King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Best Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, the King’s Speech aligns the Government’s strategy for growth with reform of the planning system for housing and infrastructure. Acute shortages of accommodation, and consequent inflated prices and rents, not only present multiple health, social care and welfare burdens for the state, but hold back economic growth. As Professor Duncan Maclennan’s seminal analysis concluded last year,

“the housing market has a big impact on national productivity”.

This is not just a London problem. The Minister’s excellent maiden speech mentioned the cities of Oxford and Cambridge, for example. These may be attractive locations for international investors, but without anywhere for a workforce to live the investment has to go elsewhere. Further afield in Devon, where I declare my interest as chair of the Devon Housing Commission, public and private employers alike express exasperation that recruitment is impossible and Devon’s next generation are leaving the county, defeated by the lack of affordability and availability of a decent home.

Achieving housebuilding targets—1.5 million homes in five years—as well as funding important regeneration will be fiendishly difficult. As the Government prepare their planning and infrastructure Bill, perhaps I can offer some thoughts to the Chancellor for relatively cost-free ingredients to achieve the changes that will lead to stronger local economies.

First, the essential reform of planning must fit within a wider national housing and infrastructure strategy that provides the long-term vision and a road map for the way ahead. What about a statutory housing and infrastructure committee reporting to Parliament, modelled on the Climate Change Committee, which could formulate this strategy and monitor progress year by year?

Secondly, we must end our fated dependency on a handful of volume housebuilders. Instead, the Government should back social housing providers, which need some longer-term certainty over grants and rents to achieve their crucial role, and back the return of SME builders, which used to provide 40% of all new homes but now barely manage 9%.

Thirdly, the Government’s promise of 300 more planning staff is helpful, but we need to go further to restock the hugely depleted planning departments. The Government need to allow local authorities to recover, through developers’ fees, the full cost of an effective, speedy local planning service.

Fourthly, planners must be empowered to insist upon the kind of housing needed locally, not least the level of affordable homes, where so often promises by developers have been broken. Housebuilders must realise that the price they pay for land has to reflect their non-negotiable obligations.

Fifthly, to achieve quality of new development as well as quantity, the Government should use building regulations, not just planning advice, to require higher standards of accessibility and sustainability.

Sixthly, a big welcome for the new development corporations, with simplified compulsory purchase powers to take on not just

“a new generation of new towns”,

and “urban extensions”, but major strategic developments. These bodies can acquire the land, capture its uplift in value and implement a brilliant master plan.

Finally, at present the construction industry does not have the skills to tackle at scale either the new-build or the retrofit programmes that we need. Let us see the new Skills England agency overhauling the existing unfit training levy scheme for the construction industry.

With these relatively inexpensive reforms, I believe that planning, housing and infrastructure could indeed be the key to igniting economic growth and creating enhanced prosperity and productivity. I wish the Chancellor, as well as the new Ministers, every success in this endeavour.