I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
It is my honour and pleasure to move the Second Reading of my Bill today. My interest in this subject was initially prompted by the fact that I represent the very rural constituency of South Norfolk, which has many young people who find it very difficult to get on the housing ladder or to find any place to live when they grow up and leave home. The idea of being able to stay in the area, let alone the village, where they grew up or to be near their parents is sometimes completely outwith the range of possibilities for them in a very rural area with many small villages. Of course, some young people will go off to big cities—in our case, to Norwich or cities in Essex, as well as to London or elsewhere—but the fact is that we do not have enough housing in our rural area. What has become apparent to me, and it would be apparent to anyone who takes notice of the debate across the country, is that the problems of housing are just as acute in many urban areas. In some cases, the problems elsewhere are even broader.
There is a very important but underestimated issue about how we unlock the energy latent in the population and deploy it to get more housing. The fact is that many millions of people in this country would like to get a piece of land and build their own house. The National Custom and Self Build Association estimates that about 1 million people would like to do it in the next 12 months, and that more than 7 million people would like to do it at some point in their lives. The availability of means to turn this latent desire or pent-up demand into something real—in my view, it would do a great deal to fulfil the nation’s housing needs—have been remarkably lacking. We have a housing market, if we can call it that, that is sclerotic.
Slightly more than 12 months ago when I was at the party conference in Manchester—I have recently returned from this year’s conference—house builders were still talking about how the housing market was quite fragile. They said that there was no certainty about the recovery, and that the sector still needed support. Yet only two or three months ago, the newspapers were full of stories about a housing bubble. It is quite remarkable how one can go from near stasis or sclerosis to a housing bubble within 12 months. It seems improbable that that would happen if we had a well-functioning housing market. In fact, it happened because we do not have a well-functioning housing market: the supply of housing does not rise to meet the demand for housing. We have a systemic problem or a sustained disequilibrium, to use the jargon, between the number of people who want houses and the supply of houses. There are a whole range of very understandable reasons for that connected with the structure of our planning system and the number of large-volume house builders who provide a great deal of the housing in this country, as well as the interplay between those two factors and between the large-volume house builders and the capital markets.
Although we do not have equilibrium, it is no good blaming anybody. I attended the debate on housing supply in the summer, which was moved by the hon.
Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds). I found it a rather appalling and depressing experience, because the first hour and a half was taken up with hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber essentially shouting numbers at each other about who had not done what. Shouting numbers will not get us far. Indeed, announcing targets will not necessarily get us far. If targets were the answer, we would probably have solved the problem by now.
One of the most interesting facets of public policy in recent years has been the widespread recognition, for example in policing, health and schools, that targets have often made the situation worse and allowed people to game the system. I am not sure that that is quite true of housing, but there is certainly a broad recognition in many areas of public policy that instead of worrying about numbers and setting targets, one should focus on removing the blockages that prevent the system flowing smoothly. In other words, to use the term of art coined by John Seddon, the occupational psychologist and management thinker, if one spends more time studying “how the work works” and attempting to remove the blockages in the flow of how the work works, one frequently gets improvements in performance much greater than any target one would have dared to set. We have seen that again and again in different parts of local government, where we have had startling successes in performance improvement by taking that approach.
People have asked me whether it would make a difference if we had a statutory right to get a piece of land and build a house. They ask whether I can point to a number and say, “That is how many extra dwellings would be created as a result.” The answer is, “No I can’t, and I’m not even going to try,” because the question misses the main point: that there is enormous pent-up demand among people who wish to get a piece of land and build a dwelling of their own, but it does not have an outlet because the blockages are too severe.
My humble Bill seeks to do two things: to create a register containing information on people who wish to get a piece of land and build a dwelling—individuals and associations of individuals—and to ensure that local councils have regard to that register when bringing forward their housing plans. I believe that such house building could make a significant difference if it were built into the warp and weft of the housing plans of local authorities and became, as it were, part of the new normal. A number of other steps would need to be taken in parallel for it to become part of the normal landscape, rather than an activity for an eccentric or highly wealthy fringe, as it is still too easily characterised. I will say more about the things that need to happen in parallel later, but I just say, to emphasise the point, that we need to take a broader view of the parameters of what is possible in trying to make our housing supply function properly and rise to meet demand.
This agenda touches on a far broader range of issues than I at first realised. It is not just about rural areas and urban areas, but touches on social cohesion, reoffending and disability. Stella Clarke, who runs the Community Self Build Agency in Bristol, has young people, who 10 or 15 years ago would have been rioting, literally building their own stake in the community. She has found a way to help young unemployed people who are
in housing need to take action to shape their own future. Ex-service personnel, who had always had the accommodation that they needed provided for them in the forces, but who sometimes lose their way when they leave the discipline of the military environment, have been helped in the same way.
