My Lords, the declared aim of the Government’s promotion of the concept of permission in principle was to facilitate the building of homes, especially on brownfield sites. This objective is all the more compelling in the light of today’s news that the number of housing starts in the first quarter of this year was the lowest in three years—while of course we still have several hundred thousand sites with planning permission that has not been activated.
For ideological reasons, the Government rely almost entirely on the private sector and building for sale, whereas I recall that 50 years ago Newcastle City Council alone was building 3,000 new council homes in a year. Perhaps the Government should reconsider their hostility to the provision of social housing and do something to redress the balance.
However, leaving history aside, it was reassuring to hear the Minister affirm in Committee on 22 March:
“We are currently consulting on an approach that would enable permission in principle to be granted for housing-led development to allow for the possibility of mixed uses that are compatible with a residential environment. This means that as long as a site allocation is housing-led, local authorities will be able to grant permission in principle in line with local and national policy for other uses”.
In reply to my question at the time as to whether there would be a definition in guidance about what “housing led” actually means in terms of the proportion of sites, she confirmed that there would, and she gave the example that it might include retail, community and office space, saying:
“This approach is absolutely crucial to continuing to promote sustainable development and the delivery of balanced, mixed communities, spaces and places”.—[Official Report, 22/3/16; col. 2281.]
This reflected the statement in paragraph 402 of the Explanatory Notes to the Bill that the uses “must be housing led”.
The Opposition and, I suspect, most other Members of the House entirely support that approach, which is reiterated in the department’s policy factsheet, which states explicitly:
“The Bill will allow permission in principle to be granted when local authorities or neighbourhood groups choose to allocate housing-led development in future local and neighbourhood plans or identify it on brownfield registers”.
However, a different picture emerged in the Government’s response last week to the 26th report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. Paragraph 35 of the reply confirms:
“The Committee is right to emphasise that this measure will facilitate the building of vital new housing, by allowing permission in principle to be granted for housing-led development. That is, development that contains an element of housing but which can also include other compatible uses in the interests of encouraging mixed use and sustainable development”.
That sentence alone prompts a degree of suspicion. Housing-led development now appears to be defined as development containing only “an element”—unquantified—of housing.
That some mysterious alchemy continues to be at work is confirmed by the contents of paragraph 36, in which the Minister proclaims that,
“I consider it to be reasonable … for other uses, such as retail or commercial space, where there is no housing element. There is no restriction on the types of development for which full or outline planning permission may be granted”.
Paragraph 37 goes on to say that amendments will, however, be tabled—as they have been—to exclude “fracking or mineral development”. Welcome though that latter position is, we now have a permission-in-principle cocktail in which the ingredient of housing development can be reduced to homeopathic proportions or even be excluded altogether.
I am sure that the Minister did not deliberately mislead the House. We all know how hard she has struggled to explain and defend this dreadful Bill and the way in which it comes to us, laden with promises of future consultations and government responses in the form of reams of secondary legislation, none of which Parliament will have seen before the Bill becomes law. It is not her fault that the timetable results in Delegated
Powers Committee’s reports, intensely critical as they are of the process, reaching us a day before matters are debated on Report.
But the position now in respect of permission in principle and the necessary involvement of housing is completely unacceptable. The amendments in this group are designed simply to enshrine in legislation what the Government told us were the Bill’s intentions—namely, to facilitate the provision of desperately needed new homes in, to use their own words, “housing-led development”. All the amendments seek to do is to hold the Government to their originally declared policy, which they appear to have changed, possibly without the Minister even noticing.
I therefore commend the amendments in my name and, in particular, Amendments 102C and 102D, which make it clear that permission in principle is to be for housing-led development—by which it is clear that I do not mean exclusively housing development. In Amendment 102D the permission in principle is for the development of brownfield land for that purpose. I beg to move.