My Lords, after hearing about Louis XVI, possum whisperers and a plague of locusts, I think that Amendment 79A might bring us rather down to earth.
Amendment 79A seeks to include major housing developments in the projects that can be defined as “nationally significant infrastructure projects”. The amendment would pave the way for the Bill to address one aspect of the acute problem of housing shortages in the UK. I am grateful to the National Housing Federation for its briefings on this and also for the advice from one of the UK’s foremost planners, Professor Kelvin MacDonald.
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I will not rehearse the problem that this amendment seeks to address. We all know that more or less everybody under 40 in this country now has a housing problem of some kind. At one extreme end, there is homelessness, gross overcrowding and two-hour commutes to work every day. Even those who manage to buy a flat—those younger households who have managed the deposit and moved into somewhere—have the difficulty of moving on in the next stage of their life. Affordability follows them now. Even if one gets on to the bottom rung of the ladder, one can find difficulty moving up from there.
We know why everyone has this severe problem. It is because of the acute shortages of housing. For some years we have not built the same number of homes as we have created new households. As the figures now stand, there is a demand for 243,000 homes each year through to 2031, but this year we are building something like only 120,000 of them. That is a huge deficit to add each year to the deficit already there. This issue is not confined to any specialists. Across the piece, everyone now recognises that what we need is to build more homes. Chancellor George Osborne, Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney and certainly Planning Minister Nick Boles are all vocal in saying that we must ease housing shortages by building more homes.
We know that if we depend on a handful of major housebuilders to do that for us, it will not happen. We know that reliance on the big six housebuilding companies produces very small results—they go increasingly for value, not volume. The numbers of homes being built do not seem remotely to reach the targets that all
political parties are now setting. It is agreed generally across the piece that it would be good to get to 200,000 homes a year by 2021, but that is still some way short, by some 40,000 or 50,000 homes a year, in addition to the backlog of homes that we do not have.
What is to be done? Remember that what looks to be a target of 200,000 homes a year is far less than we achieved year by year in many decades in times past. It is not a very big number. Even that target—200,000 homes a year—at the moment looks pretty ambitious. This amendment seeks to improve the position in one relatively modest way, but one that could see more homes built, homes built of better quality, bigger homes and homes that are more sustainable and set in a decent environment. If you develop at some scale, you can do your affordable housing and combined heat and power plant and build in all those extra ingredients that mean you are building not just houses but new communities.
I declare past interests. I looked after the garden village of New Earswick, built by Joseph Rowntree and started in 1904. It was the precursor to the garden cities and used the same planners and architects as Letchworth and Welwyn. That relatively small community of New Earswick village—something over 1,000 homes to the north of York—was able to provide all the kinds of community facilities that made life better than just building houses.
If we build major developments, we get sustainable communities as a result. Prince Charles’s Poundbury is probably the best known example of this. It has some defects but is not a bad example of how communities can be created. The Chancellor announced that there will be support for a new generation of garden cities, Ebbsfleet being the first. However, achieving the Chancellor’s dream of new garden cities—and achieving developments of more than, say, 1,000 homes—is an extraordinarily difficult task.
A hundred years after the creation of the village of New Earswick, to the north of York, we started building, or attempting to build, another new settlement to mark those 100 years. Rowntree, which, of course, had the resources from the chocolate company, looked for sites and we acquired a 53-acre site to the east of York. Today, 10 years on, a really fine development of 550 homes is being built there. The homes are for mixed tenure, for sale and for rent, with all the facilities one would expect, lots of green space and, indeed, a combined heat and power energy source that means people’s bills are very low. It is a prime example, but it was no mean task to get even a 550-home development off the ground. It took eight years of extraordinarily hard work and a great deal of head banging.
I am suggesting in this amendment that 1,500 homes would be the marker for a reclassification of the development as a nationally significant infrastructure project. What would that mean? The Planning Act 2008 created a streamlined authorisation process for projects that are classified as nationally significant infrastructure projects. In 2008, the headings for those projects were energy, transport, water, wastewater and waste. Last year, the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013 allowed the Secretary of State to extend that definition to cover other projects which would get the same fast-track
planning arrangements. These new projects would cover significant business and commercial developments. Last November, the Department for Communities and Local Government spelled out the kind of projects that might be included: big office developments, research and development, manufacturing, distribution, sport and tourism—a big film studio is having a go at this—and mining projects. All these could be treated speedily through the planning system if they were deemed to meet national rather than local priorities.
