Homes and Planning Bill

Debate between Emily Darlington and Sarah Gibson

Friday 13th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Gibson]

I do recognise that, but we are still nowhere near the levels we were at when councils were actually building. That is important, because for too long—even under this Labour Government—we have assumed that the answer to the housing crisis is more planning permissions, in the hope that the market will deliver, when we know that it will not.

That is why I welcome the Bill tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George). It recognises something that we have forgotten in housing policy: land, planning and delivery cannot be separated from one another. As the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Michelle Scrogham) mentioned, we can have planning applications, but delivery is a different issue. As an architect, I have spent most of my adult life trying to deliver buildings and actually get things built on the ground. One of the problems that I repeatedly see is land passing from one developer to another while the planning application process takes so long. With each of those transactions, the price increase on the land and the hope value built into the assumption that planning permission will ultimately be granted mean that, by the time planning permission is secured, the price paid for the land and the expectations on that future development have created so much pressure that almost everything else gets squeezed.

[Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)]

The hon. Member is making a good case for development corporations. Does she agree that spatial development strategies—there was an announcement on them yesterday, I think—are a good step forward in doing the strategic planning that she is asking for, and that I think we all agree is needed?

[Sarah Gibson]

Absolutely. I recognise that this Government are working towards that, which is why I feel very strongly that the Bill is adding to the work that the Government are doing, not detracting from it.

Over the years, we have seen the squeezing of affordable housing. It is what gets removed every time there is an economic crisis or an economic case for its removal—the social housing, the infrastructure and the quality of the housing itself. I particularly welcome the compulsory purchase provisions in the Bill, as they deal with the issues of affordability for housing associations and local government being able to actually provide this housing. Authorities need to be able to secure the land at a value that makes these homes deliverable, rather than allowing the inflated expectations of future development value to consume the viability of the scheme before a single home is built.

We also need to look again at who actually builds the homes. I speak regularly to the social housing providers in my area, and one problem in relying on developers to construct the affordable element of a large scheme, and then asking the housing association to acquire it, is that those homes have not necessarily been built with what the provider needs. The homes may be the wrong type of house or built to the wrong specification, and increasingly they may leave the provider with the additional costs of bringing them up to the standards the provider will shortly be required to meet.

By 2030, social landlords will need to meet new minimum energy-efficiency standards, and providers are therefore being asked to retrofit thousands of their existing homes while simultaneously finding the money to build new homes designed and built by somebody else.