HOUSING (PEAK DISTRICT NATIONAL PARK AREA) (Hansard, 12 June 1980)

§ Mr. Matthew Parris (Derbyshire, West)

I am glad that the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Finsberg), is to reply to the debate. We remember with pride and pleasure the visit he paid to West Derbyshire last year. I am grateful to him for giving up his time this evening. I know that he is a busy man.

Both my hon. Friend and I have had the pleasure of sitting through an ecclesiastical debate. That was a new experience for me. I wonder whether, when our Lord wandered through those piles of stones in Palestine, had He realised that this would be the outcome, He would have given up and gone home. It was extraordinary.

If you should ever go into orbit, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and look down on England from an altitude in which all is indistinguishable save the blurred patches of light formed by the great cities and populous zones, my constituency would appear as a blot of soft and friendly darkness, totally encircled by light—the lights of Manchester, Bradford and Leeds, Sheffield, Derby and Nottingham, Burton, Birmingham. Stoke and, not far away, Liverpool. Half the population of Britain lives more or less within 973 60 miles of an area of spectacular rural beauty. Much of my constituency forms a large part of the Peak District national park.

To the industrial centres of Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Midlands it is almost, writ large, what Hyde Park is to London. Most of Britain can conveniently spend weekends in West Derbyshire. On a sunny bank holiday, it sometimes seems that most of Britain does.

Market forces would have covered most of the Derbyshire hills with breeze-block bungalows years ago. The Peak park planning board exists to stop that. It is hard to get permission to build within the national park and pretty difficult in the surrounding rural areas. The criteria employed discriminate particularly against low-cost, high-density housing. Hon Members will realise why.

The scarcity of supply contrasts with a demand, swollen hugely by the ranks of would-be weekenders or commuters from the surrounding cities. Some of them will pay anything. To them, a stone hovel is a desired country cottage. The effect is to drive prices to levels that belong to another world from that in which my constituents live. In the villages, the bottom rung of the housing ladder has been removed from them. A few weeks ago, in the little village of Froggatt, in my constituency, a quarter of an acre of land, with building permission only for a bungalow, was auctioned for £20,500.

These inflated prices do not stop at the confines of the national park but spread outwards into the surrounding districts. I have made a study this week of the principal estate agents and building societies in the district. I am informed that the cheapest, modern starter homes, for which 90 per cent. mortgages are available, vary in price between the £20,000 mark in Wirksworth and figures approaching £30,000 in the national park itself.

Older properties are mortgageable only if improved and in good repair. Even then, only 80 per cent. mortgages will be available. Prices are lower, but there is little below £15,000 in the towns or £20,000 in the villages. One will need savings of £2,000 or £3,000 and a home loan of between £12,000 and £20,000 before anything comes within reach in 974 West Derbyshire. A young man must earn upwards of £6,000 or his wife, if she works, must earn £2,000 for every £1,000 that his earnings fall below £6,000.

A great many of my constituents are not so lucky. To establish the level of wages, I contacted 20 of the principal or typical employers in the constituency from the Hope Valley cement works just north of the constituency to Nestlé and Charcon Products in the south. In each case, I asked what a young man at the lower end of the wage scale could expect to earn before tax. Expressed as an annual figure, there are two broad bands. Textile, catering, banking, clerical and agricultural workers straddle both sides of the £3,000 mark. Other workers, mainly blue collar, start at £3,500 but fall mostly between £4,000 and £5,000. None reaches £6,000.

This was not a proper statistical exercise, It was simply to find out whether many young would-be house owners in my constituency would be unable to afford to buy their own house. It showed that a great many could never hope to buy. In the villages, the position is desperate. Prices are ludicrous. One either already owns, lives with Mum and Dad, inherits, gets a council house or gets out. Increasing numbers of people get out.

Our council house waiting list, though it is at 1,000 and has doubled recently, does not show the thousands who do not hang around but take themselves to the waiting lists of London and the industrial Midlands, where bed-sitters can be found, the wages are higher, prices are lower and one does not have to have a car.

In and around the national park are all the trappings of a low-wage economy without the compensating low prices. To afford to live in West Derbyshire, many find that they must work elsewhere. To work in West Derbyshire, many find that they must live elsewhere. It is sad, but not surprising, that people have become bitter and that in the villages resentment is sometimes misdirected towards the incomers who are seen as being responsible for breaking up local families. I cannot emphasise too strongly the depth, intensity and unanimity of feeling amongst my constituents on this issue.

