Oral Answers to Questions

Claire Young Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Jim McMahon]

The fair funding review deliberately took into account the different types of local authorities that were funded through the settlement, from London authorities and urban authorities to authorities for coastal or rural communities. For the first time we made sure that deprivation was picked up in the funding formula, and the level at which we did that was in the hundreds of households, not the thousands or tens of thousands of households. The idea behind that is to enable us to really home in on where deprivation exists across the country.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Angela Rayner)]

There was nothing duff in the Budget last week. It delivers a major boost to council housing with an additional £1.5 billion for the social and affordable homes programme. This investment will take the total funding for the programme to more than £40 billion over 10 years.

[Claire Young]

The Housing Minister promised me in January that we would see protection from fleecehold exploitation in this Parliament. The Government are running out of time. When can my constituents in freeholds expect unfair service charges to be properly regulated?

[Angela Rayner]

I am hoping for an early Christmas present for the hon. Lady when we set out our leasehold Bill, and hopefully by the end of this Parliament we will be able, using secondary legislation, to get things through.

Budget Resolutions

Claire Young Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

The Chancellor called this a “breathing space” Budget, but it seems only to be breathing space for the Government to put off the hard decisions. It is not a breathing space for my constituents, with frozen tax and student loan repayment thresholds. It is not a breathing space for my local businesses: the rise in employer national insurance contributions has not been reversed, there is no emergency VAT cut for hospitality to help our high streets, and on business rates, which I have repeatedly raised in this House, the Budget just tinkers with a system that needs wholesale reform.

The Budget is not a breathing space for farmers. There is no change in the family farm tax. The cut to fertiliser tariffs will make little difference when, as the NFU has pointed out, much already arrives tariff-free. I am disappointed that the Budget does not treat food security as national security.

The Budget is not a breathing space for local transport users. In a Budget that mentions the north repeatedly, the west barely gets a look in. South Gloucestershire is mentioned once—a brief reference to a mass transit system that we have been hearing about for decades and that is unlikely to touch our rural villages. A £1 bus fare cap and discounted rail fares would have helped families in the short term, and investment in rural transport would help them in the longer term. The west of England is a growth engine outside of London. It deserves more ambition than that.

The Budget is not a breathing space for energy bill payers. Suppliers forecast that the price cap will rise by around a quarter in January. Although welcome, the £100 for this winter and the promise of scrapping gas standing charges in the future do not touch the sides. Scrapping the standing charge will save people just £45 on average—and only those who actually use gas. One in five properties in Thornbury and Yate is heated by oil. Those households have no price cap at all, and there is nothing to ensure that the removal of import tariffs on kerosene is passed to consumers. The surest way to bring down bills is to insulate homes and move people off volatile oil and gas, so why is there a £1 billion cut in the warm homes plan?

What of the promised growth? When will we hear about plans for new nuclear at Oldbury? The outcome of Great British Energy Nuclear’s review was promised this autumn. If data centres that meet the new British data centre covenant are to get priority grid connections, then, given the problem with providing nuclear connections, where is the grid capacity for new homes to meet the Government’s own housing targets? Where is the investment in skills in the rural west of England so that our local young people can access the technical jobs available? This Budget is a missed opportunity to provide real breathing space for our constituents, our businesses and our economy.

National Planning Policy Framework

Claire Young Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this debate.

My constituency is large and rural, containing the towns of Thornbury, Yate and Chipping Sodbury, as well as numerous villages and hamlets, and stretches from the internationally designated Severn estuary all the way to the Cotswold escarpment. A large part of the countryside that surrounds those communities is designated green belt, with all the protections that that used to bring, but now that protection is under threat.

Before I go further, I will provide some context. Under the current administration, South Gloucestershire council recognises the need for new housing and has developed a plan to deliver its housing need, which recently went through its examination in public. More than that, the council recognises the importance of homes for social rent and has been punching above its weight in their provision. With around 0.6% of the population of England outside London, it delivered 1.6% of total new social rent completions last year.

