Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Part of Debate on the Address – in the House of Commons at 4:29 pm on 12 May 2021.

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Photo of Simon Clarke Simon Clarke Conservative, Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland 4:29, 12 May 2021

I absolutely take my hon. Friend’s point. He is quite right that this is a complex problem and we need to address aggravating factors, including land banking by developers, which undoubtedly makes the situation harder to address.

We must confront the difficult reality that this is fundamentally a problem of supply. We should not privilege the interests of those who have homes over those who do not. In 1979, the green belt was 721,000 hectares. It has since more than doubled to over 1.6 million hectares, much of which is not genuinely green. Up to 11% of UK brownfield land, over 4,000 hectares, lies within the constraint of the green belt. The Government are proposing sensible steps to release some more land, a fraction of the total, to build the homes that are so badly needed while protecting areas that local residents cherish and choose to exclude.

Striking that balance deftly is vital. I am not advocating a planning free-for-all, and nor is anyone on the Government Benches, but I make a serious appeal to the House to recognise the urgency of the problem that we are storing up in the south-east corner of England, in particular, and to take action to address this. Fundamentally, land scarcity is the problem. Today the land that houses are built on accounts for 72% of its sale value. In 1995, it was 55%, while in the 1950s it was roughly 25%. The pattern is clear. From a centre-right perspective, we cannot be surprised if it becomes harder to make the case for popular capitalism in communities where too many people, particularly younger people, cannot see a realistic route to build that capital in their own lives.

We have to fix this, and I make a plea for us to do so. The most important thing we can do is to focus on sensible solutions to this planning impasse, because if we do not get it right, we will cut a generation of people out of home ownership, and there will be very serious consequences that we are already starting to see in the capital. We ought to look at how we distribute the burden of planning more sensibly. Rather than there being some additional homes in almost every community, perhaps we should be looking more at garden towns and even cities, because that might concentrate some of the pressures and some of the agglomeration advantages of creating those new communities.

However we choose to address this problem, we cannot ignore it, and the Government are right to be addressing it as part of a strong Queen’s Speech that will ultimately deliver on the promise of levelling up not just in communities such as mine, which are the typical centre of attention, but in the wider sense, recognising that if we do not get this right there will be exclusion and deprivation in parts of the country that are typically associated with being much more successful and affluent.