Blake Stephenson

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention—I forget which positions people have had over the years. I absolutely agree. I will discuss new towns later in my speech; it is important that the Government provide clarity, and clarity soon, on where those new towns will be built. In my constituency too, people want the infrastructure to be built at the right time—before people move into houses, not afterwards. Those promises need to be fulfilled much earlier in the development cycle. I mentioned some of those points just now. I would like to see the Government either commit to requiring developers to deliver new infrastructure right at the start of development, or consider a programme of investment whereby the Government provide capital funding up front for councils to deliver the promised infrastructure, which they could then claim back directly from developers’ section 106 contributions. I would like to see the Government go further on flooding, and commit to a ban in all circumstances on development on functional floodplains. New homes mean nothing if they flood. Rivers and valleys have been here longer than we have, and the water that flows through them will not simply get out of the way because of the size of the Government’s mandate. We must ensure that our housing policy keeps houses out of the way and restricts floodplain to amenity and recreational land as part of proper local placemaking strategies. We must also ensure that the sustainable drainage infrastructure that gets installed with housing is effective and properly maintained. Too often, we see and hear of sustainable drainage systems that are nothing more than overgrown and sometimes blocked ditches, which offer no protection when the rain starts falling. We need a proper strategy to manage them, for example with ownership devolved to properly funded internal drainage boards that can provide expert maintenance. We need to embrace nature-based solutions to flooding—an opportunity presented by the Government’s proposed environmental delivery plans if they are strengthened to include a duty to consider such solutions. I would like to see the Government commit to properly funding and empowering planners in urban areas with high housing targets to identify and release appropriate sites for urban densification—a point made by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). For too long, urban authorities have been able to restrict land supply and the duty to co-operate to foist urban sprawl on neighbouring rural communities. Development that builds dormitories on our countryside rather than densification in our towns and cities is development that fails us all. We must end the easy fixes and see a focused strategy to densify our urban areas. In rural Bedfordshire, without such a fix we face a real and significant risk that our villages will be forced under the duty to co-operate to take thousands more homes for Luton in addition to the thousands of homes we took last time. Sticking-plaster planning politics where housing targets mean nothing because they are consistently and repeatedly delivered elsewhere does nothing to resolve the housing crisis and nothing to appease the Government’s blockers, who rightly wonder how it can be fair that they must continue to pay the price for failures in urban areas to deliver targets.