Grant Shapps, Shadow Minister for Housing, answers the questions you asked here (sorry for the delay).
NigelC: Is the Green Belt safe under the Conservatives? Labour talk about maintaining the total acreage by compensatory additions when one site is redesignated for building. This defeats the purpose of the Green belt in containing urban sprawl and encouraging urban regeneration. Do the Conservatives recognise the real benefits the Green Belt brings in forcing hard planning decisions for our towns and cities?
Yes we will rigorously protect the Green Belt and won’t pull the wool
over people’s eyes by saying that we’re enlarging it, whilst
simultaneously deleting parts and creating new green belt where there’s
no real development pressure. The only caveat to this very firm policy
would be if local people wanted to use Green Belt for a community based
facility. I’m thinking here of the kind of development that may well
provide a community sports facility on Green Belt in my own
constituency. This would be subject to all the safeguards that you
would expect, including final sign-off by the Secretary of State. The
message would be simple though. We’ll protect the Green Belt and we
won’t play tricks by deleting one part and creating it elsewhere in the
country.
Secondly will the Conservatives abolish regional plans (whether drawn
up by regional assemblies or regional development agencies) and return
to county structure plans and district local plans?
Yes. We’ll scrap the Regional Assemblies, as the Government have now said that they will do. But rather than giving those powers to the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), we will hand the powers to Local Authorities either at Parish, District or County level as appropriate.
Our entire approach to planning will emphasise bottom up, rather than top down and so it’s only natural for decision making to happen through incentivised local communities, rather than because Whitehall knows best.
The public are savvy. They understand that the power of locally elected Councillors has been diminished over the years and none more so because of the growth of Regional Quangos. Last year I completed a piece of research which demonstrated that the cost of Regional Government, by which I mean just administering it, had hit £1m per day. Centrally inspired, unelected and pen-pushingly bureaucratic, this regional approach to governing us uniquely distant from everyday lives. We’ll scrap this structure and in the process give people good reasons to go out and vote for local councillors who will once again have real power over what happens in our own communities.
Tony Makara: What can be done to sort out 'Problem Families' living on council estates? Often it only takes one such family to move onto an estate to completely ruin it as they act as a magnet for other troublemakers in the area, encouraging youths to congregate, holding noisy parties and so on. I'd like to see tough measures taken against such families but I'm worried about forced evictions where children are involved. Is there a way to deal with such families while still ensuring that the children don't become homeless?
It is not acceptable for one family to cause problems for their neighbours and strong action needs to be taken by councils to tackle the situation. Of course the all too frequent reality is that hard-pressed councils find it difficult to provide sufficient resources to neighbourhood teams who deal with this kind of anti-social behaviour and yet it’s my firm belief that if standards are allowed to drop in a street or vicinity, then the problems will escalate.
I’m always very wary of suggestion that there is one silver bullet or simple fix to any problem. The causes are complex and relate to the breakdown in the structure of society, lack of backing given to families through successive Governments and in particular this one. But I’ve been impressed by the work I’ve seen carried out by some particularly proactive councils who have put teams in place to tackle the problems from an early stage. Eviction should always be the ultimate threat, but with this in mind I’ve seen many instances where early intervention has paid dividends.
It’s tempting to write a book on the answer to this one question, but
I’d summarise my response in two ways. First, you’ve got to deal with
the day to day problems in a much more proactive, professional and
speedy manner. Just as I’ve seen some of our best councils doing.
Second, problem families have become more prevalent because of the
breakdown in society that we’re all familiar with. The solutions are
therefore short-term, better intervention, and long-term, a project
that will take generations but will put families back in the front and
centre of every aspect of policy.
powellite: How are you going to reconcile the visceral nimbyism in our party with the housing shortage and desire for people to own their own homes? I don't have a chance of getting a home in the south east at the moment with prices as they are, and yet any scheme to increase housing provision sees Tories throw up their arms about 'concreting over the countryside.' Are you going to make us the party of social aspiration again, like Cameron said in his conference speech last year?
First we need to be absolutely clear that there is a housing crisis and a large, though not only, part of the solution is to build more good quality homes.
Second we must reject the Government’s mistaken belief that the way to build more homes is to decree them from above. ‘3m Homes By 2020’ might make a good headline, but ask Ministers how many cars they’re going to produce over the same period, or tractors? The reality is that the Government doesn’t construct houses and its centrally-driven, top-down approach will always fail.
Third we need to understand that what the Government terms as Nimbyism is sometimes about people’s natural desire to protect their own quality of life and neighbourhood. The previous Housing Minister was forced to concede this point when the people opposing development turned out to be six of her own Cabinet colleagues.
Fourth we need to work with, rather than against, the grain of human nature. If we accept that local people probably know what’s best for their own areas and we believe in localism, then we must scrap the Whitehall targets and get serious about incentivising local communities to want and welcome development.
Now before you stop reading in the belief that this approach cannot work, let me provide you with some solid examples. Let’s say that a local community whose Maternity or A&E units are under threat understand that one way to protect them is to welcome more residents to their area and expand the patient base. How would public opinion be affected then?
When large scale development takes place money is generated from the developer under a so called Section 106, but by virtue of the guidance issued alongside the Section 106 legislation, investment has to basically go into the new development. This means that residents who are yet to live in the neighbourhood benefit. However, if the challenge is to get communities to welcome development, then surely a more constructive approach is to focus that S106 money on the existing community instead. A new town centre, swimming pool or whatever the popular local requirement happens to be.
