My Lords, this group of amendments exposes the conundrum at the heart of planning for housing. At this point, I repeat my interests, as in the register, as being a councillor in Kirklees, with its up-to-date local plan, and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. My noble friend Lord Stunell is of course right to say that the simple statement of a number of new house builds per year has failed and will continue to fail: top-down diktats are the last resort of a failed policy. As the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, helpfully reminded us, there are more than 1 million unbuilt homes with current planning consents. That seems to me to indicate that a top-down planning policy is failing to produce the number of new home builds that the country needs and wants.
Amendment 207 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Best, points to a challenge in housing development that is considered far too rarely: housing and planning policy should have a focus on fulfilling need. There is ample evidence of which housing units are needed, such as those for older people. As my noble friend Lord Stunell has said, we know that there is a desperate need for housing at a social rent. There are current applications from over 1 million people for social housing. Their chances of success are very limited indeed, as successive Governments have continued with the right-to-buy policy while ignoring the need to build replacements. The challenge of supplying housing that meets expressed need is not being addressed by the changes to planning policy in this Bill.
6 pm
Councils already have to make an assessment of their housing requirements, as set out in the National Planning Policy Framework, and every council has to prepare a strategic housing market assessment to assess
the full housing needs. We have that bit. Every local authority, before it draws up its local plan, has to do a strategic housing market assessment, which should identify the scale and mix of housing and the range of tenures that the local population is likely to need over the planning period. The local plan must then reflect that assessment in the housing site allocations, so that bit is already there in planning policy. The assessment and planning stage to meet housing needs exists.
Where it all fails, which is what I hope we can begin to discuss and debate in this Chamber, is in the delivery of the housing types, sizes and tenures, as well as numbers. Local councils and local planning authorities can use only the limited levers they have to encourage developers to build to meet need rather than to maximise profit—which is, of course, their purpose. That is precisely the explanation that the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, gave at the very start of his contribution. We can have fine and worthy policies, which have been expressed across the Chamber today, to meet various housing needs, but if there are no levers to ensure that they happen, they are fine words that are never going to be implemented.
I will give some examples in relation to housing numbers. Sites in local plans have a potential housing number attached to them. They all have to be assessed: how many houses can we get on to this site? For example, a site in my locality allocated 413 units in the local plan. Of course, it never works out quite like that; from theory to practice, it is going to be different. In the end, the planning consent was for 291 houses, which is a significant 25% difference. The units developed will not reflect the stated assessment of local and subregional need for two and three-bedroom properties. The majority of the development will be of four and five-bedroom properties. So local need is not being met, and more families in my locality will be in inadequate housing, with the consequent long-term impact on their lives.
That, to me, is the conundrum at the heart of housing and planning policy: how do the Government provide local authorities with the levers they need to match housing need to the housing developed? Currently, there is only influence. For example, let us take affordable homes. My council has a policy of 20% affordable homes on sites. But along come the developers; they will do a viability assessment, which ensures that the 20% goes down to 10% or less. It will be the same if there is an allocation of, say, 15% to housing specifically designed for older people. They will argue that this cannot be done because of the need for this, that and the other expense; hence, we end up with maybe one unit or something.
This is where the failure is. Everybody is saying where we want to be in order to meet need, so how do we get high-volume house developers, which the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, referred to, to do it? If they will not do it, the Government have to provide the levers to match one with the other. I feel quite strongly about this, because otherwise we have loads of warm words and worthy policies but nothing will happen.
I would like the Minister to tell the Committee how we are going to address the challenges set out by the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Lansley, and others
and how we are going to meet the needs of older people, families who need social housing, those who need supported accommodation and families who need smaller units and can only afford a small unit within their budget. How are we going to get that? Local plans and the social housing market assessment will say that but, when it comes to the crunch, developers get their own way. Something has to change if we are to achieve what we want to achieve, which is appropriate, high-quality, high-standard housing for people in this country.
It could be something to do with land allocation to enable housing numbers; then there has to be a change in the way that sites are developed out—or not developed at all. Another thing that happens is that there are several sites in a locality, and housing developers wait—they have a little arrangement and wait until one is developed out, so that not too many come on to the market at the same time, which of course would reduce the price and reduce their profits.
There are big challenges here for the Government if their stated aim is to be achieved. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s answers to those challenges.