However, there is an implicit deal with local people in that local plan, which delivers homes while protecting the remaining countryside from speculative development. The Government’s grey belt policy fundamentally threatens that. Green belt land will now be parcelled up into cells for assessment, and it will be difficult to show an individual cell’s contribution.

The changes to the framework around the grey belt essentially make purposes C and E void, and particularly C, which protects countryside from encroachment. The danger is that pockets of land will be considered in isolation and be judged only to contribute to purpose C. Indeed, the 2022 West of England combined authority report, in the local plan evidence, showed that the primary reason for just about all the land in the local green belt is purpose C.

However, the cumulative impact of developing those pockets of land would degrade the green belt as a whole. Some of our green belt is very narrow, and it will only become more so if this is allowed to happen. Our towns and villages will slowly be swallowed up by Bristol, and the distinctiveness of our communities will be lost. My constituents do not want that, and I suspect that the good people of Bristol do not want it either, although some hon. Members may think otherwise.

The Government rightly want to speed up housing delivery, but indiscriminate housing built by big developers with no regard for the environment or the people living nearby is not the answer. Ironically, far from increasing the speed of housing delivery, as the Government claim it will, in my area the grey belt changes the level of risk, creating more delays by distracting planning officers from the planned sites and from the Government’s new town proposal. Time will be wasted arguing with speculative developers about what constitutes grey belt, when it could be spent delivering local housing need through the local plan.

I urge the Minister to listen to hon. Members across the Chamber, who are rightly raising concerns, and to advise the new Cabinet and the incoming Prime Minister that rural voices must be heard, and the NPPF revisited.

Commonhold and Leasehold Reform

Claire Young Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

As I have made clear, there are measures in this draft Bill that will provide enhanced protections for residential freeholders on freehold estates, but we are taking other action, and I refer him—as I have other hon. Members—to the two comprehensive consultations we launched before Christmas, one of which deals exclusively with switching on the consumer protections for those people living on freehold estates.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

My constituents trapped in fleecehold schemes—freeholders on privately managed estates—will still be exposed to escalating, unregulated service charges and have no way of ensuring that the work they are paying for is actually done. The Minister has talked about the consultation and promised that help is on the way, but can he promise protection from this exploitation for my constituents in this Parliament?

[Matthew Pennycook]

Yes.

Historical Interim Development Orders

Claire Young Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

“A monstrosity”, “the giant greenhouse”,

“like living next to a large prison”

and

“like ‘War of the Worlds’, it just kept getting bigger and bigger”.

Those are just a few of the words that my constituents in the village of Pilning have used to describe a gigantic new warehouse being built close to their homes. In a debate about historical planning consents, I will inevitably have to talk about some pretty dry planning matters, but I want to start by setting out the very real human impact that one such consent is having on the people of Pilning. Long time resident Sue said to the media:

“How have they been allowed to build it so close to our properties? It’s made everything dark, the constant noise and dust… And what about the flood plain? Where is all the water going to go?”

Simone said:

“I feel so upset. We have never drawn our curtains. Now you feel like you have no privacy… When they started the piling work the whole house was shaking.”

--- Later in debate ---

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Jade Botterill.)

[Claire Young]

Residents of Pilning woke up one day to find piling work taking place on the edge of their village for a massive, stadium-sized warehouse, which they have dubbed the mega-shed. It now looms over their homes. Not only is it over 20 metres high, but the land on which it is built has been raised, making it even more imposing. It sits around 150 metres from the closest houses at Cranmoor Green in Pilning. It has robbed them of light, it impacts on visual amenity, and with the land raised and concreted over, it leaves them fearing that their homes will now be at greater risk of flooding. Residents worry about light and noise pollution, with the 24/7 nature of modern warehouse and distribution centres, refrigerated vehicles running while they unload, forklift trucks with warning bleepers, and HGVs arriving around the clock. They worry about the additional traffic that it will draw through the country roads that surround the site, which are already overwhelmed with heavy traffic.

