wrote a book about Harold Laski, who probably did more damage to the world economy through the people he taught over 50 years than almost any other human being alive. I should like to declare my own interest, in that I am a member of the right to build taskforce, which was referenced in the White Paper. I thank the Secretary of State for seconding Mario Wolf, an official from the Department for Communities and Local Government, to run the taskforce. I should also like to thank the Nationwide Foundation for funding it for the next three years I welcome this Budget. It is a Budget for housing, and I particularly welcome the announcement that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) is going to carry out an urgent review of why there is such a gap between extant planning permissions and actual build-out of housing. This is a complicated subject, but it is not that complicated. The real reason for the gap is that house builders have no incentive to build more houses than they can sell. The Home Builders Federation, the trade body for the volume house builders, did a study entitled "Why buy new? Home buyer intentions and opinions". It was commissioned from YouGov, a professional opinion poll firm, and its conclusions were startling. It found that 67% of people would prefer not to or were unlikely to buy the product of the volume house builders—in other words, a new home. If 67% of people do not want to buy your product, you might consider changing your product, but that would involve severe risks for volume house builders, because they already face a welter of planning conditions before they can even start We have a broken housing market in which demand cannot sufficiently influence supply and drive volumes. I therefore particularly welcome the housing White Paper, because it offers the first explicit acknowledgement that we have a housing model that is broken. The precondition for solving our problems is that we acknowledge the existence of those problems, and Government policy is now to acknowledge that we have a broken housing model and that we need to fix it. This Budget takes many good steps in that direction It is my fundamental belief that the only way to make "development" a good word—it is often seen as a pejorative term, and the word "developer" is often viewed as a swear word—is to have good development. At the moment, however, most people feel that they have no say over what gets built, where it gets built, what it looks like or who has the first chance to live there. We need to change all that. We need to change the conversation. Development should be about making well-designed, well-built places that are well connected, well served and well run with good governance. They should be environmentally sensitive places where green is normal, and with a thriving economy offering local jobs. They should be active, inclusive and safe, and fair for everyone. In other words, we should separate the business of place-making—which is what all those things are about—from the business of home building. All those things that I have just described are part of the public weal. They are part of the public responsibility to make great places. That is why the people who work in the planning profession go into planning, but when they get there they often find that they are unable to achieve those things, and end up being the person who says no. The way to separate place-making from home-making, and to make home-making available for everyone, is to have large numbers of serviced plots at scale, and thanks to the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act 2015, which is now on the statute book, that is now going to be easier than ever before People sometimes think that this is a minor obsession of mine, and they would be right, but it is for a good reason. There is no area of public policy that this does not touch on. Under that Act, it is not only individuals who can register for the chance to get a piece of land; associations of individuals can also do so. It is tenure neutral. Those associations of individuals could be the governors of a high school looking to fill difficult-to-fill teaching posts; they could be the directors of a social services department trying to recruit new senior social work managers to difficult-to-fill positions; they could be the Ministry of Defence looking to retain military personnel; they could be the Royal British Legion seeking to look after veterans better; and they could even be ex-offenders. I was pleased to have had the chance last week to brief the Secretary of State on the right to build taskforce’s latest proposals, and the Lord Chancellor has now invited me to do the same in relation to ex-offenders, because there is so much more that this policy could do.