We need to build 250,000 new homes every year, probably for the next 20 or 30 years, if we are to address the housing crisis properly. That is the scale of the challenge that faces us collectively. In order to do that over that period, we probably need buy-in to such an approach from all political parties. That is a further challenge. I admitted in the Queen’s Speech debate that the Government whom I supported for 13 years did not build enough homes. The problem is that the present Government are building even fewer.
On average, year by year, fewer homes are being built under this Government than were built under the previous Government. That is a fact, however the Minister tries to dress up the figures. If we are to get that long-term buy-in to building sufficient homes, it has to be through all-party agreement, because the construction industry cannot be turned on and off like a tap. Another challenge is to train and keep construction workers to deliver the homes we need. As the Select Committee report in 2012 said, there is no single silver bullet—we need a range of different measures to provide a range of different homes.
We need the volume house builders to build more, of course. That is a challenge for them as well as for the Government. But we also need other forms of building, including building houses for social rent. We cannot simply build houses at 80% of market rent to help everyone in this country. There are people who not only cannot afford to buy, but cannot afford market rents, so we need a social house building programme as part of the total number.
Let me be clear to Front Benchers on both sides of the House. I support the campaigns of the Local Government Association and of the National Federation of ALMOs to lift the borrowing cap on local authorities.
That could build us at least 60,000 new homes, but that does not go far enough. In this Parliament we have had a 60% cut in the funding for social housing. Some, if not all, of it will have to be restored if we are to build sufficient social homes in the future. Whether we are talking about local authority homes—council homes—or housing association homes, we will not get them built without more public money being put in. That is a fact of life. It is uncomfortable at a time of stringency and constraint, but that is a reality and we all have to address it.
Another uncomfortable issue is the right to buy. The Government’s policy envisages a one-for-one replacement. In many parts of the country, such as my constituency, there is no point selling a family home and offering to replace it with a one-bedroom flat. The demand is for family homes. Like-for-like replacement is what is needed, and even that is not sufficient in some areas. If there is an acute shortage of social housing in particular localities, or there is not the land to replace homes that are sold, we may have to give local authorities the powers to restrict the right to buy.
Again, that is uncomfortable. It is not what anyone wants to hear, but it is about true localism and recognising that there are particular circumstances and particular housing markets where the problems are so difficult that that is what we may have to do. That, again, is something that the Select Committee report addressed and the Government dismissed. It is a factor if we are to deal with the acute crisis faced by many people who cannot afford to buy and cannot afford to rent in the private sector.
There are two other issues that I shall address. If we are to build sufficient homes, we all want to see a brownfield-first policy. The Select Committee is conducting an inquiry into the national planning policy framework and we look forward to the Minister coming before us. We may be slightly less harsh on him than some of his own colleagues were this morning in the Westminster Hall debate, which I chaired. If we have a brownfield-first policy, we will have to deal with the question why the proportion of houses built on brownfield sites appears to be declining. It is difficult to know because the figures are available only up to 2011. There is a gap in the figures, which is not helpful.
Perhaps there has been decline because of the problem of paragraph 47 of the NPPF and developers claiming that brownfield sites are not viable. Perhaps it is because we have lost the grants that the regional development agencies used to put in to deal with contamination and other problems on brownfield sites that made them easier to develop. Perhaps it is a bit of both. We face that challenge if we are to get brownfield development going. We must also be honest with people. Even if we build on all the available brownfield sites, we will still have to build on some greenfield sites in this country. We must be honest about that and face up to it.
Then we come on to the further challenge: how do we sign up local communities? The principle of the NPPF is to support sustainable development, which is consistent with the local plan, so putting in place local plans is absolutely vital. There may be some authorities that are dragging their feet, but there are some that are genuinely struggling to get local plans in place. That is what we are finding in our inquiry, and we will produce our
findings on that in due course. There are a number of other issues that the Minister will look at in due course; perhaps he will do it when he appears before the Committee.
Let us return to the viability of brownfield sites. Is that an issue that needs to be addressed? It is stopping some local plans being put in place, as authorities are being forced to go back and relook at greenfield sites. What about the duty to co-operate? Those authorities are trying to co-operate, but cannot get a local plan in place because their neighbours will not co-operate with them. How do we deal with that challenge?
Finally, one issue that has come up time and again is the assessment of housing need. Many authorities are unclear about how they should do their sums. The planning inspector could come in at the last minute and say that they have got them wrong and that they should go back and start counting again. Although I am not generally in favour of heavy-handed centralism, should there not be a bit more guidance at the beginning of the process so that local authorities are clear about the numbers they are trying to address, and their local plans are not held up at the last stages?
I hope that those are helpful points that will help to move this matter forward. We must all face up to the fact that over the past 30 years we have had a collective failure to build sufficient homes in this country. If we are to address that collective failure, we need some collective agreement across the House about how we will proceed to build those homes over the next 20 or 30 years.
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