Planning Reform

Luke Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

My hon. Friend is right, and the protections and provisions that were in the draft framework last year have been carried across. We want councils to be able to designate those spaces for their areas, but we also want to see development come forward in the right places. I think she alluded to a national scheme of delegation, and we will be taking forward our reforms to modernise planning committees that are in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. We will set out details of the national scheme of delegation, and consult on the draft regulations, early next year.

[Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)]

My constituents would have much more sympathy with the Minister if he could explain why, when it comes to house building, Leicester city’s target will go down by 31%, whereas Hinckley and Bosworth’s and north-west Leicestershire’s targets will go up by 59% and 74% respectively. It means that we have 10,000 houses proposed near Twycross, and thousands near Burbage and Barwell. What would he say to my constituents about the unfairness of the discrepancies between targets for city and brownfield sites, and targets for green-belt sites and agricultural land?

[Matthew Pennycook]

As I have said to other hon. Members in the past, housing targets, under the new standard method we have introduced, will increase in every metro area in the country with the exception of London, which was given a fantastical figure by the previous Government, because they applied the urban uplift—an entirely arbitrary 35%—to every London borough, not just the core centre.