I thank the Minister for her gracious comments about giving me time to respond. This has been a very good debate and, despite the proximity of an election, a remarkably consensual one about a number of the issues that we know we need to overcome if we are to build the homes we need as a country. Clearly, there are areas of contention and big challenges that require significant political courage to be addressed.
I will briefly give credit to those who have spoken. I agreed with the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) about the importance of allowing local planning departments to be sufficiently resourced to do their job. I have more faith than he does in the ability of the market to fix these problems, but that is probably not an unusual distinction between us.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) for attending the debate. I wish him every success with bringing forward the Shrewsbury ring road—the 9 o’clock to 12 o’clock segment. Although I concentrated primarily on housing in this debate, it could equally well be extended to infrastructure. We must allow ourselves to build what we need to succeed. The Government need to address some of the obstacles that have progressively accreted and stop us from doing things that we know are in the national and often the local interest.
I welcome the ambition that the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) set out for 380,000 homes a year, but that needs to be underpinned by robust methodology in terms of clear national targets. As the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) said, local plans need to be up to date and we need to make sure that they are resourced appropriately so that they can be kept up to date. I count the shadow Minister as a friend in this place, and he is right that there are things that we need to do to give greater accountability for local authorities when it comes to their work. We obviously disagree on nutrient neutrality: I think Labour failed to put their money where their mouth has been when it comes to the importance of house building.
Finally, I thank the Minister. I welcome the fact that we are on track for 1 million homes a year. I would clearly like to see more of that home building and I look forward to discussing with her, as we approach the manifesto-writing process, how we can best deliver it.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).