Housing and Regeneration Bill

As I understand it, the noble Baroness seeks clarification of the definition of future needs, and I assure her that it means planning for the future population. We must do that, as everyone in the Committee will understand. That commitment is necessarily reflected in the way in which we forecast and plan for population growth and change. Part of the problem is that our estimates lag behind real world time. It is worth putting on the record that the population is growing and changing in different ways. The most recent ONS household projections for England, which came out last October and were revised at sub-national level in February, project that the number of households will grow by 223,000 on average per year to 2026. Within that, there are some really fascinating pressures. Two-thirds will be single-person households, which reflects what is happening to family formation and lifestyle choices. By 2026, older people will account for almost half the increase in the total number of households: that is, 2.4 million more older households. We have to reflect that in what we do. All that and other elements are being fed into the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit, local authorities and regional spatial strategies, and we are looking at those strategies in the light of that information. There will be an opportunity to update that in due course to come to terms with those figures. Those are the figures that we will work with; and we will work with local authorities, because they know the pressures that they have in their neighbourhoods. We have to work in partnership with them, and we have to bring in the private sector and plan a co-ordinated and integrated strategy. I assure the noble Baroness that we need to take account of our future population. We have a growing younger population in some parts of the country, and we need more large family homes. That will be part of the market intelligence that makes the HCA’s investment priorities and the way in which they are iterated between local authorities, regional strategies and the work of the HCA.