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Infrastructure Audit (Housing Development) Bill
Order for Second Reading read.
12.22 pm
Charles Hendry (Wealden) (Con): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
It is a great privilege to open this Second Reading debate on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), in whose name the Bill stands. Sadly, my right hon. Friend cannot be in the House today, because of commitments to fight for the interests of his constituents in Sussex, but that should not take away from the importance of the issue or lead anybody to conclude that the Bill is not widely supported by hon. Members, and, in particular, by those in the south-east and other parts of country that face excessive housing development.
The purpose of the Bill could not be clearer. The south-east faces unprecedented and unwanted pressure for new houses. The infrastructure is already creaking, and there is grave concern about the implications if many new houses are built before the infrastructure is improved to accommodate them. That is one of a number of issues that concern hon. Members. In particular, I draw attention to the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) will introduce to change the designation of gardens from brownfield sites, which is currently causing extreme problems in many parts of the country and particularly in the south-east.
The Bill requires a full audit of existing or planned infrastructure in areas in which significant housing development is planned. It has been introduced because there is growing concern that the Government plan for massive housing building in the south-east will lead to a substantial deficit in the region’s infrastructure. Local authorities in the south-east earmarked by Government for significant amounts of new house building estimate their individual infrastructure deficits to be about £1 billion each. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) will be familiar with that figure, as it was calculated by his district council. The cost of providing adequate infrastructure for the Government’s house building targets for the south-east has been more formally estimated at £45 billion at least.
In March 2006, the South East England regional assembly submitted the south- east plan to Government, recommending an additional 28,900 new dwellings a year as sustainable housing growth for the south-east. For many of us, that figure was already much higher than we believed the region could sustain. However, as the consultation period on the south-east plan closed, the Government published a report examining the impact of building up to 60 per cent. more houses than was suggested in the already controversial SEERA plans. Typically of the Government, the report was published on the Government office for the south-east website without adequate attention being drawn to its presence there.
There is therefore a real
concern that the Government are determined to impose even higher levels
of house building in the south-east than SEERA had itself suggested,
which, as I have said, many of us
felt was already too high, especially given that recent legislative
changes mean that the Secretary of State now has a veto over all stages
of the planning process, from regional strategy to local plans, even
after examination in public. That brings even greater focus to our
concerns in these matters.
Government spending on our infrastructure is already woefully inadequate. The community infrastructure fund is a mere £295 million for London and the wider south-east. Compare that figure with the figure I gave earlier of a £45 billion infrastructure deficit across the south-east in general. If that is not bad enough, there is also the worry that the current system of section 106 agreements will soon be replaced by the Government’s new system of planning gain supplement. This new system will siphon off the majority of development gains into a central fund for strategic infrastructure. That is new Labour-speak for the Treasury, and yet another example of funds being taken away from the south-east to be distributed to other parts of the country.
Last year, the south-east county councils commissioned ICM to carry out the largest-ever survey of public opinion on the south-east plan. The headline result is stark indeed. The survey revealed that 60 per cent. of people in the south-east are not confident that the supply of infrastructure in the region will keep pace with new house building. The percentages of people saying which types of infrastructure should be given priority come as no surprise: 48 per cent. said that NHS hospitals should be given priority; 48 per cent. also said that priority should be given to public transport; 31 per cent. said that it should be given to major road projects.
The Bill would force a serious rethink about where the infrastructure is weakest and it would require a full audit of existing or planned infrastructure in areas where significant housing development is being proposed.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab): Is the hon. Gentleman genuinely suggesting that the Government in perhaps the Lee valley or the Thames Gateway are not doing what is necessary by laying down the foundations of good community projects and infrastructure, including housing, parks and libraries, to create the new communities that are desperately needed my our area of London?
Charles Hendry: Of course there will be some parts of the country that the hon. Lady may be more familiar with than I am where the Government are investing in that infrastructure. I am saying that more generally across the south-east that infrastructure is already lacking and that unless steps are taken now to address the problem, with hundreds of thousands of houses being proposed, the situation will become catastrophically worse.
Lyn Brown: The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous in giving way.
I am
trying to understand the nub of the Bill; I am struggling somewhat with
that. As I see it, there are not many new proposals in the Bill that
are not already
part of what has come through via the ODPM Select Committee, which sets
out things that the Government are doing. Is the nub of the issue the
number of homes that are being built? Does the hon. Gentleman wish to
say to people who are on my public sector housing list, and who have
been for about 18 to 20 years, that they can sit and wait because we
are not prepared to build any more houses?
