National Planning Policy Framework

I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of changes to the National Planning Policy Framework. I am pleased to see you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I am grateful for the time to introduce this debate on the impact of the changes to the national planning policy framework. I called for this debate following a decision affecting the village of Yatton in the north of the Wells and Mendip Hills constituency, with 190 homes set to be built on a site known as Rectory Farm, Yatton Batch. Yatton Batch is in flood zone 3a, which is the highest level of risk, according to the Environment Agency. The consequences of this decision affect not just the people of Yatton, as I believe it sets a precedent for every other community living with flood risk across this country. I will give the Minister some context to the geography of my constituency, which matters enormously. Wells and Mendip Hills falls roughly in two parts. One part comprises the limestone Mendip hills and the rest, the majority of the constituency, is wetlands and coastal plains: the Somerset levels and the North Somerset levels. Fifty-one per cent of my constituency is less than 20 metres above sea level. I will send the Minister a map, on which he will see that the Somerset levels are a man-made landscape. The monks, led by the Abbot of Glastonbury, drained the land hundreds of years ago by digging what locally we call “rhynes”, which is why the map shows the waterways as straight lines in my part of the world. It does not take a PhD in geography to work out that low-lying coastal wetlands are prone to flooding. It has taken centuries of careful management and regular maintenance of the local waterways to keep this land habitable at all.

On the subject of keeping land habitable, the hon. Lady will be familiar with the fact that the Lincolnshire fens, and particularly South Holland and The Deepings, are entirely flat, without even the undulation equivalent to the Mendip hills. Our land is drained, and much of it is reclaimed from the sea, yet there are perpetual attempts to put critical infrastructure on it, including solar, pylons and suchlike. That is incompatible, and those things cannot be reconciled. I entirely endorse what the hon. Lady says about the character of the land, its propensity to flood and what we should do with it.

I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point. I will suggest to the Minister that, if he wishes to pursue a policy of building on land that will almost certainly flood, we need to put those buildings on stilts. That is not impossible, and there is certainly one very beautiful house on the levels that sits on stilts. Yatton, the village subject to the decision, sits within the North Somerset levels, barely 2 km from the Bristol channel. On Friday 12 June, the High Court handed down its judgment permitting the development of 190 homes in this flood-prone area, on a site that failed the flood risk sequential test. The judgment follows the NPPF exactly, as the judge had to, and prioritised building homes over protection from flooding. It imperils not only the new homes—I should explain that the judge said that homeowners threatened by flooding had sufficient time to vacate their houses before the floodwater reached them—but the homes and businesses in and around the Yatton site. The impact of flooding does not disappear just because people can get away safely. This is about property as well as people. The damage to wellbeing and mental health takes its toll on those affected, as does the damage to property, which can take months and sometimes years to remedy and replace. I would not want the Minister to think that this is a case of nimbyism and anti-development sentiment by those in rural areas. My Lib Dem colleagues and I agree with the Government’s desire to meet the huge need for housing across the country. There are 12,800 people on the Homefinder list in Somerset, which covers 66% of my patch, and a similar proportion on the North Somerset list. I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on flooding and flooded communities. Many of our discussions centre on the Flood Re scheme, which was a great initiative that meant insurers could cover flooding claims and the premiums for home insurance in high flood risk areas were not astronomical. The scheme comes to an end in 2039, and the Government have been very clear that it will not be extended. As set out in legislation, homes built after 2009 are not covered by the scheme. As we get closer to that 2039 date, more and more homes built in high flood risk areas are not covered by the scheme and so risk becoming uninsurable and consequently unmortgageable. The consequences for developers and those who have already bought the homes will be awful. And the Yatton decision compounds the problems with the NPPF in allowing the need for home building to override common sense. To press the point, it is very likely that residents of new homes built on floodplains, such as those in Yatton, will face flooding damage in the coming years. Not only will they not be able to make an insurance claim, but any new buyers will likely struggle to access a mortgage. Residents may well end up trapped, unable to sell a home that might cost them thousands of pounds in repairs every winter. The Minister knows the weather experts say that what we are experiencing now is the most stable weather that we are ever going to see. I mentioned that the current neighbours would also be affected due to the simple fact that the floodwater must go somewhere. If developers choose to build up the land on which they wish to develop, the floodwater may well not hit those homes precisely, but will cause the existing homes and businesses in the area to be flooded more greatly. I have a lovely set of photographs of the land I am speaking about, which I will send to the Minister, showing exactly how it floods every year.