To hon. Members who might remind me of my party's commitment to market 975 forces, I say that that commitment, rightly, overlooks the planning function of the national park. That is the interference with the free market which has distorted house prices upwards. If I ask for a little State assistance, it is only to mitigate the effect of this primary intervention. We need it, but it has its casualties. Its casualties are my constituents.

I do not believe that the problem is soluble. Certainly it is not soluble by the Government. However, we can help a little at least in the hardest cases. In general, we can provide an impetus and direction which might be helpful. I shall outline the way forward as I see it, as the West Derbyshire district council sees it and as my hon. Friend the Minister might see it. Some members of the Labour Party on the local council might not concur with me about council house sales. I respect all points of view. I am surprised at how much agreement is possible.

The days of huge new public housing projects are over. West Derbyshire realises that. Most of our housing stock is saleable and much of it, particularly in the larger urban estates, can and should be sold to willing tenants, not just for this generation but for future generations of would-be householders. That would create thousands of bottom and middle rungs on the owner-occupied housing ladder. I welcome it.

In the villages, it should be policy to retain at least some hold over the small and highly desirable estates. The Government initially proposed to help by allowing the council, under clause 18 of the Housing Bill, to restrict subsequent resales by tenants who had bought to people who had lived or worked in the region. Any definition of the region which includes its principal cities drives a coach and horses through the clause. Any definition which excludes them drives a coach and horses through our country geography.

Because it was anxious about that, the district council delayed the implementation in advance of the Housing Bill until it was settled, although that was not on my advice. We were grateful that the Government listened to our anxieties and amended the clause to permit a condition of sale which allows the council first refusal at market prices on any resales within 10 years. We hope that that will help, 976 particularly in villages with acute housing problems, to keep places available for local people. But it will be expensive and must be used discriminatingly.

The main drift of housing policy in West Derbyshire must be towards special housing for special needs, particularly for the elderly. West Derbyshire realises that. The Minister visited the district last year and saw a fine example of the sheltered housing that we are providing at Victoria Court, Matlock. By offering a comfortable alternative to elderly people, we can release private and public housing suitable for families on to the market and provide more bottom and middle rungs for young families.

We need more Victoria Courts. The council planned an exciting new housing project at Darley Dale which was a joint private development of low-cost starter homes for first-time buyers, to which reference was made earlier this evening. In stimulating and assisting private ventures, we do much to bring back those bottom rungs, but the council must be able to provide incentives or it will be easier and more profitable for developers to go for high-cost, low-density housing projects.

I turn to adaptation and improvement for invalids and disabled people. Very often, quite apart from humanitarian purposes, it can save money to keep an individual or a family in their house by helping them to cope with the onset of illness, age or the birth of a disabled child as opposed to the enormously expensive cost of institutionalisation.

I saw a particularly heart-rending case in a town called Wirksworth in my constituency where a little girl with, I think, hydrocephalus was hoping that the council would be able to help with the installation of a downstairs lavatory. It was just the kind of thing that she needed and just the kind of thing that would keep her out of institutional care. It would be cheap at the price. But this argument is commonplace, and I do not think that hon. Members need persuading of its truth.

There are improvement grants in general improvement areas whereby we can bring into the area of the mortgageable exactly the kind of property that could be within the means of the low-paid, first-time buyer. Again, I think that the argument is commonplace and I need hardly develop the point.

977 I have run briefly over the area that I believe we should be recommending to a housing authority like mine as a right future field for its activities. I have indicated that it does not need persuading. I shall return to that point, but first I shall complete my catalogue of ways in which we can help by turning quickly to the private sector.

We have almost no private rented sector in West Derbyshire. We need one. I believe that the shorthold tenure provisions of the Housing Bill enabling landlords to let on fixed terms with certainty of repossession at the end of the term will bring new lettings on to the market. I certainly hope that they will.

I also welcome the provisions for equity sharing which are aimed at those with exactly the problem faced by many of my constituents—that is, the inability to raise the whole of the sum needed. However, it will take time for the idea to catch on, because, although demand is there, I think that supply will be longer in organising itself.

