Damian Hinds

I will be brief as many colleagues are waiting to contribute. I will speak only to new clause 40, which calls for a review of the standard method of assessing local housing need. A couple of colleagues have already mentioned aspects of it, but I will talk about it for three reasons: it puts too many housing development requirements on rural areas, rather than cities; in areas like mine there are physical constraints, such as national parks, which can cause difficulties; and, as specified in the new clause, the system needs to take account of different types of housing and their affordability. First, the new formula means that too much housing is being put into rural areas, away from urban areas. As we have heard, in some parts of London and Birmingham targets are being reduced, but there has been a 50% uplift in housing numbers nationally and a 100% uplift in my constituency. This is not a north-south issue; it is repeated in rural areas throughout the country, including in the far north-west and the far north-east. It does not correct what some people may think of as an historical imbalance, where all the developments are in towns and not in the country, because over the past couple of decades developments have been disproportionately in predominantly rural areas rather than predominantly urban areas. This is also bad for the Government’s growth agenda because, as the Resolution Foundation and others have pointed out, skewing development towards cities and towns is better for growth because of connectivity. Secondly, I am concerned about physical constraints such as national parks. Development in a constituency such as mine, where over half the land area is inside a national park, creates particular issues in the areas just outside the national park. The Minister and his officials have been listening and they have been very helpful; I hope that they will continue to give the issue full consideration and that there will be a change.