I commend the hon. Lady for the ambition she has put forward. Does she not agree that there is a risk of severe regulatory divergence? If the English planning system undergoes massive deregulation and introduces a faster, rules-based yes by default to major projects, capital will do what it always does and flow through the path of least resistance. The Government and the Minister need to ensure that the possibility she outlines for her constituents does not happen elsewhere.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The point I would like to make to the Minister is that, if developers choose to raise the level of the land on which they wish to build, we make a complete mockery of the Environment Agency’s work in relation to the LiDAR data that it uses to measure flood risk. There will be little pockets that are no longer in flood zone 3a, for example, but everybody else is then in a more problematic area for flooding. The current neighbours would be affected, because floodwater has to go somewhere. In the event of flooding, if the properties are lifted above sea level by raising the land, the displaced water goes straight into existing homes and businesses. The Association of British Insurers has been clear that, while it supports the Government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million homes, it has serious concerns about allowing developers to bypass the flood risk sequential test in areas at high risk of surface water flooding, which is precisely the kind of decision we have seen play out in Yatton. The scale of the risk to which it points is sobering. The Environment Agency’s national assessment of flood and coastal erosion risk shows that 6.3 million homes in England are already at risk of flooding, 4.6 million of them from surface water alone. In just the first quarter of this year, insurers paid out £846 million in property claims, with the average weather-related claim reaching £6,040—the highest first quarter figure on record. Subsidence claims, often linked to the same extreme weather, rose 9% year on year to £17,820. Research commissioned by Aviva suggests that 11% of new homes built between 2022 and 2024 are already at risk of flooding, and that figure is projected to rise to one in seven by 2050, once climate change is factored in. That is why I believe the Association of British Insurers, together with UK Finance and flood campaigners, has written directly to the Secretaries of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Housing, Communities and Local Government to raise the alarm. The message is simple: rather than weakening the sequential test, the Government should mandate sustainable drainage systems, finally implementing schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. That legislation has been in the ether, unimplemented, for nearly 16 years. It is telling that 66% of the public already say that they do not believe the country or their local area is prepared for future flooding. Ignoring the industry that pays out when floods happen is really not the way to change people’s minds. I put it to the Minister that Somerset council is required to deliver 75,000 new homes in the next 20 years, and I believe that North Somerset has to produce nearly 25,000 new homes in the next 15 years. To repeat something that one of my colleagues on Somerset council says, it has taken since the dawn of time for the population of the Somerset council area—not including the North Somerset council area—to reach 560,000. I am keen to know why the Minister and his Government believe that the population will grow by more than 75,000 people in the next 20 years. That is a 13% increase, when it has taken centuries to get to 560,000. It is a ridiculous population increase, and it is not realistic in the slightest. For context, the Office for National Statistics projects that the entire population of the United Kingdom will grow from around 70 million to around 72 million over the same period—a rise of just 2.8%. I am the first to recognise that Wells and Mendip Hills is a lovely place to live—actually the best—but, even allowing for that huge appeal, I struggle to understand why the Government believe that such a disproportionately rural area will see growth at almost five times the national rate. The NPPF changes will affect much more than just flood risk—our area and its green spaces will be under pressure. It seems especially disproportionate when I look at Bristol, my local city, which I love dearly. Its population is projected to grow by about 10%, which is again above the national average. It seems that those in Somerset and North Somerset will be asked to take a huge number of new residents. I do not know where they are coming from, and I cannot quite see how the Government have come to those figures. I would be grateful if the Minister could write to me on how his team has come to that assumption. The last matter I would like to raise is that farmers run factories. Those factories are the agricultural land—it is just that we do not have roofs on them. That is no different from any other part of the country that has some sort of manufacturing. Farmers use fields, and they do not have roofs, so it is quite hard for people to spot the fact that they are food factories. In the interests of an honest debate, I acknowledge that many in the farming community welcome what is set out in the new NPPF, but that comes with real caveats. It is worth the House hearing what they are. A lot of our greenhouses are more than 40 years old and in urgent need of modernisation, yet large glasshouse developments are still routinely treated as major infrastructure projects, which triggers huge delays that again undermine our domestic food production. My colleagues will need no second invitation on this point: food security is national security. I am really glad that the Government recognised that in February. Ensuring that our farmers can produce the food this country needs is of critical importance in what is a very unstable world. Will the Minister consider the points that I have made and write to me about the population figures? I want to make absolutely certain that he does not misunderstand me; this is not a sentimental case for nature and green spaces. It is very realistic damage that is happening to Somerset.

