I am pleased to be able to speak on Second Reading of the Bill, which I broadly welcome. I support its main aims of making the housing market work better for everybody, helping to identify and free up more land to build homes, and speeding up the delivery of the new homes that are so badly needed in many areas of the country. Those aspects of the Bill will help improve the planning system to make it easier to deliver the Government’s ambition of 1 million new homes by the end of this Parliament.
When I arrived in the House last year a sage senior colleague advised me never to get involved in planning matters. Although that may be very sound advice on conservatories and house extensions, it is none the less our duty to ensure that we play a full role in the scrutiny of the Bill. With that in mind, it is good so see such a strong new ministerial team on the Treasury Bench; I look forward to engaging with that team constructively.
I also support the Government’s manifesto commitment to encourage communities to be more engaged in neighbourhood planning, particularly as a vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for civic societies. Community engagement is vital; we need it to build homes and infrastructure while ensuring that that is done in a way that is sympathetic and sensitive to the wishes of local communities. In my view, that will mean that we can build more, not less, as developers and local authorities ensure communities are brought on board at
an early stage and are therefore more likely to support developments. That process is under way in Marple in my constituency.
There is no magic wand to solve the housing shortage. It will require many years of investment, hard work and difficult choices, and while Government play a role, ultimately the work is done by those building houses: the developers. To my mind, there are three ways that developers are stalling in the process to deliver the homes we need at the rate required. The first is land banking, which many hon. Members have mentioned this evening, whereby developers buy up land, often brownfield sites suitable for building and sometimes with planning permissions already granted, but do not build on it, either because they have priorities elsewhere or because they are waiting for the value to increase.
The second issue is when developers are keen to build, but there are delays between the granting of an outline application and the submission of the full planning application. Thirdly, once planning approval has been granted, there can be delays from developers in starting construction, which can sometimes be the result of deliberate land banking, as I have mentioned. These delays cannot always be laid at the door of the planning system, which is a common cry of developers. Developers must take some responsibility themselves. However, measures from the Government to encourage developers to reduce delays are welcome, and these are contained in the Bill.