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Friday 5 April 2019

“Devon’s New Housing Need - A Government and Local Authority Perspective” > Housing Minister addresses CPRE seminar in Exeter > full report

The Campaign to Protect Rural England put on a very well-attended conference last month:
Futures Forum: “Devon’s New Housing Need - A Government and Local Authority Perspective” > CPRE seminar in Exeter > video report
Futures Forum: “Devon’s New Housing Need - A Government and Local Authority Perspective” > Housing Minister to address CPRE seminar in Exeter > Thursday 21st March

Devon Live has an account of the Minister's speech at the event:

Minister urges developers to build beauty for Devon's new build estates

However, Kit Malthouse MP was criticised for not reading CPRE report on housing need


Lewis Clarke
4 APR 2019


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CPRE KIT MALTHOUSE IN DEVON

Housing Minister Kit Malthouse has called on developers and local authorities to build beauty across the nation.

The MP spoke to the Devon branch of the CPRE (Campaign to Protect Rural England) at Sandy Park in Exeter on Thursday, March 21. The event was CPRE Devon’s biggest yet, drawing 230 people from across Devon as well as neighbouring counties.

Mr Malthouse MP discussed the Government’s target of building 300,000 new homes a year in England.

He said: “We promise to future generations that their lives will be better than ours, that we will start the businesses, find the cures, plant the trees and build the houses that mean future generations have a better life than we do.

“That’s fundamentally what binds us together and means my children – I own a 20-year-old and a couple of younger twins - will pay to look after me when I’m sick and elderly, and the deal is that I will provide for them in the future.


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“We have to acknowledge that in the last 40 years a particular part of that contract, the housing part, has broken down. Governments of all stripes over the past three or four decades have failed to build the houses the country needs, and the crash in 2007 exacerbated that. Just before the crash, we built around 231,000 new homes in this country, after the crash that dropped down to about 124,000. That coincided with enormous changes in demographics, people living much longer, but also living alone much longer, younger people also living alone in single unit households and growing population alongside it as well. It meant that we saw some important indicators in this country start to fall, not least home ownership amongst the young.

“My predecessors and back in the days of the coalition decided that we needed to do something about this and to start to ramp up and push as hard as we could on the housing production numbers to try and restore people to where they were before. I’ve been given this enormous target or hitting 300,000 homes a year. I hope there is nobody who thinks we don’t need to build any more houses and I certainly hope nobody thinks we need to build new houses but just not in Devon.

“This is a national mission for all of us and a national obligation for all of us to the next generation.”

Mr Malthouse accepted that it was a “particularly difficult conundrum” to solve in the “beautiful” county of Devon but encouraged local debate to answer questions of how many, where and what type of housing was needed locally.



(Image: CPRE)

He added: “We are putting enormous emphasis on the desire for local authorities to think about beauty. If we’re going to get to 300,000, it is an enormous ramp up from where we are, and it means that hardly any part of the country that is untouched by development.

“In my experience 80 per cent of people’s concern about development is what it’s going to look like. The phrase I hear most from people is that it will spoil their area, and yet if we get design right, make it beautiful, and if it fits and takes part in the context of where it is place, it can enhance things.

“The charge I put down to the development community is twofold; I’ve said to them to think not just of building homes, but building neighbourhoods, and how they will live, the soul and the heart. Secondly, they need to consider if they are building the conservation area of the future. Is what they are building going to last the centuries or is it likely to bulldozed in the next forty years as so much of what was built in the 60s and 70s is now.


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“I hope that in four decades they will turn up with a preservation notice to the stuff we’re going to build rather than bulldoze them. I admit we’re not achieving that now, and the large builders are building the same thing whether it’s in Devon, Doncaster, Canterbury or Carlisle. It all looks the same, it doesn’t fit, they’re not using local vernacular, they’re not using detailing it’s all blank ubiquity.

“We won’t get to the 300,000 target because residents will be hostile to development, thinking it’s going to spoil areas. It’s critical that local authorities and developers make space for beauty. We’re trying hard to push the idea that if we’re building beautiful stuff, then we will be much more likely to make progress”.

However, the minister has been lambasted by Devon residents for not addressing concerns about the impact of new homes in the countryside.

CPRE Devon has produced a hard-hitting video in the wake of the Housing Minister’s address to a seminar in Exeter on the issue of the number of new homes in Devon’s countryside.


The local conservation charity is campaigning to protect Devon’s precious countryside and green spaces. Last year, it commissioned an independent report by a leading research company, which showed that more new homes are being built in Devon than are needed and that too few of them are affordable or sustainable.

The Minister was expected to respond to this evidence and people’s concerns about the scale, design and quality of new housing. In fact, he admitted on camera that he hadn’t even read the report, produced six months ago, before coming to Devon to deliver his keynote speech.

Many attendees said they were disappointed and frustrated by what they heard from the Minister, including his failure to address key concerns about the lack of investment in corresponding infrastructure such as transport links, employment, schools and health facilities.

Rebecca Bartleet, Chair of CPRE Devon said: “Kit Malthouse does not come out of this well. He failed to read our report in advance. So why come all this way on the pretence of answering the questions raised in the report?

“He did not come to hear our concerns, based on hard evidence. He came to peddle his policies and basically tell us we are wrong to disagree with them. By contrast, the presentation by Mid Devon District Council’s CEO, Stephen Wolford, added real substance to the new homes debate.”

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Penny Mills, Director of CPRE Devon, added: “We are grateful to the Minister for coming to Devon and to Sir Hugo Swire for arranging the visit. Our event was packed with over two hundred people interested to hear what Mr Malthouse had to say. Unfortunately, he neither addressed the key findings of our report nor the fact that the government has used an outdated and flawed methodology in calculating new housing figures. We will, therefore, be writing to Mr Malthouse with the questions people want answered. We will continue our campaign to challenge the number of homes the government claims need to be built in Devon and to protect Devon’s precious asset - its countryside.”

Six months after Opinion Research Services (ORS) published the report, DEVON HOUSING NEEDS EVIDENCE, Local Planning Authorities appear to be responding to pressure to take note of the evidence. East Devon District Council and Exeter City Council are commissioning their own studies to take a fresh look at the justification for continuing to build the number of new homes planned.

Latest figures released nationally by CPRE show how much brownfield land is available for development before more countryside is lost. The figures show that across Devon there are currently 337 brownfield sites, totalling over 400 hectares of available land with a minimum capacity of 14,405 homes.


Minister urges developers to build beauty for Devon's new build estates - Devon Live
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