So far, so familiar—our modern lives have led to huge growth in large scale warehousing across the country. However, what makes this particular case all the harder for residents to take is that the developers did not have to make a full planning application, which would have allowed all the residents’ concerns to be taken into consideration and properly assessed. That is because the work has been undertaken under historical planning consents first granted nearly 70 years ago, and that only required a reserved matters application that could look at a very limited set of issues. It does not end with this warehouse, because those consents would allow many more such warehouses to be built near Pilning, Severn Beach and Easter Compton. As one resident put it:

“It’s just so big and so impactful and affecting people’s lives. The issue is, it seems there’s nothing we can do about it.”

In 1957 and 1958, planning permission was granted to Imperial Chemical Industries to facilitate the expansion of chemical, storage, and distribution industries on an area covering over 1,000 hectares alongside and out into the Severn estuary, in what is now my Thornbury and Yate constituency. At this point I must clarify that these were general development orders, not interim development orders, but I will be returning to the latter shortly, as I am sure you will be pleased to hear, Madam Deputy Speaker, given the title of the debate. Those consents were effectively hybrid applications that allowed development without any further planning applications for a large part of the site, as happened with the building of a new Amazon warehouse, and they required a reserved matters application in the remaining parts of the site, including the land next to Pilning.

That was part of a big post-war push to industrialise. The local area looked very different then. There was no M4, no M5, and no Severn bridges. Filton airfield was operating. There was an expectation of goods being brought in and out via the estuary, which was why the development area extended out into it. The lorries that would have moved goods about that were not being transported via the estuary were considerably smaller than modern HGVs. Pilning itself was smaller and Cranmoor Green did not exist.

The permissions are very open, and lacking in conditions by modern standards. The area is loosely described, and the only red line drawn on a map is at such a scale that the thickness of the line represents 100 metres to 150 metres on the ground. On those parts of the site where reserved matters applications are required, the only things that can be considered are the layout, design, and external appearance of the buildings. Planners cannot consider access, parking, ecology, biodiversity net gain, residential amenity, flood risks—the list goes on. Also, the council cannot use a section 106 agreement or receive community infrastructure levy to mitigate the impacts of any development. The world has moved on in the last 70 years, but that planning consent remains extant, despite efforts to challenge it. I am afraid Madam Deputy Speaker that this is where we get into the driest of planning matters.

A memorandum that the House of Commons Library found for me highlights that the 1957 and 1958 consents were granted without a time limit, and that although section 91 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 introduced time limits, those do not apply to permission granted by a development order. In any case, ICI had developed on a small proportion of the land, so implementation had been started.

In 1992, AstraZeneca purchased the site from ICI. A planning committee report from 30 September 2011 says that South Gloucestershire council challenged the permission in 2000, but it was found sound and capable of implementation in its current form by the courts in 2003. There was a further Secretary of State decision in 2022, when Redrow appealed against the non-determination of an application, which also confirmed the permission extant and capable of implementation.

In 2011, the Cresswell review was undertaken to see if the permission ran contrary to the environmental designations affecting the area. It identified that habitat loss would occur and identified potential sites for mitigation. The public authorities chose the two most impactful options and have implemented those at public expense, not the expense of the developer.

In response to recent media coverage of the mega-shed, a Government spokesperson said:

“Councils are ultimately responsible for reviewing old permissions if the development is no longer suitable and deciding whether action is necessary.”

But what powers do councils actually have to do this? They have already tried the judicial review route and the consent was found to be extant.

The local residents’ action group takes issue with the council’s interpretation of the case, but in many cases residents were unaware of the development until it was too late to mount a judicial review, and no other avenue is open to them. I believe that it will take Government action to resolve this situation and restore some control to the local planning authority. There is precedent, and this is where I finally come to interim development orders.

