Fair Funding Review

Lord Sahota Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I very much agree. I have seen on the front line how cuts to local government funding have affected so much the provision of social activities, culture and leisure in our communities. It is very important that local government has the ability to make provision for local communities in those areas. What happened was that the harder it was for a local council to raise funds, the more they seemed to be penalised through the system. The more deprived a community was, the less likely they were to have the headroom to deliver the kinds of services the noble Earl speaks about. We need to change that, and we are working on reversing that.

[Lord Sahota (Lab)]

My Lords, what assessment have the Government made of the reasons so many local authorities are failing to meet their housing delivery targets? What steps are being taken to support them in doing so?

[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.