Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2016-01-05
Topic: Housing
Roberta Carol Blackman-Woods (Labour, Centre-left): I am going to speak in support of a number of new clauses and amendments and speak briefly to the Government’s new clauses New clause 50 would incorporate minimum space standards in building regulations for new dwellings in England. It seeks to ensure that new homes are of a high standard and are built with the realities of day-to-day life in mind In October 2015, the Government introduced a new housing standard called the national described space standard. That was supposed to improve the quality of new-build housing by ensuring that it was built to an adequate size. Unfortunately, it is voluntary and too complicated for most authorities to introduce Royal Institute of British Architects research shows that more than half of new homes being built today are not big enough to meet the needs of the people who buy them. The squeeze on the size of our houses is depriving thousands of families of the space needed for them to live comfortably. Moreover, establishing the standard within building regulations could minimise the bureaucracy at a local level and mean that councils had a ready-made measure that they could adopt. It is a straightforward proposal and I hope that even at this late hour the Minister will tell us that he is going to adopt it. New clause 51 would allow local authorities to develop a planning fees schedule that would enable the full costs of processing planning applications to be recovered. Since 2010, local authorities’ spending on planning has almost halved, falling from £2.2 billion then to £1.2 billion this year. That decline is second only to the decline in spending on cultural services. We heard from the Royal Town Planning Institute, which gave oral evidence to the Select Committee, that it believed that councils should be allowed to recoup the full costs of providing planning services. The point has rightly been made that good, well-run planning departments contribute to economic growth and development, and that they should be supported in that role The issue of overstretched local authorities was raised several times on Second Reading and in Committee. Local planning departments are experiencing reduced resources and greater pressure, as well as increasing insecurity, because people do not know when the next round of Government cuts will cause them to lose their jobs. The only way in which to address that is to ensure that planning departments have the resources that will enable them to work effectively I am pleased to note that what we said during all that time in Committee did not fall on completely deaf ears. Ministers appear to agree with us, in theory, that planning needs additional resources. However, new clause 45 is such a poor execution of that notion that it might as well not be there. We must ask why the Government have acknowledged the need for the full recovery of planning fee costs, but will allow that to happen only when the service is contracted out. Why have they not considered allowing local planning departments to do the same? What can they possibly mean by increased devolution if they do not even trust local planning authorities to set their own fees? I hope that the Minister will do something about that tonight New clause 57 would empower local planning authorities to impose a planning obligation when giving permission for the construction of new housing for sale by requiring a proportion of the housing to be marketed exclusively to local first-time buyers.