English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Best Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, my contribution today addresses one ingredient in the Bill that is easily overlooked but which could prove of immense significance in achieving the quantity and quality of new homes the nation needs. I am referring to the measures in Part 2 that will facilitate strategic authorities—mayors and combined authorities—establishing mayoral development corporations and development corporations of combined authorities, including combined county authorities. These development corporations can take on planning powers, land acquisition and development powers. They will be single-minded and focused on achieving new housing and all the related infrastructure. This will create an alternative to the nation’s current total reliance on a small number of volume housebuilders who plan, design and provide most of this country’s new housing development but who so often fail us in what they produce.

Development corporations can trace their origins to the establishment of overarching planning and development bodies for the pre-war garden cities, and then for the 32 post-war new towns. The most recent example is the London Legacy Development Corporation, or LLDC, which has been doing such good work in the redevelopment of the Olympic site and its environs. Development corporations are already the chosen vehicle for delivery of the new generation of new towns, as set out in the excellent report from the New Towns Taskforce published in September. New town development corporations will follow the pattern of land acquisition and land value capture, creating a master plan, with private financing, and long-term, overarching control in the hands of a publicly accountable body. Now this Bill enables all strategic authorities to establish their own development corporations and assume the same roles as the new town development corporations.

For some years, I have championed the report by Sir Oliver Letwin which dates back to 2018. The Letwin review pointed out that the oligopoly of volume housebuilders will build only at the speed they can sell, without having to reduce their prices. This has ensured that there is always a gap between supply and demand, leading inexorably to growing housing shortages. Letwin recommended ending our dependency on developers that, entirely predictably, work at their own pace and negotiate down the standards and quotas of affordable housing to maximise their profits. In their place, Letwin advocated the establishment of development corporations that would acquire the land and capture the increase in its value when planning consent was subsequently granted. The development corporations’ master plans can then parcel out the site to different profit-making and non-profit-making bodies, covering the full range of types, tenures and uses: housing for sale but also for shared ownership, market rents and social rents; housing for older people and for students, with specialist and pioneering ingredients; plus the place-making green spaces, mixed uses and amenities needed for all new homes.

As an example of the potential of this approach, the Devon Housing Commission, formed by the local authorities in that county, pointed to the opportunity for a development corporation to develop strategic sites in Devon. This would ease pressure on the county’s 10 planning authorities, with the combined county authority taking a cross-boundary view for exemplary major developments. The danger here is that mayors and combined authorities have other important matters to handle, and this route to more and better housing provision may not lead to the strategic authorities taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the Bill.

I have three questions for the Minister, who has a deep understanding of these issues. First, will the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government provide the necessary seed corn as a financial incentive for the strategic authorities to set up their own development corporations?

Secondly, will the MHCLG be drawing up guidance on the governance, funding and delivery of new development corporations? If so, I commend a new report from a distinguished group of architects and planners called Placemaking not Plotting, which provides a helpful basis for the key aspects of urban design to be adopted in place of current poor practice.

Thirdly, are the Government planning to support delivery by these new development corporations with grants or guarantees, perhaps via Homes England, for the initial land purchase on which so much will depend? Any news from the Minister on government support to get these development corporations off the ground would be greatly welcomed. With proper backing from the MHCLG, this component in the Bill, which streamlines the development corporation approach, could revolutionise the quality and quantity of tomorrow’s new homes and communities.