Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Adam Thompson Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 24th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)]

Like so much of the midlands, Erewash as we know and understand it today was born of the industrial revolution. Ilkeston was transformed from a historic market town to a place of hard, serious industry, and Long Eaton was scarcely a village before the coming of the canals and the railways. While the economy has changed, this Erewash of good jobs, thriving town centres and proper communities is still very much in living memory. At the heart of the east midlands—halfway between Derby and Nottingham—Erewash is now a place of immense potential. With this Bill, I believe we can unlock that potential, unleash prosperity, spur economic growth and help to deliver national renewal, creating the jobs and building the new homes that my constituents and this country need.

In Ilkeston, the old Stanton ironworks was a British industrial giant, employing nearly 10,000 people. Now, 20 years on from its closure, on the largest brownfield site in Derbyshire, New Stanton Park rises from the rubble. Every time I drive past, new work has been done on the park, and new jobs are already being created, but this restoration has taken too long. The planning process, with the immense costs, time and insecurity involved, has a serious, direct and negative impact on businesses’ ability to grow.

Erewash has not met its housing targets since they were introduced in 2011—not once in the last 15 years. This problem is part of a decades-long national failure to build enough new homes, which has resulted in a housing crisis named by some as the worst in the developed world. As a result, the cost of buying a home has risen exponentially, rents are ever increasing and the average age of first-time buyers is rising consistently. From the peak, where homeowners represented more than 70% of the population just over 20 years ago, home ownership has fallen by nearly 10%.

Most disturbingly for me, Erewash borough council has a social housing waiting list of more than 5,000 people, or about 2,400 households. This is a staggering failure of the state. Recently, I had the pleasure of showing my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary to the Treasury around 50 new social homes built on a brownfield site in Long Eaton. While this site represents excellent work by my council colleagues, it is not enough. Fifty new social homes is a droplet in the ocean when we have 2,000 families waiting to move in.

For too long, politicians locally and nationally have clung to stopgap measures, trying to treat the symptoms but falling short of a cure. Nobody is denying that people may not like it and that this is really difficult, but the solution is simple: we have to build more new homes. For the young families wanting to settle down, the renters tired of having so much of their hard-earned income paying their landlord’s mortgage, and the 1.3 million households—not people, but households—on social waiting lists in England alone, we have a moral duty to build new homes.

This Bill is at the very heart of this Government’s decade of national renewal. If we are going to make Britain a green energy superpower, we need to build the vital infrastructure that is required. If we want to take back our streets, break down the barriers to opportunity and build a national health service fit for the future, we need to unlock economic growth, so the Government have the money to properly invest in and restore public services. If we are going to put money back in people’s pockets, we need to make it cheaper to buy a home, and if we are going to create the good jobs that people want and need, Britain needs to be a more attractive place to invest, grow and do business. To do all of that, we need to make it cheaper, faster and easier to build a better Britain.