Baroness Coffey (Con)

My Lords, the Bill in its entirety is designed, to paraphrase the Government, to remove all the barriers that prevent homes being built. The reality is that about a million homes across our country have consent to be built but have not been built. I have explained to your Lordships’ House my concerns that more and more land is being allocated to be built on while we are not doing anything about the homes that have not been built. We are in this odd, almost Catch-22 situation where we are chasing our tails. Meanwhile, there are plenty of families, as we have heard from noble Lords, who do not have a home of their own and are living in temporary accommodation, or indeed worse. By the way, I did group these amendments together; the Government had originally suggested they be separate. I appreciate that Amendment 135HZJ may seem a bit odd; it is basically giving power to allow direction to repeal planning permission, when we are trying to get homes built. However, the combination of Amendments 135HZI and 135HZJ is designed to be very transparent and, frankly, to allow Ministers in MHCLG, all the mayors and all these other bodies that are being developed to get to grips with the situation that we have around the country much better and deliver the outcome, which by and large people share. By reporting where planning consent has been granted and either building just has not started at all or has not been completed, that would give some clarity. We know that the Government have established a variety of task forces to try and help local councils get on with what is proving a problem, so this would make things clearer not only for the Ministers—by the way, they can probably access that information anyway—but for the public and for Parliament. Perhaps I have not identified the right piece of legislation, but legislation certainly exists already where councils can basically say to developers, “Use it or lose it”, but, where councils are not using that, Ministers do not have a way to overreach them. This is the way. I would say it is analogous to something that we put through earlier in the Bill when it comes to energy infrastructure, where the convention has been, “I want to connect. I can generate energy. Give me this, and I can think about how I will eventually do it in detail”. The Government have realised, as had the previous Administration, that stuff just was not getting done. Meanwhile, it was clogging up the system on all sorts of issues. Therefore, this is in effect giving Ministers the same power to say, “We need to get these homes built. We want to make sure in different ways that those developers who are going to build get the consent. Meanwhile, get out of the way, those people who have not actually bothered”. Some of that has traditionally been done to get hope value or whatever it is; nevertheless, we know that land is getting stuck. My noble friend Lady Hodgson of Abinger has put in a—how can I put it? I will not say “aggressive”—demanding timeline for developers to get on with it. Ultimately, I hope that the Minister recognises the intent of the two amendments I have tabled: to make things far more straightforward. It does not entirely to take a Stalinist approach, but it is not far off. They would make the Secretary of State’s words “Build, baby, build” come to fruition. I beg to move.