Order. I impose a four-minute time limit on speeches.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on council and social housing. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) on securing this very important debate. On a personal basis, a debate on national planning policy feels like a very fitting bookend to the outgoing Administration. The issue of what gets built where defines our daily lives like no other issue, and I have found my first two years in this place defined by those debates. Without wanting to cast myself as a latter-day Cassandra, I shared early on my view that, try though Ministers might, there would be no appeasing the developer lobby—no amount of deregulation will ever satisfy them—and so it has proven, with the clamour for relaxed fire safety standards and the weakening of environmental policies, and for there to be less opportunity for ordinary people to influence decisions in the planning system, as loud as ever. However, my views on the subject have changed. Today, I am not joining this debate to raise a series of detailed concerns about the latest redrafting of the NPPF—although I do still have such concerns, especially in relation to possible changes to the sequential test on surface water flooding and limits being imposed on local authorities to pursue more ambitious policies on climate and nature restoration. The point I really want to make today is that I believe we have reached a point where national planning policy is completely broken and the NPPF is beyond reform. After decades of deregulation, the genius of Labour’s post-war democratic settlement has been degraded and reduced to a system of fiendishly complex processes, combined with overwhelmingly negative outcomes, which, for all the world, seems to have been designed by an evil genius to drive all those involved mad. When Lewis Silkin created the planning system that rebuilt this country from the ashes of world war two, he described the distinctly Labour vision for a policy that would meet “actual needs, democratically expressed.” Yet what the NPPF has achieved for years—I am afraid the latest iteration will be little different—is almost the precise opposite of Silkin’s idealism. Pretty much ever since the first version of the NPPF in 2012, what we have seen is the proliferation of speculative development across the country, with democratically produced local plans ridden roughshod over and housing built first and foremost for profit, not for people. In fact, a national planning policy framework is not even an accurate name for what we have. There can be no plan-led system when national policy introduces the overwhelming likelihood of caveats to local plans through an ever stronger and equally inaccurately named presumption in favour of sustainable development, which in reality functions as a passport to permission for all but the very worst speculative schemes. This is not planning in any reasonable sense of the word—it is merely reacting. Under the NPPF system, more and more of the initiative, the influence and the advantage lies with the vested interests of land promoters and major developers, whose private profit will never accord with the public good. And thus we have a national system in which the notion of affordable housing is a running joke, and in which the environment that politicians so often protest their love for is repeatedly trashed as a secondary matter compared to the unequally distributed benefits of growth. It is a national planning policy framework that overwhelmingly produces outcomes that lock us into car-dependent, unsustainable lifestyles, with polluted air that chokes the lungs of our children and costs the NHS billions, and utterly fails to secure public consent for the development we very desperately require to meet the needs of those stuck in temporary accommodation and in cramped, crowded and unsanitary conditions.

I apologise to the Minister; I am hopping between two different debates in two different Chambers. I told my constituents that I would make this point about planning policy in my area, which has fought for decades to protect the green belt. The introduction of the concept of the grey belt means that developers are now turning green belt into grey belt by dumping, cutting down trees and despoiling the area, and then applying for planning permission for development. The concept of grey belt has undermined all that we have spent decades campaigning for.