IDO consents were permissions granted between 1943 and 1948 for mineral extraction. The Planning and Compensation Act 1991 created a process through which old mining and mineral extraction permissions authorised by an IDO consent could be updated with modern conditions. The Act required holders of IDO consents as at 1991 to apply to the mineral planning authority to register that old permission, as it was granted before the modern planning system, and then to apply for determination of the conditions to which the permission was to be subject. The planning policy underpinning Act states:

“The Government takes the view that this is an important opportunity to secure improved operating and environmental standards. Minerals are vital to the economy but it is essential that they are extracted in an environmentally acceptable away”.

Similar statements could be made about warehousing and the modern economy. No compensation was paid to the holders of IDO consents.

Although the legislation covered just about any condition, the Government guidance said that for working sites, a distinction should be drawn between environment and amenity aspects, where new conditions should not affect the asset value, and conditions that would fundamentally affect the economic structure of the operation. The latter should be done under mineral planning authority review.

Separately, under the Environment Act 1995, there was a review of old mineral permissions: ROMPs. This is a separate procedure that effectively does the same thing—modernises old mineral planning consents—but for consents granted in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. That Act imposed a requirement on mineral planning authorities to periodically review the planning permissions of mines to ensure that they stay up to date to modern standards. This legislation said that if the new conditions would prejudice the asset value or viability “to an unreasonable degree” the applicant could claim compensation.

The Labour Government issued revised minerals planning guidance MPG4 in August 1997, which provided guidance on the Town and Country Planning (Compensation for Restrictions on Mineral Working and Mineral Waste Depositing) Regulations 1997, and section 198 of the Planning Act 2008 made changes to the process for appeals relating to old mining permission granted under IDOs. So through a series of legislation and planning guidance, we have a process in place for the pre-1948 mineral permissions—the IDO process—and one for the post-1948 mineral permissions. However, there is no process in place for other blanket consents that need modernising.

I ask the Minister to review the Severnside consents and to consider creating a process analogous to those I have just described for reviewing historical blanket consents that have not been fully implemented. To be absolutely clear, I am not suggesting that most old consents be reviewed and modern conditions imposed—only those that have not been implemented on all the parcels of land to which the consent applies, such as the Severnside consents. I appreciate that there is no power to halt the existing construction of the mega-shed, much to the anger of my constituents affected by it, but that would provide a route to ensuring that all issues can be considered before permitting further development.

Furthermore, I ask the Minister to consider taking steps to prevent this issue in the future. If most consents are not implemented within three years, the consent lapses, thanks to the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. The problem arises where consents cover a large area, such as this one, and they are considered to have been implemented as soon as the first thing is built, resulting in the whole consent being live indefinitely. If this Government want to speed up development in the pursuit of growth, they could put time limits on the completion of the implementation, so that if the consent is not fully implemented within that period, the consent for the remaining parcels of land lapses or can have its conditions reviewed. If no such measure is introduced, and Governments continue to let developers hang around for 70 years with no incentive to finish implementing permissions and no modernisation of conditions, it makes a mockery of the Government’s plans for growth and their stated commitment to do so sustainably.

Let me highlight the particular concerns felt by residents and the parish council around flooding. I am meeting the Environment Agency tomorrow, and I would appreciate the Minister’s support for me to convene a meeting of the Environment Agency, the parish council and South Gloucestershire council to understand these concerns better and identify any action necessary to address them.

This is a complex matter, which I have tried to explain in the time allowed and without the use of supporting diagrams. I would be grateful for an opportunity to meet the Minister to discuss it in more depth and to see whether we can find a way to give hope to the residents of Pilning and the surrounding villages. Ultimately, they are the ones paying the price for a planning decision made years before many of them were even born.

Oral Answers to Questions

Claire Young Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

T3. In the light of some worrying small-site applications on previously undeveloped green-belt land in my constituency, and of concerns from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, will the Minister undertake to monitor and assess the initial impact of the new grey-belt provisions and look at refining the wording, to avoid salami-slicing of the green belt?

[Matthew Pennycook]

No. We are confident that the protections in place for the green belt—the tests that have to be met for grey-belt release—are robust. It is ultimately for local planning authorities to conduct green-belt reviews and to bring forward those sites as part of local plans.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Claire Young Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gideon Amos]

I certainly agree that part 3 requires amending. Our amendments seek to do that, as I will come to shortly.

