- 1:04 pm
- Before I begin my statement, I know that the whole House will join me in sending our deepest condolences and strength in the hours ahead to those affected by yesterday’s shocking incident in Southport. As a mother and grandmother, I cannot even begin to imagine the depth of pain and suffering of those involved. I would like to echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Patrick Hurley) in thanking the police and the emergency services for their swift response. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have already sadly lost loved ones and those who are now fighting for their lives.With your permission, Mr Speaker, I have come to the House to make a statement about the Government’s plan to get Britain building. Delivering economic growth is our No. 1 mission—it is how we will raise living standards for everyone, everywhere, and the only way we can fix our public services—so today I am setting out a radical plan not only to get the homes that we desperately need, but to drive growth, create jobs and breathe life back into towns and cities. We are ambitious, and what I say will not be without controversy, but this is urgent. This Labour Government are not afraid to take the tough choices needed to deliver for our country.We are facing the most acute housing crisis in living memory, with 150,000 children in temporary accommodation, nearly 1.3 million households on social housing waiting lists and under-30s less than half as likely to own their own home compared with the 1990s. Rents are up 8.6% in the last year. Total homelessness is at record levels. There are simply not enough homes.Those on the Conservative Benches knew that, but what did they do for 14 years? As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor said yesterday, they ducked the difficult decisions. They put party before country. They pulled the wool over people’s eyes by crowing about getting 1 million new homes built in the last Parliament, but they failed to get anywhere near their target of 300,000 homes a year. In a bid to appease their anti-housing Back Benchers, they made housing targets only advisory. They knew that would tank housing supply, but they still did it. As I stand here today, I can reveal the result: the number of new homes is now likely to drop below 200,000 this year. Unforgivable.That legacy makes our job all the harder, but it also makes it so much more urgent. So today, I will explain how Labour will deliver the change needed to turbocharge growth and build more homes. I will start with housing targets. Decisions about what to build should reflect local views, but that should be about how, not whether, to deliver new homes. While the previous Government watered down housing targets, caving in to their anti-growth Back Benchers, this Labour Government are taking the tough choices, putting people and country first.For the first time, we will make local housing targets mandatory, requiring local authorities to use the same method to work out how many homes to build. But that alone is insufficient to meet our ambition, so we are also changing the standard method used to calculate housing need so that it better reflects the urgency of supply for local areas. Rather than relying on outdated data, this new method will require local authorities to plan for homes proportionate to the size of existing communities, and it will incorporate an uplift where house prices are most out of step with local incomes. The collective total of these local targets will therefore rise from some 300,000 a year to just over 370,000 a year.Some will find that uncomfortable, and others will try to poke holes, so I will tackle four arguments head on. The first is that we are demanding too much from some places. To that, I say we have a housing crisis and a mandate for real change, and we must all play our part. The second is that some areas may appear to get a surprising target. No method is perfect, and the old one produced all sorts of odd outcomes. Crucially, ours offers extra stability for local authorities.The third argument is that we are lowering our ambition for London. I am clear that we are doing no such thing. London had a nominal target of almost 100,000 homes a year, based on an arbitrary uplift, which was absolute nonsense. The London plan has a target of around 52,000, and around 35,000 were delivered in London last year. The target we are now setting for London of roughly 80,000 is still a huge ask, but I know it is one that the mayor is determined to rise to, and I met him about this last week. Fourthly, some will say that a total of 370,000 is not enough. To that I say: ambition is critical, but we also need to be realistic.Let me move on to the green belt. Once we have targets for what we need to build, next we need to ensure that we build in the right places. The first port of call must be brownfield land. We are making some changes today to support that, but they are only part of the answer, which is why we must create a more strategic system for green-belt release, to make it work for the 21st century. Local authorities will have to review their green belt if needed to meet housing targets, but they will also need to prioritise low-quality grey-belt land, for which we are setting out a definition today. Where land in the green belt is developed, new golden rules will require the provision of 50% affordable housing, with a focus on social rent, as well as schools, GP surgeries and transport links that the community needs, and improvements to accessible green space. Let us not forget that the previous Government’s haphazard approach to building on the green belt saw so many of the wrong homes built in the wrong places, without the local services that people need. Under Labour, that will change.Increasing supply is essential to improving affordability, but we must also go