I agree with those concerns. As I understand it, many of the applications for grey belt are in fact on greenfield sites, and that needs to be addressed. For all its labyrinthine processes, the NPPF makes a mockery of local democracy, which breeds disillusion and contempt for politics in this country. The system we have created through the NPPF traps communities in a never-ending cycle of adversarial confrontations with corporations that see our local landscapes as easy pickings and cream off much of the wealth of new developments, while leaving the public to carry the majority of the costs. The section 106 mechanism they rely on is not only obscure, but demonstrably incapable of securing the investment in the infrastructure—GPs, schools, sports grounds and public transport—necessary to keep pace with population growth, when hundreds of new houses are bolted on to towns that have already seen almost all their facilities closed. The housing the NPPF produces is often both miserabilist and identikit. It is seemingly designed to erase local identity and shorn of local traditions, with no space for community and with a built environment that is best described as unhappiness given physical form. All in all, the damage that successive iterations of the NPPF have done to our country is difficult to forgive. Now is the time to consign the NPPF to the dustbin of history where it belongs and start afresh instead of making further amendments. The one positive note I can strike is that it is not difficult to imagine something far, far better. We need to return to Labour’s democratic principles, stop treating the public as a problem to be silenced and embrace them as a source of optimistic solutions for meeting the needs of the future. It is time to replace the constant nonsense that traduces our constituents as nimbys, and to put power in their hands so that they can decide where and how to meet the housing needs of their communities in a way that expresses their hopes and priorities for the future. It is time to bring back architects in every local planning authority, working with each community to shape plans for future development on an appropriate scale for each settlement, and with a renaissance in the local vernacular that strengthens and reinvigorates the culture and identity of each unique town, village and city. In short, it is time to ditch the NPPF and build a new system that puts power in the hands of the people and allows planners to genuinely plan with communities.

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt). I will try to cover four aspects of the NPPF in just short of four minutes. The first is what the NPPF says on intentional unauthorised development. I welcome the move towards stronger wording in that area. I should stress that I am not talking about a house extension or somebody accidentally not complying with regulations, but entire new dwellings and wilful non-compliance. I welcome the move from material consideration, as it is known, to substantial weight, but I fear it does not go far enough. As I said in my submission to the consultation, it should be set out very clearly that “wilfully ignoring planning consent requirements will not result in retrospective planning permissions being granted”, and that this cannot in normal circumstances be overridden by personal circumstance arguments. Other things could be done in support, such as making sure that stop notices are easier to issue, and restrictions on things like delivery of construction materials and mobile homes to unlawful sites. The Minister and I have discussed the NPPF housing formula many times across this Floor. He is a very diligent Minister and, although he always robustly defends the Government line, which is kind of annoying, he always does it with great courtesy. I thank him for that. The problem is that this formula has meant a massive increase in housing numbers for the countryside. It is not a north-south thing; it is an urban to countryside shift. Whereas the numbers have gone up by 50% for the country overall, in East Hampshire they have doubled. When that happens overnight, no one has a five-year land supply that can deal with it, so we get speculative developments. That has been brought into sharp relief by the issue of water supply, which has particularly come to prominence since South East Water’s submission to the Basingstoke and Deane local plan. The Basingstoke area that it talks about—zone 4, as it is known—extends to Alton and around my constituency. The Environment Agency has stopped the extension of the abstraction licence at Greywell Fen because of the degradation of that globally rare site of special scientific interest. I met South East Water recently to discuss this. There are questions outstanding, particularly regarding parts of my constituency. Clearly, action should have happened before now, but a doubling of the housing target hugely exacerbates the issue. Large-scale development should not go ahead unless and until this issue is resolved.

I commend the right hon. Gentleman on his speech. I know that the Minister is not responsible for my constituency across the water, but does the right hon. Gentleman feel that recommendations and good things learned on the mainland should be shared with us back home to ensure that we do not have the same problems that seem to be repeating over and over again here?

I agree. There is no practical limit on what we can learn from one another in the home nations of the United Kingdom. I want to come on to what is known as policy L3, which concerns the minimum density requirements for areas around train stations. I have written about this in my submission to the consultation. I fear that a policy that is, on the face of it, sensible—“Let’s have people living close to train stations where they can commute to work or whatever it might be”—is really designed for urban town areas. But it will also have an impact on market towns in places like East Hampshire and in villages that just happen to have a train station. The sorts of densities discussed in the NPPF would be wholly inappropriate for market towns like Alton in East Hampshire and rural villages like Bentley or Rowland’s Castle. Finally, I want to address how the NPPF interacts with local government reorganisation. I am totally opposed to the Government’s top-down reorganisation of Hampshire local government for multiple reasons, including the fact that it splits up an area with an identity—namely, East Hampshire. It puts the lower parts into a new Portsmouth super-council area and the rest of East Hampshire into this vast new Mid Hants unitary. Local plans have been built around existing district council geographies. For councils that are part-way through the process and about to have this enormous reorganisation thrust upon them, what is the guidance from the Government on how they should proceed?