There are big advantages to getting this designation. The Secretary of State has 28 days to decide whether something is nationally significant and the Planning Inspectorate needs to deliver a final decision within one year. This sounds a relatively long period and it allows for consultation, but it is immensely faster than one would expect a major scheme to run at the moment. It is also a one-stop shop for planning. Planning consents for big schemes often require a succession of multiple consents. Having a single authorisation process is really helpful. The essence of this is that the inspectorate would decide that the development is in the national interest and not just in the interests of the particular locality. However, noble Lords will notice that housing is excluded from the list I read out.
The criteria for judging whether something is nationally significant are spelled out in the DCLG guidance. There are four ingredients. The first is that a project,
“is likely to have a significant economic impact, or is important for driving growth in the economy”.
Just ask Mark Carney whether housing matters in terms of economic impact and driving the economy. Firms cannot recruit the people that they need; people cannot move around the country; indeed, people leave the country. The economic consequence of everybody paying an enormous amount of their income on housing at a young age has ripples right through the wider economy, not just for those on the lowest incomes, who always suffer most. I think that the criterion is well met by housing projects of this kind.
The second criterion is that a project,
“has an impact across an area wider than a single local authority area”.
If you are building a major housing development, people travel all over the place. At Poundbury, Prince Charles thought that people would tend to work in some of the work opportunities that that village on the side of Dorchester created. Not many people do. They go off in their cars to Weymouth or anywhere else where the jobs are. A major housing development feeds an area wider than simply the place in which it is situated.
The third criterion that the Government have put forward is that a project is,
“of a substantial physical size”.
In defining that for construction projects, they suggest anything over 40,000 square metres of gross internal floor space. I have calculated that that is the equivalent of about 500 homes. The figure of 1,500 as the threshold here is three times bigger than it would be for a big office block. The threshold of 1,500 has been chosen because that is what is currently used by the Department
for Communities and Local Government when it is allocating major development and infrastructure funding. That definition is already out there.
The fourth and final criterion that the Government are using for judging whether the project is nationally significant is that it might be linked to a significant project, such as a new railway station. Housing developments are often linked to infrastructure, and it is important that they should be. That one gets a tick in the box.
Why not housing? Why is housing excluded? The guidance from DCLG is fairly brief on this. It states that,
“housing is a primary responsibility of local planning authorities who should be responsible for ensuring an adequate supply of housing in their area”.
That is all good and well, but it is totally unrealistic to expect planning authorities to be enthusiastic about major developments on their doorstep when their elected members have to run the gamut of people who do not think it is a great idea to live next to a major new development built right next to them. Noble Lords will recall that when Stevenage, the first of the new towns, was started, people changed the name of the railway station by plastering over the sign with a new one saying “Silkingrad”. Lewis Silkin’s car tyres were let down and he was jeered and booed from the sidelines. It was not a popular idea that a new town be created at Stevenage, and who is surprised by that? Nobody is surprised.
I am the greatest fan of localism, right down to community level, but localism and major housing developments do not co-exist. These two concepts do not work well together. There is the duty to co-operate across local authority boundaries—if the development straddles a boundary or is just the other side but is serving the needs of a local authority on the other side, the duty to co-operate exists—but I am afraid it dissolves and disintegrates when we are talking about major housing developments. It is just not fair to leave it up to local authorities to say yes to major developments. Local interests are bound to prevail, and so they should at local level. The point is that these projects are of national significance—hence their redefinition.
A Bill that reclassified major housing projects as nationally significant infrastructure projects, as with the new definition for offices, sports facilities and all the rest, could make a really significant contribution to easing housing shortages and helping Governments of whatever political persuasion meet the targets that we all know we have to meet but which, at the moment, show very little likelihood of being met. I beg to move.