further to build genuinely affordable homes. Part of that must come from developers. The Housing Minister will meet major developers later to ensure that they commit to matching our pace of reform. An active, mission-led Government must also play their role, which is why I am calling on local authorities, housing associations and industry to work with me to deliver a council house revolution. This is not just a nice add-on, but vital to getting the 1.5 million homes built, because we know that schemes with a large amount of affordable housing are likely to be completed faster, and injecting confidence and certainty into social housing is how we will get Britain back to building.The previous Government had to downgrade the number of new homes that their affordable housing programme would deliver. Today, I can reveal that only 110,000 to 130,000 affordable homes are due to be built under that programme, down from their original target of 180,000. In our worst-case scenario, some 70,000 families in need of a secure home will lose out. How have they let that happen? Once again, this Government will have to pick up the pieces. That is why today I am announcing immediate steps for the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation. We will introduce more flexibilities in the current affordable homes programme, working with Homes England, and will bring forward details of future Government investment at the spending review. I recognise that councils and housing associations need support, too, so my right hon. Friend the Chancellor will set out plans at the next fiscal event to give them the rent stability that they need to borrow and invest.We must also maintain existing stock, which is why I am announcing important changes to the right to buy. We have already started reviewing the increased right to buy discounts introduced in 2012, and will consult in the autumn on wider reforms. We are immediately increasing flexibilities for councils when using right to buy receipts. In addition, to help councils provide homes for some of the most vulnerable in society, I can confirm today that the £450 million of the local authority housing fund will flow to them to provide 2,000 new homes. This is what Labour does.These reforms are key to realising our wider growth ambitions. Part of that comes from new homes themselves, releasing the untapped potential of our towns and cities, which for too long have been throttled by insufficient and unaffordable housing. It also flows from making it easier to build the infrastructure on which we rely, so we will make it easier to build laboratories, gigafactories, data centres and electricity grid connections. We must make it simpler and faster to build the clean energy sources needed to achieve zero-carbon energy generation by 2030. We have already ended the de facto ban on onshore wind, but we are also proposing that large onshore wind projects be brought back to the nationally significant infrastructure projects—NSIP—regime. We will change the threshold for solar development to reflect the developments in solar technology, and set a stronger expectation that authorities identify renewable energy sites.To deliver all that, we need every local authority to have a development plan in place. Up-to-date local plans are essential to ensure that communities have a say in how development happens. Areas with a local plan are less vulnerable to speculative developments through appeals, yet just a third of places have one that is under five years old. This must change. We will fix this by ending the constant changes and disruption to planning policy, setting clear expectations of universal local plan coverage and stepping in directly when local authorities let residents down. Local plans ensure local engagement and are critical to making developments that meet local people’s needs.While demanding more of others, we are also going to demand more of ourselves. Two weeks ago, I said that I will not hesitate to review an application where the potential economic gain warrants it. So today, I can confirm that Ministers and I will mark our homework in public, reporting against the 13-week target for turning around ministerial decisions.I know that what I have said seems a lot, but this is only the first step. We plan to do so much more. We will introduce a planning and infrastructure Bill that will reform planning committees so that they focus on the right applications with the necessary expertise. We will further reform compulsory purchase compensation rules so that what is paid to landowners is fair but not excessive. We will enable local authorities to put their planning departments on sustainable footings, streamline the delivery process for critical infrastructure and provide any legal underpinning that may be needed to ensure that nature recovery and building work hand in hand. We will also take the steps needed for universal coverage of strategic planning within this Parliament, which we will work with local leaders to develop and formalise in legislation. Shortly, we will say more about our plan for the next generation of new towns. Because we know that this crisis cannot be fixed overnight, in the coming months the Government will publish a long-term housing strategy to transform the housing market so that it delivers for working people.These are the right reforms for the decade of renewal that the country so desperately needs. We will not be deterred by those who seek to stand in the way of our country’s future. Opposition Members may say that it cannot be done but, once again, I will prove them wrong. This Government will build 1.5 million high-quality, well-designed and sustainable homes. We will achieve the biggest boost to affordable housing for a generation, and we will get Britain building to spur the growth that we need. I commend this statement to the House.