Three-minute limit!

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing a debate on this important topic very much in the spirit of end-of-term relaxation. I want to start with some of the positives of the new draft NPPF. My district councils locally have welcomed its structure, usability and the good aim, at least, of a more streamlined planning system and reduction of duplication. They also welcome the separation of plan making and decision-making guidance. Overall, the aim of speeding up the plan-making process to 13 months is welcome. Local plans take many years to be produced and involve a huge amount of resource. I am certainly interested to hear from the Minister whether he feels that the Planning Inspectorate has the resources to cope with an increase in the number of plans to examine and assess. The right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) made a very important point about the implications of local government reorganisation. Significant concerns remain about how the Government seem to be moving away from local decision making and community empowerment. As this new scheme of delegation will reduce the input of elected councillors in planning decisions, involving communities and needs specific to local geography become even more important, yet there are concerns that spatial development strategies will be agreed to far away from communities. More could be done to clarify the planning system and permissions for houses in multiple occupation. Such properties are often associated with parking and waste issues and, unlike larger HMOs, they may not be subject to requirements on parking provision, room sizes or amenity space, potentially resulting in poorer living conditions. Requiring planning permission for all HMOs for a single use class could help address those issues by ensuring consistent standards. The environment is a big concern. The NPPF has insufficient focus on our climate and environmental obligations, and certainly not enough on flood and extreme temperature resilience and standards for homes. As highlighted by Wildlife and Countryside Link, the draft NPPF would limit local ambition and powers by preventing local planning authorities from requiring biodiversity net gain above the statutory 10% minimum. That seems like a retrograde step. Finally, my biggest concern is one I have raised with the Minister many times and in many different forums: the Government’s ambitious housing targets are not being supported by the same focus on the infrastructure and public services that will be needed, which makes it harder to get local communities invested in the importance of more housing. In Oxfordshire, where the rate of housing growth has been extremely fast, the challenge is ensuring that infrastructure such as doctors, schools, public transport and affordable housing is available to support our growing population. Development should remain plan-led and be guided by evidence of local need, not by market forces alone. That is my biggest concern about both Government policy in general and the NPPF in particular. I hope the Minister will add to his previous comments on what the Government will do to ensure that our house building targets and population growth are supported by infrastructure and public services.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this important debate. Planning and local development is one of the most commonly raised issues in my email inbox, as I am sure is the case for many others in the room. First, I would like to make it clear that I am completely aware of the dire need for housing in this country. Many young people have expressed to me their fears that they will never get a foot on the property ladder, or that they are having to move away from the communities they know and love to find affordable places to rent. Affordable housing is a need, not a luxury. However, new homes do not need to come at the cost of the community that is already there, and nor should they be placed on flood plains. Local people and local elected officials should have a role in deciding the future of their area, because they best understand it. When local people are given the opportunity to help shape their future, it can be a roaring success. In the village of Holt, in my constituency, a neighbourhood plan shaped the development of a derelict, unused tannery site into an award-winning mixed-use development, combining homes and new commercial space, while still preserving the village’s distinct character and acknowledging its history. Meanwhile, in Seend, near Devizes, the village’s community land trust has delivered affordable homes for local residents, built to the highest passive house standards of energy efficiency. That demonstrates what rural communities can achieve by working with partners, such as local councils and Homes England, for the benefit of residents and the environment. Although there is a lot of good in the framework, I am particularly concerned that it fails to commit to new homes being zero-carbon or held to the highest energy efficiency standards, as was shown to be possible by the development in Seend. It also contains no clear commitment to deliver actually affordable homes, and it risks encouraging more executive housing to make more money for developers, while failing to tackle the housing crisis. I welcome the proposed presumption in favour of development near railway stations. Transport-oriented development is precisely the kind of planning approach needed to move away from car-dependent housing estates located far from town centres.

