Lord Lansley (Con)

Before the Minister’s response to the debate, I will take an opportunity to contribute. We heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, about the Competition and Markets Authority inquiries into the housebuilding industry. I will inject into this short debate one of the findings of the CMA report related to land banks. It states that “the CMA assessed over a million plots of land held by housebuilders and found the practice of banking land was more a symptom of the issues identified with the complex planning system and speculative private development, rather than it being a primary reason for the shortage of new homes”. The reference to “speculative private development” related to the finding immediately prior, where it said a “significant reason behind under delivery of homes are the limitations of private speculative development. The evidence shows that private developers produce houses at a rate at which they can be sold without needing to reduce their prices, rather than diversifying the types and numbers of homes they build to meet the needs of different communities”. This seems to directly complement and follow what was in the Letwin review, which said that we really must have work by housebuilders, and indeed in the planning process, to ensure that we have a diversity of tenures and supply to maximise the market absorption rates into the market. That will stimulate greater speculative private development and reduce land banking.