Charles Hendry: If the hon. Lady is having trouble understanding the Bill, I have two proposals. First, she could read it—to do so might be helpful to her. Secondly, she might listen to the debate before she starts intervening, because I shall now come on to exactly the matter that she raised.
We realise that the Bill would not prevent what we consider to be the Deputy Prime Minister’s disastrous legacy of housing development in the south-east, but it would make it much more difficult for the Government to impose those new houses without proper provision being made for the infrastructure necessary to support them. It would lay bare for public scrutiny the deficiencies in Government thinking and planning.
Mr. Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con): It might be helpful if I gave an example from Braintree, which until recently was one of the fastest growing towns in Britain. Two of our community hospitals have been closed down, and the land has been sold off but a new community hospital has still yet to be built. That has caused enormous frustration in a town that is growing very fast. In addition, we have had electricity blow-outs in many of our new housing areas because the proper infrastructure was not put in place for there to be sufficient electricity supplies to the new houses.
Charles Hendry: My hon. Friend, with his usual intuition, has predicted my next point. Any south-east Member could tell a similar story because all of us face the same sort of problem: enormous pressure for house building without the necessary infrastructure in place. Indeed, many aspects of that infrastructure are getting worse.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley) (Lab): I wish to make a point in response to what the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) said about community hospitals. I hope that the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) agrees that we are moving away from having smaller-unit hospitals because the advice of health professionals these days is that we want hospitals that can cover all the needs that people have and that have all the diagnostic equipment that people need. A plethora of new community hospitals is not the answer to the situation we face.
Charles Hendry: Crowborough and Uckfield in my constituency have two incredibly popular and well supported community hospitals, and the hon. Lady would be very brave if she were to come and say that they should be closed down. If that is truly a statement of the Government’s intentions, it is very worrying indeed, and it would cause profound concern.
Barbara Keeley rose—
Charles Hendry: I want to move on to some specific points on the health service, but if the hon. Lady wishes to intervene later, I will of course give way again.
The Bill would require an audit in specific areas. In terms of health care, to accommodate additional housing growth it has been calculated that almost 1,300 additional acute beds and more than 600 general beds will be required over the next 20 years in the south-east alone. To pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark), in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Essex there will be a requirement for an additional 500 acute beds and almost 300 general beds over the next 15 years. In total, that equates to six medium-sized new hospitals being required in the greater south-east over the next 15 to 20 years. But far from increasing investment in health care, the current structure is under intolerable stress. The massive debt accumulated due to the chronic underfunding in Surrey and Sussex strategic health authority is leading to service reconfigurations across Surrey and Sussex, and those moves go against the public feeling that more, not fewer, services are required.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex has been a fantastic champion for saving the health facilities at the Princess Royal hospital, Haywards Heath and the Queen Victoria hospital, East Grinstead. Without his perseverance, determination and commitment, the situation would undoubtedly be even worse than it is. Further south, my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) is leading the campaign to preserve the maternity, paediatric and specialist baby services at Eastbourne district general hospital. There are even worse proposals for downgrading the accident and emergency facilities, with at least part of them being moved to Hastings, which is causing profound concern among local communities, Members of Parliament and the ambulance service.
Mike Gapes (Ilford, South) (Lab/Co-op): The hon. Gentleman talks about chronic underfunding. Although I do not wish in any way to question the difficulties that the health service in his local area seems to face, will he at least admit that there has been a massive increase in NHS funding over the past seven or eight years, including in his area, compared with the level of funding under the Conservative Government?
Charles Hendry: No one can deny that there has been a very significant increase in the funding of the health service, but that is not resulting in better quality health care on the ground. What we have also found is that there is pressure each and every year on—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. The hon. Member is straying a little wide of the Bill into a debate on health care.
Charles Hendry: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I will endeavour to ensure that I am not tempted by further interventions away from the Bill’s Second Reading.
Secondly, there is the issue of
water resources. The south-east is one of the driest regions in Britain
and has high rates of per capita consumption of water compared with
other English regions. Inevitably,
demand for water resources will increase as a result of population
growth, a decreasing average household size and growing use of
water-intensive appliances. The current water restrictions in the
south-east resulting from exceptionally dry weather have brought a
requirement for new house building into sharper focus. I find it
inconceivable, with about 10 million people in London and the
south-east facing a hosepipe ban and the continuing possibility of
standpipes this summer, that the Government have not reduced their
house-building plans for the area. Those houses will all be built
before a single new reservoir can be built.
