Building Homes

Lord Sikka Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

There are clear links between the new National Planning Policy Framework and the English devolution programme. The English Devolution White Paper, which was published yesterday, is a consultation document, and we will be taking views on it as time goes on. The noble Lord, Lord Young, is right to say that there is a proposal in that White Paper for mayors to have strategic spatial planning powers. Across those sub-regional areas—we are talking about areas with a population of around 1.5 million—they will be looking at transport, infra- structure, probably housing numbers across the whole area, and other issues that are strategic in nature.

I do not believe that this undermines in any way the status of local plans. Where there is local government reorganisation, there will be some consolidation of plans to make this work at the level of the new councils. The strength of the local plan will be retained in determining where the allocations in the strategic spatial plan will be located. I do not think the intention of spatial planning is to undermine local plans. I remember the days of regional planning; we are not going back to that, because people felt it was too big a scale. It makes a lot of sense to do this at sub-regional level. When planning an economy, infrastructure and housing growth, you start at sub-regional level and then the local plans fit in with that.

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, the average house price is 8.6 times the average household disposable income. Last week, the ONS said that only about 10% of the population could afford to buy a house. This means that the Government will have to find ways to drastically reduce property prices and/or drastically increase the workers’ share of GDP, which cannot be done without reducing the capital share of GDP. It would be helpful to know how the Government are going to proceed.

The second part of my question follows from a Question I asked last week. On 11 December, I drew attention to some of the resource constraints on housebuilding and asked the Minister to

“publish a detailed report showing how each of the constraints on housebuilding is to be alleviated”.—[Official Report, 11/12/24; col. 1762.]

The Minister did not directly answer that question. I am assuming that someone somewhere has done some kind of risk analysis. If so, can the Minister now assure the House that the report will be published?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for both his questions. We are very aware of the point he raises about the affordability of housing, which is why, in spite of a very difficult Budget round, we have put a great deal of money into enhancing the ability to deliver affordable housing and social housing—a total of around £1.3 billion, with £500 million announced in the Budget. Some of the changes we have made to the planning process—for example, to require local authorities to determine not just how many homes they need but the tenure of those homes—will help with that as well.

To identify the obstacles to housebuilding, the housing accelerator programme has, with the industry, local authorities and other stakeholders, looked at what the key barriers have been to delivering the homes we need. It is working with specific sites where building has stalled and more generally to look at the barriers and how we overcome them. We have identified capacity in the planning system as one of those barriers, which is why we have put in additional funding this year to improve the capability and capacity of planning departments. We will be working further with our colleagues in the Department for Education to improve the number of planners coming through the training system. We have made changes to the planning fee process as part of this which will increase the quantum of funding that local authorities will have available in the planning process. The new homes accelerator has looked across all those barriers.