Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to streamline the Neighbourhood Planning process.

Over 1,500 communities, representing over 6 million people, have started the process of neighbourhood planning. The Government wants to support communities that actively seek to meet local housing and other development needs through neighbourhood planning, and our £22.5 million support programme for 2015-18 offers a range of financial and technical support and online resources to support neighbourhood planning. The Queen's Speech to Parliament also set out that the Housing Bill would include measures to speed up the neighbourhood planning process. We will be publishing more details in due course. These reforms will build on the reforms to speed up and simplify the process that took effect in February.