Lyn Brown: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Charles Hendry: I have already been generous in giving way, so perhaps the hon. Lady will make her own speech in due course.
The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report on water management recently considered water infrastructure in relation to the Government’s house-building targets. Many of its findings are particularly damaging. It says that
“the ODPM failed sufficiently to consult the water industry directly—or to give due consideration to the water management implications—when formulating the Sustainable Communities Plan and selecting the growth areas.”
“It is worrying that the housing growth plans have not in many cases been factored into the water companies’ long-term plans due to the way in which Government have initiated the planning.”
Thirdly, the Lords report recommends the provisions in the Bill, urging that
“the Government consider making water companies statutory consultees on applications for developments comprising a number of properties that exceeds a given threshold. It would also be desirable to make the Environment Agency a statutory consultee on water supply issues in these circumstances.”
The irony is that the Government will allow water companies to raise prices to meet the enormous cost of providing new water infrastructure—a double blow for residents in the south-east, where people are effectively being asked to fund the infrastructure for houses that they do not even want. Even the Government’s preferred think-tank believes that current policy has been conceptually flawed. The Institute for Public Policy Research commission on sustainable development in the south-east noted in its final report:
“Only with significant water efficiency savings in existing and new homes, and the timely provision of new water resources, will there potentially be enough water to meet rising demand for new housing and domestic consumption.”
Flooding
is the third issue. It is now nearly six years since devastating floods
affected 10,000 people at the cost of £10 billion. According to
the Environment Agency, 5 million people in 2 million properties are
already at risk of flooding. More than 40 per cent. of people are
unaware of the threat and 30 per cent. do not have adequate insurance
cover. One of the worst towns affected in the flooding of October 2000
was Uckfield in my constituency. Nearly six years on, no money has been
spent on new flood defences. We have had pledges, a reception at
Downing street, ministerial visits, consultants employed and even the
drawing up of a model that showed miraculously that if water is
poured into it, it comes out somewhere else—but not a single
pound on flood defences to prevent a recurrence has been spent. Yet
Uckfield is expected to accommodate hundreds more houses over the next
few years, with more concrete and more drains putting more water in the
self-same rivers.
Despite planning guidance directing development away from areas at risk of flooding, inappropriate development is still occurring. Data from the Environment Agency for 2004 shows that 34,000 new homes are envisaged within the indicative flood plains in local plans and that in the south-east growth areas, 30 per cent. of development sites planned for 2016 to 2031 will be in flood-risk areas. That is yet another aspect that has not been assessed and addressed.
Fourthly, there is transport. The total transport infrastructure in the south-east is estimated to be £21.3 billion. Increases in traffic congestion and pollution are cited by residents in the south-east as their two top local priorities, but there is no sign of significant improvement. There has been a legacy of underspending on transport in Britain and further public spending will be tighter in the coming years. By 2010, road traffic is expected to increase by 23 to 29 per cent. in England and by more than 25 per cent. in the south-east compared with 2000.
There is specific evidence to show that congestion in the south-east acts as a brake on new development. For example, a total of 13 junction improvements on the M1, the M11, the M20, the M3, the M27 and A3(M) are necessary for proposed developments. However, those improvements are subject to highways authority holding objections. The A2 outside Dover is now the only stretch of single carriageway main route between Carlisle and Italy. East Sussex has no motorway and there are only 12 miles of dual carriageway in the county. Vital improvements in dualling the A27 along the south coast have been abandoned or put on hold.
On top of that, there is the problem of maintenance backlogs. The average county council has an estimated £200 million to £300 million worth of maintenance work to do to bring highways up to a satisfactory standard by 2026, but poor financial settlements mean that the necessary work cannot be done.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex has continually highlighted the traffic problems around East Grinstead. I was born in East Grinstead and a bypass was being discussed even then. Indeed, it has been talked about since the 1920s. Although the town’s population has doubled in my lifetime, the A22 through the town remains a disaster. I support my hon. Friends the Members for Mid-Sussex and for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) in saying that the town cannot take more houses without improvements in the road, and that any solution must also be a solution for the surrounding communities, such as Forest Row in my constituency and the villages in East Surrey.
