Housing policy is a highly emotive topic. A home is the place where a family can thrive. Owning a home is key to our property-owning democracy. And for those for whom property ownership seems to be an unachievable aspiration, there is understandable concern for their future security and prosperity.
At the same time, inappropriate development and housebuilding on the green spaces communities cherish and the high value agricultural land that feeds us causes significant distress to local people.
This week in Parliament, one of the big points of discussion has been around the progress of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill – a huge reform on development. In this week’s blog, I wanted to level up some of the conversations I’ve seen around this topic – because too often the nuance that actually delivers substantial, positive change gets lost.
So, what is the Government’s position? Well, Rishi Sunak has been quite clear that the Government intends to deliver new homes. The Government wants to do build these houses primarily by unlocking brownfield land and city centre re-generation. That means tens of thousands of new homes in London, through Docklands 2.0, the new Euston Quarter, re-development at Old Oak Common, and much more; in Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Wolverhampton, Barrow and many more cities – primarily in the Midlands and the North; and through hundreds of thousands of homes in Cambridge – supercharging it as Europe’s science capital.
The new Office for Place signals the Government’s desire to build beautiful new homes that enhance communities, rather than taking away from them. And the Government remains committed to delivering well-planned and well-designed garden towns and villages across the country – building communities where people can live, not dormitories where they sleep.
It is in those garden communities that I want to see the future of development. I have been calling for the Government to deliver 500,000 new social houses in a new generation of garden communities, equipped with all the infrastructure that they need, enabled by building on just 2% of state-owned land.
At the same time as delivering all of this new development, the Government is strengthening protections for our greenbelt, abolishing top-down housing targets and allowing communities to decide on the level of development that is appropriate for, and sympathetic to, their needs. The new Levelling Up Bill includes measures to protect biodiversity, chalk streams and ancient woodlands and to require Councils to consider the types of – and affordability of – housing needed by local people in their Local Plans.
All of this is a great positive story on development – delivering the homes families need, in the places that they are needed; and delivering new communities without destroying what makes existing communities special places to live, work and spend time.
At the General Election, it will stand in stark contrast to the positions of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Labour have pledged more development on the greenbelt, with Keir Starmer pitching plans that would allow his Government to override local objections to new housing developments. The Liberal Democrats’ platform would see a restoration of housing targets – at 380,000 per year compared with the previous targets of 300,000 per year. They would then bind Councils to deliver their proportion of that top-down target using an independent assessment of local need – a very similar system to the one which existed prior to the Government’s abolition of housing targets.
For our communities, I think the Conservative approach is the better one – and it is one which would avoid a repeat of problems like we’ve seen this week in the aftermath of North Herts Council’s approval of the Highover Farm development, where residents have told me that they are considering their long term future in Hitchin because of the potential impact it will have on infrastructure.