Amendment of the Law — House of Commons, 2015-03-19
Topic: Housing
Richard Michael Bacon (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady makes a valid point. I have listened to economists saying that this has not been a problem in London and that the wall of money that has come in to support investment was simply replacing investment that did not happen after the crash, but I am not sure that I agree with them. We see flats in London being exchanged time and again without anyone ever living in them, and there comes a point at which this becomes a moral issue. There is developed property with nobody living in it, and I think that we should be thinking first about our own people. That fundamentally describes the planning problem, and we need to decide how to do these things My Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Bill, which I am pleased to say is now going to become an Act, will give people in every area an opportunity to go to their local council and say, "Where is your register? I want to put my name down as someone who wants to acquire a serviced plot." The council will have a statutory obligation to keep a register of such people and to have regard to it when drawing up its housing plans, whether for planning and housing, for regeneration or for the disposal of land. In visits overseas, I have seen that such space can also encompass housing for affordable rent through housing co-operatives as well as housing for private purchase. The point about serviced plots is key. This goes back to what I was saying about infrastructure and about removing the blockages to further development. This is about funding the essential infrastructure that is needed before further development can take place In the Government’s Budget last year, they announced the provision of £150 million towards serviced plots, and I interpret the creation of 20 housing zones that was announced yesterday as a further step in the right direction towards making the providing of the necessary infrastructure much easier. If a customer wants to come into the marketplace and take advantage of the opportunity to build a house that meets their own needs, the blockages that they meet can prove terminal. They might be trying to find a site, to acquire a piece of land or to obtain the necessary finance, for example. They might be told by the local authority to do an archaeological survey that they did not realise they would need, or a service supplier might tell them that the cost of supplying electricity or water, say, to the site would be prohibitive. Going back to what Mr Blakeway, the deputy mayor of London, has said about planning certainty, removing all those blockages would create a focused environment in which we know that houses would be built. Housing zones are part of the way to make that happen. The underlying infrastructure being funded by the Government would create the possibility for much more housing being developed more quickly. There is also the possibility of recouping some of that cost through the tax revenues, including council tax revenues, that would flow once the housing was in place We need a housing market that works. We need to make the supply work in a way that it is currently not doing. We need to unlock the power of potential customers who do not yet have an opportunity to turn their latent demand into something real. The National Custom and Self-build Association commissioned Ipsos MORI to carry out a survey, which found that 1 million people would like to build their own dwelling or get someone to build it for them in the next 12 months, and that 7 million people would like to do that at some point in their lives. I hope that this Budget will be the harbinger of an important turn of direction towards emphasising the importance of getting underlying infrastructure in place so that the energy and vision of our own people can be deployed in providing the housing that we need.