National Planning Policy Framework

Karen Buck Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. He is absolutely right to raise this issue. The private sector plays a huge role in infrastructure and provision of affordable homes, especially when it carries out the so-called viability assessments. We are not happy with the way that that process has worked, and that is why we started the consultation on it. At the end of that consultation, I believe, will be an outcome where we are much more easily able to hold the developers to account and make sure that they will actually deliver what they said right at the start.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Does the Secretary of State agree with the Conservative leader of the Local Government Association, Gary Porter, who said this weekend:

“If we want more houses, we have to build them, not plan them”,

and that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government needs to “push back against” the Treasury,

“or the nonsense will go on and nothing will change”?

If he does agree, why has he allowed affordable housing funding from his Ministry to be handed back to the Treasury, rather than spent on critically needed affordable homes?

[Sajid Javid]

I agree that to build the homes we need, we need to plan them properly, and that is what these reforms are about. The hon. Lady suggested that the Ministry handed money back. Among the underspend that she and her hon. Friends have mentioned was £65 million that was returned by the Greater London Authority because it did not spend it. That money was returned by the Mayor of London, so perhaps she wants to ask him why he returned funding.