I said that the problems are most acute in our villages, of which there are about 60. Four starter homes of a type designed to appeal to young local couples, rather than to weekenders in search of something quaint, in each of those villages would go further towards solving the problem than Governments commonly ever get in pursuing solutions. Less than 50 acres would be involved, and the planning authorities have the power to permit and specify.

The spin-off in terms of the viability of village post offices, schools and transport is immeasurable. But here we run straight into the Peak park planning board and the county structure plans. Nobody talks about quotas, but the figure set in the national park plan for new housing in the villages is being approached faster than anticipated. I do not complain about that.

The board has been right and human to respond to pressure, but it means that sooner or later we must either have a freeze or have a progressive stiffening of resistance to the granting of permissions. That means that applicants will be processed on criteria other than the intrinsic merit of the application, such as the date on which the application is made. That 978 cannot be right and will increase the already formidable problem faced by the board in its relations with local people.

Like the phases of the planets, and with equal mystery, there will be auspicious and inauspicious periods for making planning applications to the Peak park planning board. I cannot even begin talking to the board about housing. It will simply throw the structure plan at me, as it is bound to do. I do not ask my hon. Friend to reply to this point tonight beyond acknowledging it, but I should like him to refer it to his right hon. and hon. Friends for further discussion.

I now return to West Derbyshire district council's housing department. There has been a muddle between the district council and my hon. Friend's Department over this year's housing investment programme financial ceiling. The delayed announcement of central Government cuts seems to have meant that the council was not scared off its financial commitment for which the Department had issued loan sanctions but which the council could not include on its HIP application until contracts had been entered into. By the time that the council was ready to apply, it was too late. Tenders had already been accepted.

Inside many hon. Members there is a housing official struggling to get out. I am not one of them. I have no idea who is to blame for this muddle, and I have little interest in seeing the apportionment of blame. On the question of whether West Derbyshire has been disingenuous or naive, I am inclined to think that it has had too little guile rather than too much.

I do not ask my hon. Friend to adjudicate or even to comment in any detail. A muddle there has been, and I ask him instead to look at the results, which I shall summarise to the House.

The financial commitments to which I referred are the Parwich and Carsington schemes, small schemes for village housing which cannot now be stopped. The HIP allocation is £1.8 million. Financial commitments already made by the council soak up the remainder of that money. The council has, therefore, frozen everything else. That is, specifically, all further ventures, including the Darley Dale project and all sheltered housing projects. 979 That also includes all new council mortgages, all improvement grants and general improvement areas, all adaptations for the invalid and disabled, and improvement schemes to the older post-war council estates, except for schemes already started.

My hon. Friend will have leapt ahead of my argument to anticipate its conclusion. The effect of this muddle has been to freeze the council into the very engagement with public sector housing from which it is Government policy that we should disengage ourselves. Improvement grants and general improvement areas were to revitalise the public sector at the bottom end. The Civic Trust had just persuaded the Abbey National building society to give mortgage preference in the GIA in Wirksworth.

Adaptations for the infirm keep them out of institutions. Helping the elderly unlocks their previous housing. Council improvements and mortgages increase saleability and sales. New starter homes launch poorer young people into home ownership. I need not develop the point.

It is clear that I must give my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary time to reply. I do not ask for a detailed reply. I ask simply for the assurance that he will ask the officials in his Department again to discuss sympathetically with my council the special and pressing problems this year and in future years in West Derbyshire.

§ The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. Parris) for his kind words. I certainly enjoyed my visit to Matlock last year and the opening ceremony that I performed at Victoria Court.

I am certainly interested to hear from my hon. Friend about the problems of housing in West Derbyshire, and I am grateful to him for drawing my attention to the special problems which arise because the West Derbyshire district council and the Peak District national park overlap. When I visited that area last autumn, my hon. Friend mentioned that fact to me. I pay tribute to the careful way in which he represents the views of both his local authority and his constituents.

980 I understand that about two-thirds of the district lies within the Peak park, which is administered for planning purposes by the Peak park joint planning board. I am told that the only West Derbyshire town lying within the Peak park, is Bakewell but that the other towns and larger settlements of the district, which are Matlock, Matlock Bath, Ashbourne and Wirksworth, all lie just outside the Peak park.