Let us
consider rail. Concerns about overcrowding, especially on commuter
trains in the south-east, constitute the most common complaint that the
Office of Rail Regulation receives. Although some improvements have
been made, 4 per cent. of rail passengers into London in 2004-05 were
still without a seat. That figure will increase further with additional
house building. Along with the
hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), I have been working with the
county council to examine the case for reopening the Uckfield-Lewes
rail link, which would not only provide an improved local service but
open up a strategic new link to the south coast. Despite thousands of
new houses being imposed on us, the Government will not put one penny
piece into that key infrastructure project.
The message could not be clearer. The Government expect the south-east to bear all the pain of the new houses but none of the gain of improved infrastructure. If we could prevent the unwanted new houses being built, we would love to do that because they will destroy areas of remarkable beauty for ever. However, the Bill is not about that. If the Government are determined to impose such huge numbers of new houses, against the wishes of local people, the least they can do is establish the investment that is needed in the infrastructure to accommodate them, and the Bill provides for that.
The measure requires local planning authorities to consult a range of authorities: the health authority to ensure that GP and hospital services can meet the additional demand; the relevant water companies and providers of sewerage and waste services to ensure that they can meet the additional demand; the education authority to ensure that local schools have adequate capacity; and the highways authority and Network Rail to ensure that there is capacity on the road and rail networks.
The Bill is eminently sensible and commands great support in areas that face the greatest housing pressure. It is an urgent measure and I hope that it will be given time to proceed today. I urge hon. Members to support it.
12.43 pm
Mike Gapes (Ilford, South) (Lab/Co-op): My situation is similar to that of the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) in that there is a lot of new build in my local authority area. However, my constituency is urban and we have a lot of new build because we are surrounded by the green belt, which acts as a straitjacket on all the open spaces in the London borough of Redbridge, to such an extent that, in recent years, there has been a significant increase in the population in my borough, especially in my constituency. The Conservative council in Redbridge has given planning permission for 33-storey and 21-storey tower blocks, and many additional housing units are being built.
My electorate, which was 78,000 at the election, will increase to about 82,000 in the next three or four years and will probably reach 90,000 10 years from now. I therefore face considerable pressure. Problems involving changes of circumstances and a lack of facilities apply equally in urban areas, with one exception—the beautiful Valentines park, where Essex used to play their cricket.
We
had a problem with finding additional school places, but a long
campaign was run over many years by a local residents association
against the development of a former sports field for a new primary
school. The council has just compulsorily purchased that sports field
to build the new school. In fact, we are having two new primary schools
built. However, we will also need a new secondary school in the near
future, and I have
absolutely no idea where the land for that will be found. Our existing
schools are all full, and I regularly see constituents in my surgery
who are being told that they must take their children to schools in the
north of the borough, four or five miles away, where there are places,
because there is none in the south of the borough.
We all face such problems due to rapid population change. I would like to point out to the hon. Member for Wealden that it is predicted that the population in England will increase from 50.1 million in 2004 to 55.8 million in 2026. That is an increase of 11 per cent., or 5.7 million people. London’s population is now increasing after years of decline, and it will continue to increase because of London’s success as a global city and the great success of the economic policies of this Government.
We face a real problem, however. There is insufficient land in London to provide housing for all the people who are already in desperate housing need, including those in the London borough of Redbridge and other boroughs who are in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation. I have constituents who have been placed in my borough by Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham councils because they cannot find housing for them in their own boroughs. For several years, my council was placing people in guest houses in Southend-on-Sea out of season in order to deal with the emergency housing needs of so many homeless people.
We need new housing. We need the new housing in the Thames Gateway, but we also need it in other areas. The hon. Gentleman’s speech was a little like the curate’s egg: parts of it were good, and parts were very bad. The bad parts illustrated to me that the Bill is not all that it seems, and that it represents a very sophisticated form of nimbyism. It is saying, “We want to carry out an audit, and when we find that the facilities are not there, we will stop the houses being built in our area.”
People in urban centres such as my constituency do not live in a green and pleasant land. We have the dark, satanic mills—except that they are no longer mills but rows and rows of houses, because manufacturing industry has gone and the landscape has been transformed. Nevertheless, we do not have the same green and pleasant areas that the hon. Gentleman’s constituency has, yet the building will go on in our areas rather than elsewhere in the region. I suspect that many of the people who live in his constituency get on the train and come into London to work, earn their nice salaries from working in our capital city and go back to their homes and enjoy their environment.
