Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)

Ambitious. As the explanatory statement sets out, this amendment proposes a new clause after Clause 106 “to prevent ‘land banking’—the practice of purchasing undeveloped land and holding it for future development or resale, rather than immediately building on it”. Its proposed new subsection (1) would create an obligation on the developer or company to declare whether they held planning permission for similar developments within a 10-mile radius of the new site they were seeking permission to buy or lease. Proposed new subsection (2) would give the power to refuse development if any similar sites identified by proposed new subsection (1) had not been activated for over a year. The point succinctly made by others at Second Reading is that we must not conflate housing delivery with granting planning permissions. Planning permission will not meet targets if it is not acted on. Indeed, a Competition and Markets Authority working paper on the housebuilding market in 2023 highlighted that “a number of stakeholders have voiced concerns … around the impact of housebuilders’ land banks on the way the housebuilding market functions”. According to the CPRE, a staggering 1.2 million homes given planning permission since 2015 have not been built. Others report that there are between 500,000 to a million land-bank plots currently being held by the big house developers, with eight of the major companies holding land of a value in excess of £198 billion. In 2023, the Big Issue argued that the amount of land banking by the eight leading housebuilders had increased by 49% since 2018, with all eight companies having enough land to build for more than 11 years based on the rate they built homes in the last full trading year. Indeed, it has been argued before, in the other place, that the timescales involved in land banking in the UK seem long compared to other countries such as Germany, Japan, the USA, and even France.