People want to see development that treads lightly on the land and reduces harmful emissions. Our new clause 2 would enforce the zero carbon standard for all new homes, on which the Liberal Democrats and Labour Ministers worked so hard before the Conservatives cancelled the whole zero carbon homes programme in 2015.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

Net zero standards cut bills as well as carbon emissions, so does my hon. Friend share my incredulity that a Government who have been forced to U-turn on winter fuel payments are refusing to back new clause 2, which would cut bills for people of all ages?

[Gideon Amos]

It is absolutely right to say that we should be moving to zero carbon homes. In fact, one study shows that had they been introduced in 2015, new homeowners would have saved £9 billion.

Our new clause 25, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller), would give key national landscape partnerships, such as in the mellow and beautiful Blackdown hills in my constituency, a seat at the planning table.

As we see species becoming extinct before our eyes, people want to see new homes and nature thrive together. Crucially, our new clause 1 would put back the pre-eminent principle in all this: wherever possible, we must first do no harm to the environment on the sites that are being impacted. Of course, there are circumstances such as phosphate mitigation, where off-site measures can deal with the problem, but by completely removing from EDPs the hierarchy of mitigating impacts first and foremost on site, the Bill provides what the National Trust has called a “licence to kill nature”.

Residential Estate Management Companies

Claire Young Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gideon Amos]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and is championing the issue in his constituency. The companies watching or reading the debate would do well to listen to his words, because they could easily improve their practices right now by introducing a code of practice, as he suggests.

Liberal Democrats believe that leasehold tenure should be abolished for all properties, including flats. For too long, homeowners have been exploited by what is ultimately a feudal system. Existing residential leasehold should be converted either to freehold or commonhold, as appropriate, and we urge the Government to introduce legislation to make that happen. On commonhold properties and commercial leaseholds, ground rent should be capped to a nominal fee, so that everyone has a degree of control over their property.

Of course, the Conservative Government introduced to Parliament the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act, which received Royal Assent in 2024. However, the secondary legislation, which would give leaseholders rights over their freeholder landlords when it comes to accounts and accountability in general, has failed to be enacted. Crucially, the Act fails to regulate property management agents. As my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) pointed out, there has been widespread agreement about that since the 2019 report chaired by the Cross Bencher Lord Best, supported by the Liberal Democrats in this House and in the other place. We need to see vital improvements to the 2024 Act. I hope the Minister will today confirm when secondary legislation will be introduced, or indeed other legislation on the regulation of property agents.

Liberal Democrats want the management of buildings to be professionalised. Building maintenance and safety need to be guaranteed, not dependent on whoever happens to be the freeholder. Nowhere has that been more important in terms of safety than in the entirely avoidable but tragic disaster of Grenfell Tower. Putting profit before safety, as Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report has found, was one of the chief causes of that fire. Just as profit-driven sign-off in the testing of building materials and in the inspection of buildings needs to be reversed with the ending of both the privatised Building Research Establishment and privatised building inspectors, so too there is surely now a need to regulate property agents—for safety reasons, as much as anything else.

Today is also Stephen Lawrence Day. As Stephen was a budding young architect, it is fitting that we are debating regulating building management agents; it would be even more fitting if there was a commitment today to bring legislation forward. Just as leaseholders are charged extortionate amounts while being poorly served by the landlords and estate management companies they employ, too many freeholders of their own homes find themselves beholden to others over whom they have no control in relation to the open spaces and common areas, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke) mentioned.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

My own local council is attempting to address the issue of fleecehold through its new local plan, which I commend. Would my hon. Friend urge the Government to bring forward the legislation quickly in order to strengthen the council’s position?

Oral Answers to Questions

Claire Young Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

8. Whether she plans to include more local people in discussions on development in their area.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

18. What her policy is on the future role of planning committees in the planning process.

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

Local plans are the best way for communities to shape decisions about how to deliver the housing and wider development that their areas need. We want more people to be involved in the development of those local plans, and a key objective of our digital planning reforms is increased public engagement with them. Measures in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will ensure planning committees play their proper role in scrutinising development without obstructing it, while maximising the use of experienced professional planners.

