Housing and Planning Bill — House of Commons, 2015-11-02
Topic: Housing
Kevin Paul Hollinrake (Conservative, Centre-right): I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am delighted to speak in support of the Bill, which makes housing a key priority for this Government. I was interested that the National Infrastructure Commission also laid out that it is a key priority. Housing is infrastructure. Homes are the physical structures we need for the operation of our society and our economy, but we are not building enough—140,000 homes a year, when we need another 70,000 homes a year I wish to take issue with the shadow Secretary of State’s numbers. He seemed to think that there had been a decline in the numbers being built. There has actually been a 58% increase in the number of new starts annually since 2008, and starts are the key measure I also welcome the Minister’s commitment to deliver 1 million homes by 2020, which will have a huge direct and indirect economic benefit. There is a still greater prize: 25% of all people who live in poverty do so because of housing costs and a third of those in poverty live in the private rented sector. We have an opportunity to lift 3 million people out of poverty and give them the pride and security of owning or renting a home of their own However, we need to deal with two questions: who is going to build these homes, and where and what will we build? The larger developers are probably building enough homes to provide a return for their shareholders, so it is left to the small and medium-sized house builder to fill the gap, but also to local authorities and housing associations. Small and medium-sized house builders used to build 100,000 homes a year in this country; now they build 18,000 homes. Some 62% of small and medium-sized house builders say finance is their principal concern in their ambition to build more homes. Also, the banks have virtually closed for lending to small and medium-sized developers. The Government have tried to help, through the Housing Growth Partnership and the Builders Finance Fund, but do we need to go further, perhaps by establishing a help to build fund to help SMEs to get back into the market Local authorities and housing associations used to build 100,000 homes a year, but they are currently building only about 25,000. I believe that the extension of the right to buy will deliver more homes, as does the Chartered Institute of Housing, which believes that it will increase the number of homes sold and delivered by 30,000 a year over the next five years. Housing is infrastructure, and we have committed to spending £100 billion on infrastructure by 2020. If we were to allow just a small portion of that—a £2.5 billion annual grant—to be used for house building, we could deliver up to 120,000 new homes Where would we build those homes? Ideally, we would build them on brownfield land. There is to be a move towards a register of brownfield land, but I would suggest the establishment of a national land commission and a national register of brownfield land. We cannot build all those homes on brownfield land, however. Such building is complex: it requires remediation, there can be access difficulties and it is expensive So we also need to reform the planning process, which is slow and often under-resourced. The move towards compulsory local plans by 2017 and requiring local authorities to make more timely and more appropriate decisions is absolutely right, as is the granting of "permission in principle" for brownfield sites and for sites allocated to the local plan and the neighbourhood plan. We need developments that will meet local and national needs, and designs that we can be proud of which will improve the lives of those who live in them.