Planning Policy

: My hon. Friend is relatively lucky because I know of developments that have gone ahead and many residents have moved in, but there is no infrastructure. At least in the instance she raises, the developers decided not to go ahead because the infrastructure is not ready. To continue my argument, it is interesting to note that although Tesco started with a ““stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap”” policy, it is now departing from that, whereas the Government have adopted a ““cram ‘em in, and pile ‘em high”” philosophy for housing. That began a few years back with planning policy guidance note 3, and they now propose even greater densities with their new planning policy statement on housing known as planning policy statement 3. Often, new housing developments arise when no additional infrastructure—schools, for example—is available and ready for the new residents when they move in. The current policy set by PPG3 dictates high-density residential development of 30 to 50 dwellings per hectare, with new development to be located mainly within existing settlements, making greater use of previously developed brownfield land. The aim is to make more sustainable use of land, and I do not dispute that it has helped to regenerate many run-down inner-city areas, where there are often large wastelands of derelict former industrial land. Such sites are quite clearly brownfield land and new residential development can do much to revitalise and uplift the area. Moreover, in major urban centres, densities of 30 to 50 homes per hectare are fairly typical, and produce increased land values that help to offset the higher costs of redeveloping run-down and sometimes contaminated sites. However, what may be appropriate in large urban centres such as Birmingham or Manchester is not appropriate in our market towns and historic cathedral cities. The Government seem to have a ““one size fits all”” mentality in planning policy, which fails to take into account the great diversity of architectural styles and building densities of English towns and settlements. Over the centuries, our smaller market towns have developed their own unique characters, which are very different from the major urban centres. Although PPS3 is an improvement on PPG3 in that it at least proposes a range of densities which vary by location, it does so only by substantially increasing the range of densities overall. Only in rural areas, where the density is set at 30 to 40 dwellings per hectare, is the proposed density range lower than PPG3 levels. For so-called suburban areas it proposes 35 to 55 dwellings, for urban areas 40 to 75 dwellings, and for city centres it proposes a staggering density of over 70 dwellings per hectare. The definition of what constitutes a ““city centre”” is far from clear, but I hope that it refers to large urban areas and not small cities such as Lichfield. PPG3 density policies are already having disastrous effects on historic towns, and that will only worsen if the greater densities proposed in PPS3 come into effect. I shall illustrate that by focusing on four particular issues: the poor standard of living environment that is created in high-density developments; the loss of well established residential gardens to new housing development; the loss of existing employment land to residential development; and the threat to section 106 money, which is often used to improve the local environment. The examples I will give are for the city of Lichfield, at the heart of my constituency, but they are reflected throughout the smaller historic towns of our nation. I should begin by pointing out that the city of Lichfield is in fact a planned ““new town””. Bishop Roger de Clinton saw to that early in the 12th century when he laid out a ladder-shaped pattern of wide streets to form a compact town centre around a bustling market square, from which Lichfield still benefits today. Like most developers, however, he also had a financial interest: the income from the rents was payable to the bishop. Lichfield prospered and grew steadily, so that by the 17th century it had 3,000 inhabitants. It took the next 300 years for the city to reach a population of 10,000, but then only 50 years for it to treble in size again to its current population of 28,000. That was brought about, first, through local authority development to take Birmingham overspill in the 1950s and 1960s, and then through a large estate of mainly privately owned housing in the 1980s. That expansion has been very rapid, but for the most part the new houses—both public and private—have been of a reasonable size, have their own gardens, are built on tree-lined streets and have recreation areas nearby. In short, they are the sort of houses in which people like to live.