Affordable and Safe Housing for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-18
Topic: Housing
Timothy James Farron (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I agree with all those points. It is vitally important that land that can be used for housing is made available for affordable housing—for homes for local people that they can afford It is worth bearing in mind that there are other problems in the planning system. In my part of the world, south Cumbria, we have three planning authorities—the district council, the Yorkshire Dales national park and the Lake District national park. One problem there is not the overweening power of the planners, but the overweening power of developers to be able to run rings around the community. The viability assessment, for example, allows a developer to get planning permission for developing, let us say, 30 or 40 houses and then, having agreed to build a dozen or so affordable homes, to tell the planners, and indeed the local community, "We’ve changed our mind; we’ve found a few rocks, so we won’t go ahead as we had promised." The planners’ lack of power to ensure developers do what the community wants them to do undermines local democracy and undermines the ability to deliver affordable homes to local communities One hugely worrying aspect of the Government’s proposals is that developers will be able to build up to 50 homes without any affordable homes among them whatsoever, which will be massively ruinous to a community such as mine where the majority of developments are smaller than 50 houses and where the average wage is less than a 12th of the average house price. I heard the Secretary of State’s offer earlier about first homes and I will take him up on his offer. In the South Lakes we will offer to be a pilot for first homes, on the understanding that it is not a replacement for the existing provision for affordable homes through the planning system. I am all ears because we need to do everything we can to ensure there are local homes for local people I mentioned in an intervention a desperately worrying thing. People talk about an increased number of homes being available, but in the past 12 months we have seen a reduction in the number of homes available for local people in south Cumbria, and other parts of the country as well, as second home ownership has rocketed, in part fuelled by the Government failing to think through the impact of the stamp duty holiday. Eighty per cent. of homes purchased in Cumbria in the last 12 months have gone into the second home market. They are not lived in. What does that mean for the local community? It means we are robbing that community of a permanent population People can talk about levelling up, but it does not look like levelling up to me when we see a school closing because there are not enough permanent homes locally to send children to that school. Levelling up does not mean very much to us in Cumbria if there is no demand for the bus service, so the old person who wants to attend a GP appointment 10 miles away cannot physically get there; and the post office shuts down because there are not enough homes in the village to sustain the post office all year round. That does not look like levelling up; that looks like the Government deciding to ignore the plight of rural Britain, including my part of Cumbria Therefore, I urge the Secretary of State to look at my early-day motion, which has the backing of the Lake District national park and the Yorkshire Dales national park, calling for councils in England to be given the same powers they have in Wales to increase council tax on second homes, but also to intervene to change planning law to protect first homes in communities such as mine, so those places do not become ghost towns. It is deeply troubling that there is nothing in the Queen’s Speech that allows us to tackle the explosion of second home ownership, which is undermining community in places such as mine I want to say a few words about the Building Safety Bill. That is an opportunity for those of us who care about those who are the victims of the staggering unfairness of the cladding scandal to seek to address it, but it would be even better if the Government were to do a U-turn now and decide not to lay at the door of those people who are blameless the price incurred by those who are guilty of recklessness and lethal decisions in both the development side and the Government regulation side of the development of properties over years. It is outrageous that we are apparently about to penalise the innocent for the failures of the guilty We must protect our environment, create a planning system that listens to local people and protects our landscape, and make sure that we have homes that are available and affordable for local people, so that our communities in the likes of the lakes and the dales remain sustainable. My great fear is that the Secretary of State’s plans are all about listening to the people with the power and ignoring communities such as ours, which are in desperate need of support.