Daisy Cooper

I welcome you to your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I also thank the Deputy Prime Minister for giving me advance sight of her statement, and associate myself and my party with her remarks about the devastating and senseless attacks in Southport. Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected. For too long under the Conservatives, we had a planning system that put developer greed above community need—a system that did not deliver the homes that we needed to tackle the crisis, but did destroy swathes of our green belt. However, the statement raises a great many questions, so here we go. Will local authorities that are at an advanced stage of their draft local plans need to start again with the new standard method, or will they be able to continue? Will authorities that have recently conducted a green belt assessment need to do it again under the new system, or will the current assessment stand? There seems to be a conspicuous absence of a specific target for social homes—not affordable homes, but social homes. Will the Deputy Prime Minister take up the Liberal Democrat target of building 150,000 social homes every single year? We welcome the Government’s proposal to review the compulsory purchase compensation, but will she take up the Liberal Democrat plan to put an end to land banking by reforming the Land Compensation Act 1961 so that local authorities can acquire land at fair values? We welcome the review of the right to buy, but will the Government allow local authorities to use that money to replace lost stock? The Government indicated that they would be reviewing borrowing rules so that local authorities could borrow to invest. Will they allow authorities to borrow to invest on a scale that will allow them to put an end to homelessness, overcrowding and housing register waiting lists? What powers and resources will they give to planning authorities so that they can enforce the requirement to put infrastructure first? Will they scrap the cap on developer planning fees? Finally, some local authorities in the London metropolitan green-belt area, even when they have accounted for all their brownfield sites and all their grey-belt sites, still have to build thousands of homes on the green belt, land which is supposed to have been designed specifically to stop urban sprawl. Will the Government put anything in the national planning policy framework that will give any protection at all to the concept of the green belt?