National Planning Policy Framework — House of Commons, 2018-03-05
Topic: Housing
Roberta Carol Blackman-Woods (Labour, Centre-left): I begin by thanking the Secretary of State for early sight of his statement Today, once again, we have seen the Government bringing forward proposals that tinker with the planning system in yet another vain attempt to look as though they are doing something about the housing and infrastructure crisis that the country is facing, which is largely of their making. Let us be clear about the scale of the problem. Many communities up and down the country do not have the homes that they need. Since 2010, the number of rough sleepers in England has nearly trebled from 1,700 to almost 5,000 last year. The number of households living in temporary accommodation has also risen almost continuously since 2010, with the latest stats showing that there are 79,000 households in temporary accommodation, including 121,000 children. For many areas, wages-to-mortgage differentials are as high as one to 10, leaving those on or below average wages unable to afford to buy a house of their own—that is happening under a Tory Government New house building rates have, for many years, been only half of what we need, and nowhere near the 300,000 homes needed to keep pace with demand. Planning needs to deliver not only new homes, but new communities. Planning should be about designing places in which people want to live and work where there are environmental and leisure amenities, and where quality of life is high on the agenda, but the Government are failing at that, too As the Local Government Association has pointed out, planning departments have borne the brunt of cuts to local government, leaving many hugely under-resourced to meet the everyday tasks of assessing planning applications, building control and place-based policy- making. This results in poor planning and a lack of engagement with the communities that are most affected by planning decisions. As the Conservative chair of the LGA, Lord Porter, has said, the problem is not about planning and planning permissions. In the past year, councils and their communities granted nearly twice as many planning permissions as the number of new homes that were completed. More than 423,000 homes with planning permission are still waiting to be built. The truth is that councils are approving nine in 10 planning applications, which shows that the planning system is not a barrier to building, so the Government’s proposal of stripping councils of their right to decide where development takes place is not only unhelpful, but misguided The increase in permitted development, as set out in today’s proposals, takes the community voice out of planning altogether, so that the general view of people is that planning is something that is done to them, not something that they have any say in whatsoever. By contrast, Labour wants to empower communities, putting them at the heart of decision making, with neighbourhood plans central to a new streamlined system of plan making. What we need is a radical approach to deliver 21st century communities, and that is what Labour would do. We would invest in a new generation of garden cities and new towns, putting local councils in the driving seat of spearheading new settlements, unlike the Conservative party, which has talked warm words about new towns and garden cities for many years but, despite more than seven years in office, has barely produced enough homes for a new street, never mind a new town. The Secretary of State has said that "along that corridor, there is an opportunity to build at least four or five garden towns and villages." What does he mean by "along that corridor"? How long will it take for us to see the start of a new settlement, never mind it being built Labour will look at the Government’s proposals in detail, but we know that we need something much bolder than what we have seen today. I am talking about real policies to address land banking, as set out in our Lyons report almost a decade ago, with incentives for timely delivery and sanctions on developers whose build-out rate is too slow. We need a reformed planning system that puts communities and brownfield first and does not bypass local people with more and more permitted development and a lack of involvement in policy making We also need a robust policy platform that addresses not just the quantity of new homes, but their quality, and that delivers the infrastructure they need to work as sustainable and inclusive communities. An investment programme in local authority housing is needed, so that good-quality housing can once again be provided for working people, not at the Government’s inflated "affordable" rents, but at social rents that people can afford. We will make viability assessments transparent, so that developers cannot avoid their obligations to deliver affordable housing and other community benefits We have a vision of a built environment for the future, not a set of outdated measures that have so spectacularly failed to deliver in the past. If the Secretary of State really wants to spearhead a housing revolution, he will need to do much better than this.