- Several hon. Members rose—
- I call Kemi Badenoch. If you can, shadow Secretary of State, aim for between seven and eight minutes.
- 1:19 pm
- Thank you, Mr Speaker. I echo the comments by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) regarding the appalling incident in Southport. We on the Conservative Benches send our deepest condolences to the families of all those who are impacted.Having listened to the right hon. Lady’s statement, I have many questions. I know she will not be able to answer all of them, certainly not in the time we have today, so I hope that, for the questions she does not have the answer to now, she will be able to provide written answers within a month and before the end of the summer recess, so we can pick up quickly when we return for her Department’s oral questions.The Labour party has a mandate to deliver what it promised in its manifesto. As a party which has governed for most of the past 100 years, the Conservatives respect that mandate. It is our job, as His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, to scrutinise its plans and ensure that Labour is saying what it means and, more importantly, doing what it says. With that right to deliver its manifesto come many responsibilities. Labour now has the responsibility—unlike in its manifesto—to be crystal clear about what it actually wants to do to avoid prolonged uncertainty. It now has a responsibility to understand and address the concerns of councillors and local residents. It now has a responsibility to explain the economics and allocate the funding that we all know will be needed for this plan. It now has a responsibility not to be contradictory in what it is setting out. It must not make promises that any impartial observer knows cannot be delivered. Crucially, it must not break its commitments early, yet we are already seeing changes to what it committed itself to.On 20 June, the Chancellor stated that the Government would update the national planning policy framework within 100 days, so why is Labour now briefing that it will be before the end of the year? That is a lot more than 100 days. They have just started and they are already changing their targets. Will the right hon. Lady confirm that the NPPF will be updated and in effect by mid-October, the deadline they set for themselves? They are proposing an eight-week consultation over the summer holidays for their updates to the NPPF. This is the third set of updates we will have in a year. In the previous consultation on the NPPF in 2023, we had 2,600 responses. How will they have a meaningful consultation, which is what the legislation requires, that respects the input of local planning authorities and others? There will be legal challenges. Are they ready for them?
- Let me start by welcoming the right hon. Lady to her place. I wish her luck for her leadership campaign, now that she has confirmed that she is running. It was her ambition all along to be Leader of the Opposition, not mine. I must say that she seems to be taking to opposition very naturally. I think she will find herself comfortable for a long, long time on the Opposition Benches. She had a lot to say in her response and I will come to the substance of it in a moment. She has already put in quite a few written questions. I look forward to many more from her once she has had a chance to read and digest her brief after the election.There were a couple of things that I am not quite sure the right hon. Lady understood. First—this is critical—the British people kicked the Conservatives out of office in a landslide. Secondly, why was that? Let me remind her. The Government in which she served left us to clear up the mess. They crashed the economy and trashed our public services. They bankrupted Britain and they covered it up. They threw the book at the doctors and then they doctored the books. She keeps speaking about the Tories’ record on housing, but I remind her again that year after year the Tories failed to meet their housing targets. She speaks about the Mayor of London and the bizarre figures they set for him, but the Conservative Government—talking of promises they can’t keep—failed to meet their own target in every single year.On the right hon. Lady’s question about the NPPF consultation, it starts today, for eight weeks. We are asking people to engage. It is an incredibly detailed consultation, because we mean business. It will come as no surprise that the work needed to be done after the disaster of the last Tory Government, which ripped up the NPPF and made a right mess of it. The right hon. Lady talked about the affordable homes grant. The former Tory Secretary of State handed £1.9 billion of vital funds back to the Treasury. This Government will, working with Homes England, make it more flexible to get the homes we need.
