The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)

I thank all noble Lords for this wide-ranging, very productive and comprehensive debate. With over 60 contributions made, I am obviously not going to be able to reply in detail to every one. I will do my best; I have tried to put first the things that were talked about the most. If I do not get to some of the questions I will of course reply in writing. I have been very encouraged to hear the degree of consensus on the need for action and on much of the intent of the Bill, even if there has been some reference to what the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, referred to in her characteristically direct way as the bad and the ugly in the Bill. It has been a very good discussion, and I do not think there is any difference of opinion about the need for things to change. I especially thank the noble Lord, Lord Banner, for his contribution to the Bill, particularly in the critical area of judicial reviews, which we have looked at in great detail; I am grateful for his support in that work. The contributions of the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Liddle, from opposite sides of the House, definitely showed why the Bill is so important. The noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, described it well when he said the Bill is “about the kinds of places we want to build and the kind of country we want to be”. That is a very good way of describing what we are doing here. I will make a few general points and then turn to some of the specific issues that were raised. The noble Lord, Lord Best, referred very powerfully to the housing crisis and the broken model of relying on volume housebuilders to deliver against the housing need which we definitely have. We currently have 160,000 children in temporary and emergency accommodation. That is an absolute scandal—we have to deal with these issues. I was at St Mary’s school in Walthamstow yesterday, where the children are doing a project on homelessness, and I asked them what they would say to the Prime Minister. They said, “Can you tell the Prime Minister to build some more homes that people can afford?” I think that was quite right. I said that I will tell the Prime Minister that, so we will get on with that as quickly as we can. Since 1990, home ownership for 19 to 29 year-olds has more than halved. Homes cost eight times the annual earnings of an average worker. The number of homes granted planning permission has fallen from 310,000 in 2021 to 235,000 in 2025 Q1. The number of new homes is estimated to drop to around 200,000 this year, and this would be the lowest year for net additional dwellings in England since 2015-16. Infrastructure costs have increased by 30%—more than GDP per capita—since 2007, and the time it takes to secure planning permission for major economic infrastructure projects has almost doubled in the last decade to more than four years. We are not putting the blame on planning officers or councillors. I pay tribute to all those planning officers across the country who work with this system day in, day out, and to all the councillors who play their part in it as well. We know that 96% of planning decisions were made by planning officers in the year ending March 2025, and it was that small percentage outside of that which were made by planning committees. Only 20% of planning applications for major development are decided within the 13-week statutory deadline. It is important that we focus now on how we are going to improve this system. I will comment on the points made by the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Grender. On the 700,000 empty homes in this country, once housebuilders have been granted permission for residential development, meeting local housing needs and preferences, we expect to see them built out as quickly as possible. Local planning authorities already have powers to issue completion notices to require a developer to complete its development if it is stalled, and if they fail to do so the planning permission for the development will lapse. On homes being approved but not yet built, we know that too many developments secure planning permission and then are either stalled or not built out quickly, to the frustration of local planning committees and authorities and their communities. That is why we are proposing to introduce a new statutory build-out reporting framework to ensure that there is greater transparency and accountability about the build-out of new residential development. We are currently consulting on that, but we are determined to make sure that communities do not see empty homes, or homes that are permissioned and are not built, when there is such an enormous need for housing around the country.