In reaching his decision about the proposed housing policies contained in the approved structure plan for the park, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was conscious of the need to halt the decline in population by making sufficient provision for those for whom the park was a natural home and place of work together with some provision for inward migration to achieve a balanced age structure. For these reasons, my right hon. Friend modified the plan to increase the proposed scale of provision for housing in the West Derbyshire parts of the park. It remains, however, a very modest provision and, as is appropriate in a national park, the policies of the approved structure plan for development control generally confine new housing development to the larger settlements and mainly restrict it to a scale, design and location appropriate to the existing character of the settlements.

Because of the desirability of this area as a place to live—and I certainly understand that—pressures for the acquisition of available houses and building land are inevitably very heavy, both from people working further afield and choosing either to commute from the area or use houses there as weekend homes and from people wishing to settle in the area on retirement. Pressure of demand is, as my hon. Friend demonstrated very starkly, inevitably reflected in prices.

The local authority is, of course, very much aware of this problem, and in an excellent paper called "Housing Strategy for West Derbyshire 1979–86" it set out a number of policies to meet it. These include the identification in local plans of pieces of land for house building at higher than average densities to provide for lower-priced housing, the initiation of building-for-sale schemes in areas where new, lower-priced housing is unlikely to become available in the normal way 981 through the private sector, and the continuation of its policy of making provision for local authority mortgages and of making full use of the building society support scheme. It also intends to make provision for married and engaged couples joining the council house waiting list and to give high priority to improving the supply of public sector housing for those groups within the national park. In adopting these policies, the authority recognised one of the salient points of the Government's housing policy—namely, the need to look to the private sector to make a major contribution to solving its housing problems.

We have asked local authorities to encourage the development of starter homes, to release land, to participate with the private sector in partnership schemes for the provision of low-cost housing for sale and to help in channelling loan finance to those unable to obtain a mortgage in the usual way. Those and other measures, such as the acquisition of existing empty and rundown houses for improvement and sale and different forms of shared ownership, were discussed with the authority at a meeting in April between its officers and staff from our regional office.

The main problem is one of finance. The total housing capital allocation for 1980–81 had to be reduced because of the urgent need to curb public expenditure, which our predecessors had allowed to run wild. For West Derbyshire, that meant that the 1980–81 allocation of £1.84 million was 71 per cent. of its 1979–80 allocation, at a common price base, and 42 per cent. of its bid. Making that money go round became much more of a problem than would otherwise have been the case because two tenders for a total of 29 new dwellings, which would involve significant expenditure falling in 1980–81, were accepted by the authority in January 1980 before the 1980–81 allocations were notified to it.

That additional committee expenditure in 1980–81 has to be met out of an allocation which is less than it hoped to receive. I am bound to point out that the authority had been warned as early as November 1979 that its 1980–81 allocation was likely to be less than in previous 982 years and that it would be well advised to refrain from entering into further commitment until it knew the details.

It is undeniable that that limits the authority's opportunities for further direct action in the present financial year. However, I hope that it will continue to do all that it can to enlist the support of the private sector in the provision of low-cost housing suitable for younger local people. Bearing in mind the opportunities for augmenting housing capital allocations for 1981–82 onwards by sums equivalent to either 50 per cent. or in some instances 100 per cent. of its housing capital receipts, the authority should be in a better position to implement further policies to alleviate the problem next year.

All the funds available for HIPs this year have been distributed, so there is no prospect of an additional allocation. I have sympathy with the view expressed by my hon. Friend about the muddle that took place. All that I can say to him is that I have noted that point.

As regards the points that my hon. Friend raised with me about the difficulties of housing because of the interaction of the national park in his area, I shall draw them to the attention of my right hon. and hon. Friends who look after the difficult problems of planning boards in national parks. I shall ensure that they see what my hon. Friend has said, and I shall ask them to consider whether there is anything that they can suggest that will be of help to his constituents during the coming year.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the calm way in which he painted the picture as he saw it. I understand the difficulties that have beset a cautious and well-run local authority. I have noted that, and the matter will not be overlooked. I hope that what I have said will, at least, have shown my hon. Friend that the Department understands his problems, those of his local authority and, perhaps most of all, the problems of his constituents.