- You are just reading! You are supposed to be answering the questions, not just reading out what has been written for you to read.
- These are the answers to the questions. [Interruption.] No, they are the bits that I have written, actually, in regard to her questions.Members of the party opposite are now talking to themselves and not the country. The right hon. Lady mentioned chaos and uncertainty; I really do not know how Opposition Members can say that with a straight face after the chaos and uncertainty that we have seen, with countless Housing Secretaries not knowing what was going on.In every inner-city area—this is in answer to the question—there are increases in the targets. I remind Members that we inherited the most acute housing crisis in living memory. I say to the right hon. Lady that the green belt definition is in the consultation document, and I suggest that she read it. It also tackles the issue of “beautiful homes”, We will build homes at scale and they will be beautiful. We will protect the natural environment, and we will make sure that people have the homes that they deserve and need.I was astonished by what the right hon. Lady said about councils and council leaders. The council leaders I have spoken to are overjoyed by the fact that the Tories were kicked out. They say to me that they have been left in a dire situation. I know that Opposition Members like to think that that is just Labour councils, but councils across the political spectrum have been left in a disastrous situation, because the party opposite did not build the homes that people need. We have a homelessness crisis in this country. People under the age of 30 cannot get homes now. It is impossible for people to get on to the housing ladder. That is the failure of the last Conservative Government, and that is what we are going to fix. That is what we are going to get on and do.
- I welcome you to your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I also welcome both the ambition and the detail in my right hon. Friend’s statement, and the commitments made in it.I have two questions. First, if the targets are not mandatory—although, in the last Parliament, the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee said that they had to be—many councils will simply choose to ignore them, but if they are to be mandatory, will my right hon. Friend assure me that they will be based on a proper needs assessment of each local authority, and will do away with the nonsensical and arbitrary urban uplifts to which she referred in the context of London?Secondly, may I ask a question about social housing? I was proud to be brought up in a council house, as my right hon. Friend was. Will she work closely with local authorities and look particularly at land value capture? Will she ensure that when the planning permission for a site uplifts the value of that site, the total increase in value does not go to the landowners alone, but is used to benefit the public purse and reduce the cost of building those homes?
- I can confirm that we are getting rid of the urban uplift. The new method of establishing housing targets is better than the previous one, which we believed was outdated. The urban uplift figures were plucked from thin air, but we believe that our new method will give councils the stability and certainty that will enable them to plan for the homes and local services that they need. As for land value capture, there is a little bit about it in the consultation document, but there will be more in the forthcoming planning and infrastructure Bill.
- I welcome you to your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I also thank the Deputy Prime Minister for giving me advance sight of her statement, and associate myself and my party with her remarks about the devastating and senseless attacks in Southport. Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected.For too long under the Conservatives, we had a planning system that put developer greed above community need—a system that did not deliver the homes that we needed to tackle the crisis, but did destroy swathes of our green belt. However, the statement raises a great many questions, so here we go.Will local authorities that are at an advanced stage of their draft local plans need to start again with the new standard method, or will they be able to continue? Will authorities that have recently conducted a green belt assessment need to do it again under the new system, or will the current assessment stand? There seems to be a conspicuous absence of a specific target for social homes—not affordable homes, but social homes. Will the Deputy Prime Minister take up the Liberal Democrat target of building 150,000 social homes every single year? We welcome the Government’s proposal to review the compulsory purchase compensation, but will she take up the Liberal Democrat plan to put an end to land banking by reforming the Land Compensation Act 1961 so that local authorities can acquire land at fair values? We welcome the review of the right to buy, but will the Government allow local authorities to use that money to replace lost stock?The Government indicated that they would be reviewing borrowing rules so that local authorities could borrow to invest. Will they allow authorities to borrow to invest on a scale that will allow them to put an end to homelessness, overcrowding and housing register waiting lists? What powers and resources will they give to planning authorities so that they can enforce the requirement to put infrastructure first? Will they scrap the cap on developer planning fees?