Many of my constituents suffer as a result of the lack of space and the congestion caused by the growth of the city, but we have to recognise that nimbyism is a threat to the vast majority of people living in urban areas. Someone must speak up for people who cannot speak for themselves, and do not have sophisticated pressure groups and campaigns to preserve this or stop that. Although the hon. Gentleman made a number of valid points, he also made a number of sophisticated nimbyist points.
As the hon. Gentleman will
know, the Government have conducted various surveys to forecast the
number of homes that will be needed for our growing population. An
inevitable consequence of changes in lifestyle and the ageing
population is the fact that we
have more and more single households. Between now and 2026, the number
of households will grow by 209,000 a year, and 72 per cent. of them
will be single-person households. But we are not delivering 209,000
homes a year; in 2004-05, the most recent year for which we have
statistics, we delivered only two thirds of that number—168,000.
There is a
gap.
People are having to live in overcrowded accommodation, with friends or relatives or in temporary accommodation because they cannot obtain the housing that they need. The private rented market has not provided enough homes to meet the social needs of people in all categories. We therefore need social housing, and a mechanism to ensure that it is provided throughout the country, not just in certain areas. That necessitates a proactive approach from central Government, consulting and, I hope, in co-operation with local authorities. In London we have a Mayor with planning powers, and what he does is very important, but we need a national strategy. The brunt should not be borne by those of us who live in urban areas, or in new areas such as the Thames Gateway.
We can do some valuable things. Yesterday I spoke at a public meeting organised by Friends of the Earth in the neighbouring constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge). She and I were both on the platform. A representative of Barking council talked about the borough’s interesting plans to deal with the huge increase in its population as part of the Thames Gateway development. There will be about 140,000 new homes, or housing units, in the Thames Gateway. Many of the homes in Barking will be built at a higher level than the town centre. The hon. Gentleman talked about flood plains. Although these homes are being built on a flood plain, they will be in less danger of flooding than the existing ones.
The new housing will enable us to do something about climate change. We can introduce solar panels, and district heating schemes. We can use the surplus water from power stations: when the water has cooled them, it can be used for district heating schemes. Enormous gains can be made from modern, technological housing development. We do not all benefit from living in areas containing 17th-century and 18th-century cottages; any that existed in Ilford have long gone. In the 17th and 18th centuries Ilford was just a little hamlet, an adjunct to Barking, where the abbey was. The only buildings of any great age in my constituency are the hospital chapel, a fantastic building that dates back to the 11th and 12th centuries, and Valentine’s mansion, which dates back to the end of the 17th century. My constituency, like many others, only had a few thousand people 120 years ago, and then the railway came. As a result, my borough has a quarter of a million people. Further growth and urbanisation of London followed as the suburbs linked together, and we ended up with a global city.
Change is inevitable, and we
need to manage that change. Last December, in response to the Barker
review of housing supply, the Government published several documents,
including a consultation document on the planning gain supplement,
which contained several interesting proposals, including modifications
to section 106. That also raised the issue of whether it is right that
people derive private benefit from huge increases in the value of their
land and in their ability to make money, effectively at the public
expense, while
a mechanism is not provided for the public to
benefit in return. The community, not just the private interest that is
fortunate enough to own land in an area of development, needs to
benefit.
The Government’s response in December 2005 set out a commitment to provide more homes for future generations and an ambitious package of measures to help people into home ownership and to increase social housing, which is vital. When I was young, I lived in a council house—
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Meg Munn): You still are young.
Mike Gapes: I thank my hon. Friend. Everything is relative. She is younger than me, but we will not go into that.
When I was younger than I am now, many years ago, the area where I was growing up, Hainault, in the Ilford, North constituency, had a large body of social housing. There was as huge estate. Since the 1970s, almost all the houses have been sold. Compensatory social housing has not been built in the London borough of Redbridge. Since the Labour council of a few years in the 1990s, a policy of housing association developments has been in place, but the total number of social housing units is only a few thousand.
Every week at my advice surgery, people complain about shortages of housing. They say that they bid for a property under the Choice scheme, with a glossy booklet produced by the east London councils. After checking, we find that there were 250 bids, and that the constituent is, say, number 37 or 64 on the list. The constituent says, “What is the point of bidding?” We contact the council, and the council officers issue a standard letter—I know what it will say before I read it—that there is a scheme, people can bid and the constituent is entitled to do so. That is it, unless, there is some overriding medical need.
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