Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Steve Darling Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who is a great champion of green spaces in development. In our contribution, we are showing how the protections of nature could be strengthened in the Bill without entire chunks of it being deleted. I shall say more about that later.

As we heard from the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), when it comes to rights for individuals, real freedom often depends on decent homes that people can afford and where they can bring up their families. When homes are genuinely affordable for local people, they will command real community consent and support in the planning process. Unless we give a commitment to a massive increase in the number of social and council rent homes, we will not be responding to the needs of those people, and we will fail to meet head-on the criticism that housing developments today are more about profit than about people.

[Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)]

My constituency contains less than the national average proportion of social rented housing, at 7%. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is shocking that the new Government have been asleep at the wheel, and have lacked the ambition to deal with the desperate need for more social rented housing during their first 11 months in power?