- The answer to the hon. Lady’s direct question about local plans is that it depends on how far they have got. There will be a transition, as we explained in the consultation document, because we recognise that some areas are quite far on. As for where that is up to, it depends very much on what the difference is between what the local plan says and what we have asked. We have explained that in the consultation document as well. We have to be fair to those that have already done the work: when the work has been done, it is just a question of updating it and not disregarding those that already have local plans. A third of areas have up-to-date local plans, so I urge all Members to speak to their local authorities to ensure that they have their local plans, because that is how we ensure that people feel engaged and part of the process—which is critical—and how we protect green belt and other areas by ending the speculative developments that we have been seeing.The hon. Lady asked about the number of social homes. I talked about the flexibility in the affordable homes grant. There is some stuff in the consultation document about the right to buy, which I recognise, and about how councils and housing associations can borrow to bring up their stock. I also recognise the problem we have faced as a result of the homelessness crisis, and I am particularly keen to tackle it. We have talked about compulsory purchase orders as well, and we are consulting on that because we think that it needs to be dealt with. We will deal with some of the other issues in the planning infrastructure Bill.Planning will be strengthened—we have already announced 300 extra local planners—and we will strengthen section 106. There will be an accelerator taskforce to deal with stalled sites. When grey belt land is released, the golden rules that I outlined will apply, and we will expect a great deal from developers when they are using that land. We are consulting on fees as well. There is a lot in this consultation, which I believe will make a significant difference to engagement with local areas and ensuring that we meet the housing target that we need and the country desperately deserves.
- Too many families are housed in substandard, overcrowded flats created through permitted development rights, such as former office block conversions. Will the Deputy Prime Minister give families in my constituency some hope for the future by confirming Labour’s commitment to good-quality, affordable family houses, including council houses, under her proposals?
- My hon. Friend is right: 14 years of the Tories have left social and affordable housing in a crisis. To fix our overall problem with the housing crisis, we must have more social housing for rent. The shadow Secretary of State talked about speaking to councils, but Members here, including new Members, will know how desperate the situation is from their casework—from what is already arriving in their inboxes and their post—and from what their local leaders are saying. This is because of the supply problem, and because we need to fix the problem around social and affordable housing. That is why we have our golden rules, and why we are going to strengthen section 106. We expect developers to do what they say they are going to do, and all our Departments will work to make sure that the infrastructure is there, so that people get the homes they need locally and see the infrastructure that improves nature and their local area.
- New Forest district council has recently had its local plan agreed on the basis of local housing need. When will it be required to reopen that assessment on the basis of the right hon. Lady’s new algorithm, and when will the target become mandatory?
- The short answer is when it next updates. As I said in my answer to the shadow Secretary of State, councils that have an up-to-date local plan will not be made to start again. I commend the right hon. Gentleman’s local authority for having an up-to-date plan, because that is the best way to have consultations with a local area and provide the housing that local people need. This Government will work with local leaders and mayors to make sure that we deliver the houses that local people want and deal with the crisis they face.
- I congratulate my right hon. Friend on making a superb statement. She knows that she will have strong support on the Labour Benches for building the homes that we need in Liverpool to tackle homelessness, rising costs and the huge waiting list for social housing, but councils will be reluctant to build if they know that houses will simply end up in the hands of private landlords who exploit the right to buy. I welcome her review into the higher discounts imposed by the last Government. Can she assure me that it will be a rapid review? Given the mess that she has inherited, there is no time to waste in clearing this up.