Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said, my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb signed Amendment 219. It would introduce a new clause so that where there is permission for a development of 100 homes or more and it is not used, it is use it or lose it, and within the applicable period there is a justifiable case for compulsory purchase of the land. I do not think anyone in your Lordships’ House is going to disagree that we have a housing crisis and a broken housing system. I point noble Lords to a recent “Big Read” in the Financial Times titled “Making British homes affordable again”, which focused on a number of issues, including the role of financial deregulation in the massive escalation of home prices. Here, we are talking about the plan where the land is identified and everyone agrees this is the way forward, and then we run into the private housebuilders, where the legal obligation of the managers is to make money. They have no legal obligation to build homes: the law says to make as much money as you possibly can. I would be very tempted to use the term land banking to describe managers who just sit on land and wait until they can make more money. That means that homes are not built, and they are needed in places where people want to live. The amendment does not force anything but allows the possibility of a CPO, to take this forward to get those homes built. Surely, that is what some communities are desperately aching for.