Now imagine that with a larger Council Tax base as a result of more homes being built, all residents got to benefit with lower Council Tax bills. In reality this doesn’t happen at present because Government amends the Revenue Support Grant, but what if it agreed to keep the money with the local community? That way local people could benefit financially from welcoming new neighbours.
And here’s the real change. Now with the word ‘development’ having thrown off its poor reputation, local politicians begin to stand as pro-development Councillors. Instead of the town hall being full of people who are ready and waiting to reject the next Planning Application, some have been elected on the basis of a new town centre, lower Council Tax or keeping vital local services running or improved.
In fact benefits of this more enlightened bottom-up approach might not even stop there. With some politicians being elected on a pro-development ticket, in return for the benefits they can bring to their existing communities, the cumbersome planning and appeal system could be radically reformed. Most importantly it could speeded up as appeals would be lessened or perhaps scrapped entirely in the long-term. Local people suddenly have a real say in their own community’s destiny and so voting becomes worthwhile once again and democracy is renewed.
But if you’re thinking this will all take too long then you can be reassured in the knowledge that there would be a transition to this new world, with the existing structure only gradually being removed.
We’ll do plenty of other things, like end Garden Grabbing by redefining gardens away from being regarded as Brown Field in Planning Guidance documents, we’ll protect Green Belt as previously explained and we’ll scrap density targets which lead to the wrong kind of dwellings being created in the wrong places – most recently too many flats and not enough family homes.
It’s a radical agenda which aims to put power right back in the
hands of local people who will be properly incentivised to reap the
rewards of the high quality development of their own communities.
Iain: Are we going to see the Cameron's Conservatives coming out fighting, laying the blame of the housing crisis where it rightly belongs on Gordon Brown's Labour, their mass immigration policy, their destruction of pensions and savings, driving investment into property and to the buy-to-letters, or will it be more self censorship on immigration lest it upsets Cameron's new found friends in the BBC, Guardian newspaper and metrosexual media, and result in the Conservative councils having to take the flack and abused as being 'nimby's?
There can be no doubt that the Government needs to shoulder the blame for much of the current housing crisis. They have built less social housing in every year of their Government than we did under any year of Margaret Thatcher or John Major’s administrations. Housing numbers in every category are down from around 175,000 completions a year to 145,000 under Labour.
They have concentrated solely on the supply-side of the Housing problem, but have entirely left out any consideration of the demand-side, which is made up of three elements; fortunately people are living longer, changes to society mean that people are living apart more often and there is net migration into the country of around 200,000 people per annum.
We would look for some of our policies on supporting the family to eventually feed into living arrangements; though this must be viewed as a long-term generational policy.
David Cameron recently made a very thoughtful speech, praised by
Trevor Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality, about the
strains that migration placed on public services and housing in
particular. By the Government’s own figures it accounts for 73,000 new
housing units a year, out of the 240,000 it would like to see built. If
you haven’t had a chance to read David Cameron’s speech then do because
it answers your question in more detail than the few lines here allow.
You can find the highlights on ConservativeHome here.
601: Do you think the meaning of the green belt should be changed to include back gardens?
We do plan to redefine back gardens away from automatically being
considered as brown field and therefore ripe for development. This will
tip the balance away from a presumption to develop gardens, without
making it completely impossible under the right circumstances.
malcolm: What lessons do we need to learn from Ealing and Sedgefield?
That Parliamentary by-elections are tough and there’s a basic dilemma for any Party and Conservatives in particular. If you build up excitement about a by-election then expectations can outstretch the final result, but if you sit on your hands then you’ve actually lost before you’ve started because few workers are going to turn up at an election that no one is excited about.
The Ealing Southall result was interesting because whilst we would have loved to have made more progress, we did in fact marginally expand the Conservative vote by 1%. Since our vote didn’t collapse, this was sufficient to ensure that the LibDems failed to come from third to first place which bucked the trend of every Parliamentary by-election in the previous 18 years.
Incidentally, one enduring outcome of the election is that there are
now five Conservative Councillors right in the heart of Southall, where
previously there were none. By all accounts they’re working pretty hard
within the Conservative Group and beginning to make a mark in advance
of fighting as Conservatives next time round.
NigelC: As shadow minister will you still be able to support the "No way to 10k" campaign and other similar campaigns like StopHarlowNorth.com?
Yes, just as Labour MPs - including six Cabinet Ministers - are
fighting unsuitable development in their areas I too will support
campaigns against unsuitable development around my constituency. If the
Government are serious about developing in a way that local people can
support then they could start by not having announced the closure of
our A&E, Maternity, Paediatrics, Elderly and all surgery from our
local QE2 Hospital in Welwyn Garden City.
Felicity Mountjoy: You are expert at the internet. What role do you think blogging has in today's politics?
Big and growing. Not necessarily for us insiders who read it everyday, but because the stories which start off on the blogs frequently end up on the pages of the daily papers and then on the broadcast media. It’s a grass roots approach which has the capacity to excite and interest new generations of voters.
I also know that many Ministers have Google Alerts set up on their
name, so when someone writes about them it's drawn to their attention.
As a result the influence of a blog can far outstretch other forms of
less immediate written communication.
Oddball: As we accept that HIPs is fatally flawed, do you have any new ideas as to how to speed up/simplify the buying and selling of houses?
Yes and we are currently working on this and would invite you to contribute! We have a policy review called the Home Buying Review currently underway and it’s head up by property expert and former PPC, Owen Inskip, property presenter, Kirstie Allsopp, and me. We are asking experts, industry, academics and ordinary people for their views and ideas. Anyone wishing to contribute should visit www.HomeBuyingReview.com
We will report back by summer.