The front page of the Community Self Build Agency website quotes a local resident who was helped by the agency:
“I was encouraged by the local council to apply for the CSBA Scheme, I rang them and said; ‘I am disabled, unemployed, on benefits and I know nothing of building.’ They said; ‘You fit all the criteria!’ I have never looked back.”
We need to open our eyes to the parameters of what is possible if we are to unlock the energy of our people.
There are many people I need to thank for their help and advice on the Bill. First, the Minister’s terrific team at the Department for Communities and Local Government has helped me enormously in making the Bill technically sound. I thank Ted Stevens, who until recently was the chair of the National Self Build Association, which is now called the National Custom and Self Build Association, as well as his successor as chair, Michael Holmes, and the association’s members and supporters.
Ted Stevens was instrumental in a visit that was made by the all-party parliamentary group on self-build, custom-build and independent housebuilding—we were looking for a snappy title, Mr Speaker. We will shortly be changing the title to self-build, custom housebuilding and place-making, which I wish we had called it in the first place, to connote the important difference between building boxes on the one hand and using a bit of thought to shape places and communities that work as places to live on the other.
Ted Stevens was instrumental in helping the all-party group with our trip in the summer to Berlin to look at the Baugruppen, or building groups. More than 300 such groups have sprung up in Berlin, delivering more than 5,000 dwellings. I am delighted to see the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) in his place, who came on the trip. We were accompanied by senior officials, right up to director general level, from the Department for Communities and Local Government, as well as a range of housing experts from around the country, including from the Scottish Government. It was an extremely enlightening visit.
One thing that became apparent was that if the local authority—in this case the Berlin senate—co-operates with and encourages activity by people from the bottom up, there can be a surprising range of results and a surprising speed of delivery, and more can be done than is currently done in this country to meet housing need. I think we could import some of the ideas that we saw in Berlin to this country. I am conscious that one cannot just take a model and lift it across, because one has to take account of local circumstances, but the fact is that the Baugruppen have contributed nearly 200,000 dwellings in Germany. It is not a small sector, but a significant one.
I received an e-mail from a lady in Yorkshire a few months ago who had heard about my Bill, saying that she and her husband had been looking for a piece of land for five years, and that they were no further forward now than on the day they started. She said, “It seems as if in this country it will never be, as it is in Germany, a middle-age right of passage that you can go and get a piece of land and build a house.” In Germany, if somebody
wants a piece of land, they go to their local authority and say, “I’d like a piece of land please.” The way the system works in Germany is that the land is, in the first instance, sold by landowners to the local authority. I am not saying that we necessarily need to repeat that system here; I do not think that we do. I am just telling the story because I think that it is illustrative.
When someone asks for a piece of land, the local authority says, “Would you like a big one or a small one?” The big ones are slightly disproportionately expensive to subsidise the smaller ones, which are slightly disproportionately cheaper. That is relatively easy to do and there is no chronic shortage; and that in a country where, as anyone who has been listening to Neil MacGregor’s wonderful programme about Germany on Radio 4 will know, a third of the land area is forest. I will not segue into a great soliloquy on the importance of hugging trees and the German soul, because it would be outwith the bounds of this debate, but the fact is that there is plenty of land and it can be done.
One thing that people do not understand in this country, which they really should—I have dwelt on this and have tried my best to get the point across—is how much land we have. Only 1.2% of the land area in this country is taken up by houses. We could double the number of houses in this country, if they took up the same amount of land, and still have 97.6% of the land not being taken up by housing. Surrey has more land devoted to golf courses than to houses, and that is in the rich south-east. These are important facts—I am not making them up.
I have taken the official statistics from the Department and asked The Daily Telegraph to publish them. The senior political correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, Christopher Hope, has been running a very successful campaign for years to point out that the wicked Conservatives wish to concrete over England. Sometimes he gets one of his reporters to phone me up, and she says, “You’re a rural MP. You’ll be worried about all this extra housing.” I then give the reporter 10 or 15 minutes on why we need more houses, and because she phoned me and it would be really rather rude to put the phone down, she has to sit and listen. I know full well that they will not actually quote me, and they never do, and then instead I see a quote from somebody else saying, “It’s disgraceful—there are actually people who think we should have enough houses for everyone in this country. It’s wicked.”
The fact that Mr Hope is my brother-in-law is simply annoying, but I hope that at some point I can persuade him to publish the facts about what is going on. A ludicrous dichotomy is emerging—the idea is that people either want to concrete over England and do not care about beautiful scenery, or they only care about beautiful scenery and do not want there to be enough dwellings for all of us to have somewhere to live. I do not know anybody who falls into those categories. Most of the people I talk to both love beautiful scenery and want somewhere to live. My firm belief is that both are possible, and I hope that my Bill will make a contribution to making that happen.