Housing 'the biggest issue for MPs'

Experts from the three main parties have set out how they would reform the planning system to tackle the key housing issues facing the country.

An ePolitix.com symposium on Thursday saw Labour MP Nick Raynsford, shadow communities spokesman Jacqui Lait and Liberal Democrat housing spokesman Lembit Opik debate how to improve and increase the housing stock.

Introducing the RICS-sponsored symposium, Phyllis Starkey, the chairman of the Commons communities and local government committee, said housing was "the biggest issue for almost all MPs at the moment".

She talked of the "pressing demands of the climate change agenda" and of the need to "do something about our horrendously energy inefficient existing housing stock".

Planning was "vitally important" in facilitating "development in the way that best meets the needs of local, regional and national community", she said.

Raynsford

Raynsford, a former local government minister, set out the "quantitative and qualitative challenges we face in relation to housing".

"We've got to increase substantially the supply of housing because, for the last 20 years or more we have been seriously under-providing for needs," he said.

He argued that this had led to "massively escalating house prices and serious shortages", leaving vulnerable people more likely to be inadequately housed or homeless.

Raynsford said that financial incentives would help increase supply, and said that there should be "very high expectations" for new homes to have good green credentials.

"Planning should be seen as a means of facilitating good quality development rather than blocking it," he said.

Lait

Lait said all MPs acknowledged "that there is a need to provide a wide range of different types of new housing".

Dismissing the "top-down approach of targets and numbers", she said this was breaking down the system of trust "that is required to deliver the sort of communities that we know we're going to need in the future".

She called for a system in which "communities own their own decisions about the housing system".

"We want to change the planning system so that the local planners have got time to look at how the communities should develop," she said.

"We have to look at ways of delivering that are much more proactive and likely to deliver but all of us are very keen on achieving the same ends."

Opik

Speaking for the Lib Dems, Opik criticised the "terribly inefficient housing stock when it comes to the environment".

He said there were three main pillars to the housing issue: to have an economically sustainable market; to have an environmentally sustainable housing stock and to have socially sustainable communities.

"We can be inspirational in communities we create through the application of sensible planning and appropriate incentives," Opik said.

"We want to create homes for all and create communities for all which in an environmental sense don't cost the earth."