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Affordable Housing

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, which illustrates well one of the unintended consequences of these policies. I can give the House another example from my constituency. The largest development that has been consented is in a town called Cleobury Mortimer, where 112 houses were consented. This happened just before the introduction of the 50 per cent. policy, but more than one third of those houses were to be affordable. They have not been delivered, however. The builder had secured the opportunity to fund the affordable housing through the construction and sale of the open-market housing, but because of the high proportion of affordable housing in the scheme, he did not find it attractive enough to be able to sell the open-market housing. The entire scheme is therefore stymied, and is at present stuck. We are therefore delivering neither affordable nor open-market housing, despite having that large consent in that town. I have touched on some of the potential solutions to those problems, and I want to finish by highlighting one or two in greater detail. It is important to give a fair allocation of public housing grant to areas across the country, not only for social housing but in low-cost assistance. There are just as many key worker categories and jobs needing to be filled in rural areas as there are in urban areas, and it seems quite wrong that Government policy should prevent that from happening. Local authorities should be given more control over the number of houses that they are able to consent to each year. They should be less prescriptive about density, and more imaginative in the way in which they allow houses to be reconfigured. Examples include dividing a reasonably large house into two to provide a retirement flat for elderly parents or, in our area, allowing farmhouses to be divided into two to provide separate dwellings within the same house for parents and children, when the children start to have children of their own. Such reconfiguration should be permitted without imposing the requirement to sell the houses. A local authority could impose a section 106 agreement to require the two units to be sold together, thus preventing the opportunity to make capital gain, which seems to be the fear of so many of our local planning officers. There should be much more flexibility over the supply of land outside the green belt. Areas such as mine have acute housing need. Indeed, the housing needs survey found that we should be building 287 affordable houses a year, but we are building less than half that number in total at the moment. The local authority should have the flexibility to allow some greenfield development, or to change the definition of brownfield to encourage farmyard development, for example. There should be more local determination. I agree with the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith) that supply is part of the key to this issue, in terms of pricing and availability. We need the Government to show flexibility on this matter.