Contribution
I want to talk about some of the new build housing in my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper)—a very able colleague—and I have had difficulties with the same set of developers, so I will hand over to him to talk about the difficulties we have had with the housing in Spen View and Astbury Park, which were dealt with by Stewart Milne Homes. I will also not be giving an honourable mention to the job that Vistry has done in Loachbrook Meadow in Congleton. It is trying to persuade my residents to take on a management company and take over management of the estate, despite the fact that it has not built the sewers or roads to adoptable standards. I can see nods around the room; it is clear to me that I am not the only one suffering with these difficulties.
Currently, however, the leading problem developer in my constituency is Zenith House Developments, which produced Scholars Place in Sandbach. Scholars Place, a mixed development of detached homes and social housing, looks absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately, it was not finished with any sort of sewage pumping station, and that is as bad as one might imagine. At the moment, sewage from these homes simply goes into a well, which has a semi-piece of plasterboard covering it and is inadequately fenced, so it is totally accessible and a massive drowning hazard of excrement. It is incredibly dangerous, and it is about 200 metres, at most, from a local primary school. It is absolutely horrific. There are some real questions about whether we have sufficient legal powers in this country, given that that was ever allowed to happen. It is a public health hazard, causing sewage to back up into people’s homes and on to the streets. The road literally runs with poo.
The problems associated with this development and the Spen View development have an impact on social housing providers. In both cases, there were section 106 agreements and social housing was provided. When these enormous and expensive problems occur for residents, the social housing providers that part own the shared ownership homes on such sites become financially entangled in trying to deal with the matter. Because they part own the homes, it is of course appropriate that they should help their residents. However—I suspect this is a national problem—social housing providers, which need to provide social homes, effectively have to cross-subsidise the failings of the private sector in producing these houses. It is an absolutely shocking situation.
It is important to me that we implement section 42 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which would improve the situation around sewer adoption, and that we have an equivalent for highways adoption. The problem across every one of the developments that I have mentioned is that the sewers and roads have not been dealt with properly. People have bought their dream homes—they are so excited—and then they find they have an enormous financial liability. It is a widespread problem in my constituency, and it is destroying people’s lives. It is destroying their mental health; the level of distress among my constituents cannot be overstated.
While we are on the topic of new build homes, I will briefly touch on disability and accessibility in relation to construction standards. In London, category 4 disability access as a planning requirement has been the norm since 2004, but in the rest of the country that is not the case. Baseline category 1 only enables a household to be hypothetically visitable by a disabled person, and it does not guarantee ease of access for someone in a wheelchair. It seems to me to be a very basic minimum that homes that we are building now should be visitable by people who use wheelchairs.
We have an ageing population and lots of people who are waiting for accessible housing. As a Government, we are doing a large amount of affordable housing development, which I welcome. However, I want us to ensure as a minimum that that housing is accessible and adaptable, that a significant proportion of it is fully wheelchair adaptable and that more of it is fully wheelchair accessible.
I suggest we look at the planning frameworks from 2018, because they require local authorities to consider the impact of requiring accessible housing on the viability of their local plan. It is almost a requirement that housing should not be accessible if that will make it difficult to deliver the required number of homes. With the developers I have just described, of course the first thing that they say is that they cannot afford to provide accessible homes —but, of course, they can. They need to be producing good quality homes that everybody can access, in estates surrounded by safe and secure environments in which the roads and sewers are usable. That does not seem too much to ask in an advanced industrial society.