It is a very good idea to have development near railway stations. However, I have another application on the horizon in Yatton, which is the village I was discussing earlier, that involves a plan to build on the railway station car park. Does my hon. Friend think that that is a good idea?

It does sound most odd, if I may say so. That principle lies at the heart of the Bath and Wiltshire metro proposal, which I support. It has the potential to unlock brownfield regeneration in Melksham town centre, revitalise the riverside and strengthen the high street through sustainable, rail-connected growth. However, if that ambition is to be realised, local areas must have access to the resources needed to develop robust transport business cases, masterplans and infrastructure programmes. I am therefore concerned that the removal of funding for sub-national transport bodies risks creating a significant obstacle to the station upgrades, service improvements and strategic transport planning required to support the housing and regeneration opportunities that the policy seeks to encourage. Without adequate investment in the transport network itself, the benefits of transport-oriented development may be difficult to deliver in much of the country.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. First, I thank the Minister for his assistance in progressing the local plan in my constituency. Horsham faced a unique problem with water neutrality, which the previous Government showed no sign of ever grappling with, and I am grateful for his personal involvement in that. However, when it comes to the national house building strategy, I have to be critical. Difficulty with obtaining planning permission is only one, and no longer even the most important, of the many obstacles to house building, so why do we obsess over it to the exclusion of all else? Local targets are set through a compulsory process called the standard method, under which an area that has high local house prices, but only modest local wages, will have steeper housing targets. That formula is a terrible way to assess local housing need in practice, but its worst aspect is how it destroys local authorities’ negotiating power against developers. Like most planning authorities, Horsham district council builds very few council houses directly, so the vast majority of its new housing stock must come from private developers. Developers are not stupid; they know that if a council has a target to build 1,800 homes each and every year—a target that Horsham may face—it will have to say yes to practically every site put in front of it, no matter whether a site was rejected the year before. Try explaining that to residents. Developers with options for the land bid against each other, with a price based on the highest possible outcome, but achieving that price means them having to build zero social rent homes and lots of highly priced, executive homes. That is a bizarre case of competition only ever driving prices up, not down. Incredibly, in Horsham, we would be better off if we negotiated a monopoly for a single company to develop the whole district. That is why we have the paradox of having a chronic housing shortage at the same time as 1.5 million unbuilt houses with planning permission. Meanwhile, as collateral damage in this process, we are ripping apart local democracy. Councils are forced, with zero local consent, to approve sites that are deficient in transport and water supply and that are mostly on greenfield sites. Local authorities have to take the word of statutory consultees as gospel; even where authorities know perfectly well that land will flood, if the Environment Agency says it will not, that is the end of it. I know that the Minister is committed to solving the national housing problem, and I wholeheartedly support him in that, but the current situation is all sacrifice with no benefit. The sites we approve today will sit on the housing market like a dead-weight for years to come. High land prices are being locked in for wasteful schemes that take up three times the land that they need to. We need a reset, so I hope the Minister will agree to meet me to consider alternative solutions.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this debate. It is clearly essential to build homes. One reason why I am sitting in this place is my work to support victims of domestic abuse. For those, often with children, who are on a six-month stay in a refuge while fleeing the most dreadful violence, a secure home is the first step towards a new, safe future. However, the Government have introduced no targets for council or social housing, despite the Liberal Democrats making many calls for them to do so. The dreadful shortage left as the legacy of successive Conservative Governments is, at the very least, not being remedied by this Labour Government. That problem needs fixing, and the NPPF changes not only do not address it, but open up a raft of other problems. The Conservative Administrations that previously ran Hart district council and Basingstoke and Deane borough council failed to produce local plans. That left those areas subject to speculative development granted on appeal, resulting in the building of large housing estates on the edges of our towns and villages, with no accompanying infrastructure. To make the best of a bad situation, the Liberal Democrats on Hart district council introduced a local plan, which, crucially, meant that houses were built sustainably on brownfield land. When the Lib Dems took joint control of Basingstoke and Deane borough council, a local plan was prioritised and progressed. However, this Government’s new housing targets have rendered those new plans all but redundant. Those council areas are now easy targets for entirely