[Matthew Pennycook]

I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman needed to make a political point to get his clip, but I am glad that we have Labour councils across the country that back development. Of course residents should have their say, but it is the role and responsibility of local authorities to make decisions about material considerations in planning applications, and I have no reason to think that the local authority in question has done anything other than that.

[Claire Young]

When I was leader of South Gloucestershire council, in partnership with Labour, we restored the right of local people to speak at planning committee site visits, giving people back their voice in the affected community. However, clause 46 of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill would enable the Secretary of State to bypass planning committees altogether. If the Minister truly wants to get Britain building, will he think again and give communities a real stake in local planning decisions?

[Matthew Pennycook]

As I have made clear, we want more people involved in the development of local plans. There is nothing in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill that will prevent them from objecting to individual applications. The measures simply ensure that the process of determining applications at a local level is more streamlined and efficient. As I made clear in closing the Bill’s Second Reading on 24 March, the Government intend formally to consult on proposals relating to the delegation of planning decisions in England, so the hon. Lady and other hon. Members will be able to engage with the detail alongside the Bill’s passage.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Claire Young Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 24th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

I speak as a former unitary authority councillor for over 17 years. In that time, I spoke many times on behalf of the local community at planning committee meetings, so I understand the importance of including communities in decisions. Shutting them out of the process breeds resentment about new developments, and this is the chance to take advantage of local knowledge to make sure those developments are of good quality.

I am proud that the council administration I led reversed the previous Conservative changes that gave one councillor the power to block applications heard by the planning committee, giving local people back their voice. I am therefore dismayed that this Government want to give the Secretary of State sweeping powers to enable planning decisions to bypass planning committees, and I urge them to look elsewhere to speed up delivery.

It is vital that infrastructure is provided ahead of development, and I would like to highlight a potentially more fruitful avenue for a Government who say that they want to tackle “blockers”. Not only can organisations such as National Highways be slow to respond to planning consultations, on both individual applications and strategic plans, but when they do respond, the answer can be a simple no. Instead, we need all such bodies to see their role as one of working with local planning authorities to overcome the barriers and be enablers of growth. Junctions 16 and 17 of the M5 in my constituency are good examples of where joint working could deliver the infrastructure improvements we desperately need, for which residents in villages such as Easter Compton are crying out. That could also unlock growth.

On the subject of infrastructure, my constituency has great potential for national energy infrastructure, whether that is new small modular reactors at Oldbury or tidal lagoons. My hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire (Mr MacDonald) referred to the community benefit available from proposed transmission infrastructure, albeit he referred to its derisory levels. However, I would like to see this benefit extended to other energy infrastructure.

As a former council leader, I understand the pressure on budgets. I know that, under the current fees regime, council tax payers are paying significant amounts of money towards the planning determination process, rather than the cost falling on the applicants. I therefore welcome the provisions in the Bill to allow local planning authorities to set their own planning fees. However, I would highlight the fact that there is room to help local authorities reduce costs. For example, local newspapers, with their dwindling circulations, are costly and ineffective routes for publicising applications, yet clause 84 only tweaks what needs to be published in those newspapers. I urge the Government to consider other ways to raise awareness, such as councils consulting local groups.

[Jonathan Davies (Mid Derbyshire) (Lab)]

The hon. Member has mentioned local newspapers. That money is a lifeline to local papers, and many people cherish their local paper as a way of finding out what is going on. I hear what she is saying, but let us not play too fast and loose with the money used to keep that lifeline going in many communities.

[Claire Young]

If the hon. Member would like his Government to support the future of local newspapers in that way, I hope they will look again at how they are supporting councils to fund local planning departments.

To conclude, I urge the Government to think again, tackle the real barriers to delivery and put local communities at the heart of the planning process.