Matthew Pennycook

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West and Mid Berkshire (Olivia Bailey) on securing this important debate. She has only been in the House a relatively short time, but she has already established a reputation as a doughty champion of her constituency. Those she has the privilege of representing should be reassured by the fact that she has already assiduously conveyed their views and concerns to Ministers on a range of matters, including the one we are considering today. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) and others who have made contributions to the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Reading West and Mid Berkshire raised a number of distinct issues on the provision of affordable rural housing and I will seek to respond to as many of them as I can in the time available to me. Before I do, I would like to make some brief remarks about planning reform and the role of the planning system in delivering homes of all kinds and meeting identified need for affordable housing, as a means of providing some important context. It is not in dispute in this Chamber, I do not think, that the Government have inherited an acute and entrenched housing crisis, or that significantly boosting the supply of homes of all tenures is essential to tackling it. That is why we acted decisively to overhaul the national planning policy framework last year, to revise the anti-supply changes made by the previous Government in December 2023, and to introduce a range of pro-growth measures that will enable us to build the homes and infrastructure our country needs.