Westminster Report

By The Rt Hon Mark Francois Member of Parliament for Rayleigh and Wickford.

In our constituency of Rayleigh and Wickford, just as in many other parts of the country, one of the most contentious local issues continues to be the pace, scale and location of major housing developments.
This debate is now likely to become even more amplified, following the new Labour Government’s recently announced plans to reintroduce “mandatory” housing targets, combined with a new method for calculating “housing need”, based upon a computer algorithm, rather than practical experience, detailed local knowledge and sheer common sense.
Under Labour’s post-election plans, announced in the House of Commons on 30 July, they are now seeking to build some 370,000 homes a year – a massive increase which will entail devouring a lot of our precious Green Belt, especially in Essex. Locally, this means increasing Rochford District Council’s annual target, from an ‘advisory’ (you can essentially argue back) number of 356 units per year to a “mandatory” (you can like it or lump it) figure of 675 units.
Numerically, that’s roughly the equivalent of building the new High Elms Park development in Hullbridge – every single year – regardless of the ability (or rather inability) of our local infrastructure to cope with it.
It is true, that our current system of planning for new development is clearly in need of reform. It is too slow, too bureaucratic, too complicated, and highly legalistic in form.
This makes it difficult for local residents to actively participate in the evolution of the communities in which they live. (This is especially so when they end up at a planning inquiry, faced by highly qualified barristers, hired by wealthy property developers, as in the case of the highly controversial development by Bloor Homes, along the Ashingdon Road, which, unfortunately, they eventually won on appeal).
We undoubtedly do need to build some more homes in this country – young people cannot expect to live at home with their parents forever.
However, we need to build the right types of high-quality homes, in the right places and, crucially, in a sustainable way, that does not materially damage the quality of life of the already existing residents.
Put another way – and I say this based on my twenty-three years’ experience as a constituency MP – it is sometimes possible to create successful new developments but that has to be something that is done with people rather than to people.
Indeed, I raised my serious concerns about these new Labour proposals in the House of Commons, as soon as they were announced. As I told the new Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner MP, in reply, on the day (which you can see on my Facebook page)
“It is possible to have successful development, but from experience, it has to be something done with people and not to people. This policy is the latter.
These pernicious top-down targets have the practical effect at the ground level of setting one town against another, one village against another and one local community against another; and given the Chancellor’s statement on public spending yesterday, who will pay for the tens of billions of pounds worth of infrastructure that would be required to make all this work?
Why then, is the Secretary of State going back to the old, failed way of doing it, which will not work”?   (House of Commons Hansard, 30 July 2024, col. 1193.)
Alongside this, there are several other, specific, concerns that I share regarding Labour’s proposed plans, practically, economically and environmentally.
Firstly, it is clear that our local infrastructure in South Essex simply could not cope with these sorts of proposals. Our essential infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, GP surgeries and especially roads have struggled to keep pace with even the housebuilding we have seen to date.
As every South Essex motorist already well knows, the A127 and the A13 are already frequently bumper to bumper during the morning and evening peak and yet STILL Labour want to cram thousands and thousands more houses into our county.
Moreover, we have also had to suffer endless roadworks in the past few years, caused not just by utility companies doing seemingly endless repairs, but by developers connecting new estates to existing supply networks – often painfully slowly (especially via Cadent, who seems to be about the worst of the lot).
Instead of this socialist, “top-down”, Whitehall-centric approach, we should be promoting a more localised, “bottom-up” alternative, via Neighbourhood Plans, which are already catered for in existing legislation and whereby local communities, be they towns or villages, come together to create detailed proposals concerning how their communities should grow, what types of development should be encouraged and what elements of new infrastructure – which should be provided first, not last, – are needed to sustainably facilitate them, in both the short and long term.
Secondly, Labour’s plans are economically illiterate. They propose mandating that half of all new housing developments should be “affordable housing” (which has never been precisely defined but which generally relates to housing, to buy or to rent, at below the normal market value).
For comparison, Rochford,’s policy is that a third should be “affordable.”
Labour’s plan might sound laudable at first but, Labour’s Mayor of London, Sadiq “Ulez” Khan, has had the same policy for years, which meant many developments were simply not economically viable – which is principally why he has never got anywhere near his ambitious housing targets for London. Ironically, Labour’s new plans materially CUT Khan’s housing targets in the capital, while increasing those in the Home Counties, including Essex, instead. Frankly, it didn’t work in London and it won’t work here, either.
Thirdly, as research by the Local Government Association ( LGA) has highlighted, there are now around one million units of housing, which already have planning permission but which have never actually been constructed by the house-building industry, including for the reasons just outlined above.
Surely, the developers should be encouraged to build those already approved developments first, before asking for yet more swathes of our precious Green Belt land, on which to make their profits? We need much of this agricultural land to feed our nation, not just to be concreted over, instead.
To bring this all together in practical terms – and as I pointed out very clearly during the recent General Election campaign – I am FIRMLY against the proposals to build thousands of houses at Dollymans Farm, on largely Green Belt land, between Rayleigh and Wickford.
Crucially, although this land goes right up to the Basildon Borough boundary at Shotgate, it is almost all within the Rochford District Council area. That is why I am calling on the currently Lib Dem-led Rochford Council to firmly reject these proposals, in their forthcoming new District Local Plan.
Rather, we should  “Dump Dollymans” from the outset and not allow these environmentally damaging, completely unsustainable proposals, which represent totally unacceptable urban sprawl, right across our local Green Belt, any official comfort at all.
In summary, when it comes to development, I really don’t believe that “the man, or woman, in Whitehall, knows best,” Conversely, I would argue that local, democratically elected councillors, who know their area very well, quite often know better.
I am therefore completely opposed, as a matter of principle, to Labour’s Whitehall-driven, algorithm-based, like it or lump it, undemocratic plans to force mandatory housing targets down our throats in Essex and I will continue to fight these proposals, both locally and in the House of Commons, to the best of my ability, as your MP. 

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