Sarah Gibson

I do recognise that, but we are still nowhere near the levels we were at when councils were actually building. That is important, because for too long—even under this Labour Government—we have assumed that the answer to the housing crisis is more planning permissions, in the hope that the market will deliver, when we know that it will not. That is why I welcome the Bill tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George). It recognises something that we have forgotten in housing policy: land, planning and delivery cannot be separated from one another. As the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Michelle Scrogham) mentioned, we can have planning applications, but delivery is a different issue. As an architect, I have spent most of my adult life trying to deliver buildings and actually get things built on the ground. One of the problems that I repeatedly see is land passing from one developer to another while the planning application process takes so long. With each of those transactions, the price increase on the land and the hope value built into the assumption that planning permission will ultimately be granted mean that, by the time planning permission is secured, the price paid for the land and the expectations on that future development have created so much pressure that almost everything else gets squeezed.