Fair Funding Review

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The first thing we did was restore the mandatory housing targets because, first, it did not make any sense to us. We wanted to deliver an overall target across the country but we were not saying what part in that each local authority played. Secondly, we know there are a lot of pressures facing local planning authorities. We have invested £46 million in this year’s funding to strengthen the capacity and capability to deliver planning reform to enable local authorities to meet their housing targets. We have made a commitment to recruit 300 additional planners, alongside wider planning policy changes—we will be discussing these later this afternoon—and legislative changes. That will help us deliver the housing and economic growth our country desperately needs.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, my experience as a councillor was that builders and developers would often promise a percentage of social or affordable housing within their building projects and then somehow fail to do that. Are there enough penalties for builders who do that?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We continue to explore this. It is very important that local authorities are able to set in their local plans the targets that they think are appropriate for their local areas. We will continue to explore with local authorities, particularly as we roll out the funding for social and affordable housing, whether there is any more we need to do to make sure that housing is delivered to the targets that each local authority has set itself.