Steff Aquarone

I am happy to speak today in support of amendment 151, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos). Our planning system needs reform, but the approach the Government are taking in the Bill is sadly all wrong and desperately needs to be amended. Amendment 151 would compel the Secretary of State to produce a report that addresses a key principle of my concern with the current house building regime, which is good design. I am pleased that in drafting clause 93, the Government have recognised that good design goes hand in hand with sustainable development, but we need to see evidence that the houses we are getting are actually being designed and built better if we are to be confident that we are not just getting more of the same from the big developers. No one has ever told me that they want more energy-inefficient chocolate box homes, buried deep in rabbit warren estates and built to maximise developer profit. What we see too often in North Norfolk is homes that people do not like and cannot afford, but which they must queue up to buy because there is no other option. I was horrified recently to find that developers had put covenants on an entire estate to ban branded vehicles from parking on private driveways—they might as well have marketed those homes as for rich second home owners only. That is not how we want to design our communities of the future. The Government are already taking steps towards good design by accepting the provisions of the sunshine Bill, introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson), which mandates solar panels on new builds. It can sometimes seem that politicians ignore good ideas if they come from Opposition parties, so I am particularly pleased that the Government have come to share the Liberal Democrats’ view that having solar panels on new builds is just common sense. It is not just about the homes themselves; good design is also about how and where we build new houses. People are growing tired, rightly, of estates that are designed around car use, rather than putting public transport or walking and cycling at the heart of design. We can encourage more people to walk or use public transport if we design developments in a way that makes it easy and attractive to do just that. When we use scheme design to encourage walking and cycling rather than car use, access to public transport rather than car parks, and routes that take people to town centres rather than bypasses, we see the benefits right across society: in reduced pressure on health services, in better natural environments and in more cohesive, resilient communities. Good design will also support the second key aim that amendment 151 seeks to have the Government report on, which is tackling the climate emergency. It is simple: a development that means fewer fossil fuel-powered cars are required to be on the roads will be better for the planet than one that does not. I do not think that people in North Norfolk are unreasonable in asking for developments to be affordable to buy or rent and sustainable and low cost to heat and power, and to feel connected to communities and not a burden on them. My constituents want to end the housing crisis, but they do not want it done through unaccountable, top-down targets. They want a design-led approach to planning and infrastructure development. I hope the Government hear our proposals to achieve that and support them today.