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House-building Programme

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, on securing this important and timely debate. Although not neighbours in the political sense, we are most certainly neighbours in the geographical sense, originating from two fine counties with a shared border and much shared history. Indeed, the noble Baroness, in her excellent speech, referred to many of the problems and concerns stemming from the Government’s house-building programme that will have a similar effect upon my own county of Essex. Perhaps this is an opportune moment to declare an interest as the leader of Essex County Council, as many Members know. I shall be speaking a fair bit today about the problems of Essex. In nearly 30 years of being a member of that council, I cannot remember a more serious threat to the way of life of the people of Essex and the concerns that exist over the Government’s plans for mass house building. It is my intention to return to the particular circumstances facing Essex a little later as I believe that the challenges facing my own county serve as an example of what is happening over much of the country, particularly in the south east. I want to begin by stating that the need for new houses is of course unquestionable. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, referred to the fact that there are many houses, but we must recognise that some of them are in the wrong place. I shall return to that issue. People are living longer and more are living on their own. We are only too aware of the problems faced by many young people who simply cannot afford to get a foot on the housing property ladder, not just in the south east but increasingly in all parts of the country which have seen property values rocket in recent years. We are equally aware of the problems facing many low-income public servants. We have a job to recruit people such as social workers in our counties in the south east because of the cost of housing. I thank the Minister for being involved with us in Essex, because however many houses we have, the design of them needs to be right and she is helping us to launch a design guide. However many houses we have and whatever the problems, they need to be designed right for the disabled and the elderly. I thank her for being involved in considering the design of houses with us. Clearly, the supply of houses in the right places has fallen well below the rate of demand. In fact, the level of new builds is at its lowest since the war. We on these Benches are not anti-development nor anti-new houses, but we want to make certain that the policy is well thought out. We are opposed to the arbitrary and misguided plans that this Government have for the creation of vast new communities, possibly destroying large sections of green belt, going against the wishes of local people and local communities and without enough thinking about the economic independence of these new communities or the required infrastructure—to which I shall return—needed to allow them to thrive. That is what we are opposed to. The Government optimistically refer to this strategy as a sustainable communities plan. That is a rather misguided description. As I will describe later, that plan will have a profoundly negative impact on existing communities from an economic, social and environmental aspect. Regrettably, there is virtually nothing that I can think that redeems these plans from the clutches of possible disaster. It is perhaps worth mentioning the flip side of these plans, as the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said: plans that involve the destruction of significant swathes of existing housing in many northern cities. One does not need to be a genius to work out that there is something fundamentally wrong in the overall strategy when, with one hand, we are destroying perfectly usable housing only to create new properties at the risk of existing communities and green belt. Indeed, noble Lords may be interested to learn that only on Monday we had Jane Kennedy—a Minister, I believe—telling a public inquiry that plans to raze 10,000 terrace properties in her Liverpool constituency amounted to ““social cleansing”” of her constituents. This reveals disquiet within the Government about the Deputy Prime Minister’s housing market renewal scheme. If the Government are not agreed, what hope is there for the rest of us? I now turn to the situation facing my county of Essex. Under the Government’s plans, Essex will be expected to take at least 110,000 new houses over the next 15 years, although the figure is still very much in dispute, with the regional assembly demanding that the county build 131,000. We will not go back to the point about the unelected, unaccountable regional assemblies, but I would rather have local people deciding such matters than regional assemblies, which are not elected and are unpopular in my part of the world. The population increase in Essex alone is equivalent to the entire population of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Since we lost the London boroughs about 40 years ago, Essex has nearly trebled in population. So beside the trebling of the population since we lost the London boroughs, we will now take the equivalent of the city of Newcastle. Let me give you some idea of the costs and consequences involved in that. The bill for supporting the Government’s plans for that new housing development is likely to reach £13 billion in capital costs. Nearly £5 billion will be needed for the land alone for those houses. We already have about a £2 billion infrastructure deficit in Essex because of all the new houses since 1964. Yet the largest single area of investment required will be the improvement of transport infrastructure, which will cost at least £5 billion. That excludes the extensive improvements to the rail system to the west of the county. Indeed, at the current rate of spending it will take 100 years to catch up with what we have already done. That comes at a time when government support for transport funding in the region has been reduced. The Strategic Rail Authority and Network Rail have both confirmed that they cannot fund the majority of the region’s proposed rail schemes. We estimate that the public sector will have to find about £2.5 billion each year in ongoing revenue costs. The largest ongoing revenue cost will be new schools, with a bill of about £1 billion each year. We of course will need new hospitals, GPs, fire and police stations, care and social workers, to name but a few, all of whom will need to be funded from somewhere. Increases in local tax revenue will fund the majority of that increase, but there will be a shortfall of almost £300 million per year. That would mean an increase to Essex council taxpayers of about 43 per cent, just to fund all those new people. We have recently published a report with independent help and a lot of thought and we will submit it to the examination of the east of England draft plan, which will be heard soon. The report suggests that the development proposals outlined in our draft plan are unrealistic and unaffordable and we call for a plan that plans, monitors and manages the increase in housing. I ask the Minister to reply to that. We have not had that from the Government and I want them to think about how to do that. My eight minutes have run out. I would just like to say that the extra waste disposal in Essex would be about 1 million tonnes a year. We have enough problem disposing of our waste at present. All those infrastructure costs are being placed on local authorities without the Government planning for it. I hope that the Minister can respond to some of those issues when she winds up.