inappropriate housing developments. When the balance tips in favour of appeal, it is not the people but the developers who benefit. In Basingstoke and Deane, planning permission for around 6,000 new homes has already been granted. In Hart, the major developer working on the biggest housing project has slowed down building: instead of building and selling 200 houses at a time, it is now building 50 to protect its profits. The new houses are no more affordable—in fact, properties in North East Hampshire are some of the most expensive outside London—but under the Government’s housing policies, developers are being allowed to land-bank: to push through application after application, despite the lack of infrastructure, and to hold on to land for years or decades as it increases in value. Applications come in for a raft of inappropriate places, and all the while, there is no statutory consultee for our most important resource. Water is out biggest concern, and it is absent from the Government’s plans. South East Water, which supplies fresh water to most of North East Hampshire, produced a five-year plan in autumn 2024 that is largely a work of fiction, citing a new pipeline that would supply new and existing homes that would come online in spring 2025. Nobody believed that that could be completed in six months, but Ofwat has no powers to compel South East Water to publish a plan that is in any way based in reality. The consequences of this regulatory and legislative failure sit with local people and the environment. Failure to supply local fresh water has obvious consequences, but the environment also suffers. We have heard already about how the Environment Agency has cancelled the supply of water in Greywell, yet South East Water continues to abstract from the site.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this debate. My constituency is large and rural, containing the towns of Thornbury, Yate and Chipping Sodbury, as well as numerous villages and hamlets, and stretches from the internationally designated Severn estuary all the way to the Cotswold escarpment. A large part of the countryside that surrounds those communities is designated green belt, with all the protections that that used to bring, but now that protection is under threat. Before I go further, I will provide some context. Under the current administration, South Gloucestershire council recognises the need for new housing and has developed a plan to deliver its housing need, which recently went through its examination in public. More than that, the council recognises the importance of homes for social rent and has been punching above its weight in their provision. With around 0.6% of the population of England outside London, it delivered 1.6% of total new social rent completions last year. However, there is an implicit deal with local people in that local plan, which delivers homes while protecting the remaining countryside from speculative development. The Government’s grey belt policy fundamentally threatens that. Green belt land will now be parcelled up into cells for assessment, and it will be difficult to show an individual cell’s contribution. The changes to the framework around the grey belt essentially make purposes C and E void, and particularly C, which protects countryside from encroachment. The danger is that pockets of land will be considered in isolation and be judged only to contribute to purpose C. Indeed, the 2022 West of England combined authority report, in the local plan evidence, showed that the primary reason for just about all the land in the local green belt is purpose C. However, the cumulative impact of developing those pockets of land would degrade the green belt as a whole. Some of our green belt is very narrow, and it will only become more so if this is allowed to happen. Our towns and villages will slowly be swallowed up by Bristol, and the distinctiveness of our communities will be lost. My constituents do not want that, and I suspect that the good people of Bristol do not want it either, although some hon. Members may think otherwise. The Government rightly want to speed up housing delivery, but indiscriminate housing built by big developers with no regard for the environment or the people living nearby is not the answer. Ironically, far from increasing the speed of housing delivery, as the Government claim it will, in my area the grey belt changes the level of risk, creating more delays by distracting planning officers from the planned sites and from the Government’s new town proposal. Time will be wasted arguing with speculative developers about what constitutes grey belt, when it could be spent delivering local housing need through the local plan. I urge the Minister to listen to hon. Members across the Chamber, who are rightly raising concerns, and to advise the new Cabinet and the incoming Prime Minister that rural voices must be heard, and the NPPF revisited.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) on securing the debate, and all other Members for their excellent contributions, which I strongly endorse. I particularly wish to highlight the contribution of the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff), which I hope was a bid to catapult him into becoming Secretary of State under the new regime—I would certainly strongly support the approach he is taking. A lot of people have referred to the inequity and inappropriateness of the way in which the Government have introduced national targets and the manner in which they have imposed them, through the national planning policy framework. It certainly reinforces the weakness of the whole system, because it is based on a delusion that private developers will collude with the Government in driving down the price of their finished product.