Housing: New Homes

Lord Best Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

The Government are taking many measures to tackle the skills crisis in this sector. For example, the Department for Education’s £24 million construction skills fund is supporting 26 on- site hubs focusing on housing. The EU exit does create opportunities to grow our own workforce, but the industry is best placed to step up and train the workforce that it knows it will need. The Government are doing their part by improving skills provision, supporting modernisation to increase productivity and creating a fair migration system.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, to rescue the country from the small number of volume housebuilders who do 70% of all our housebuilding, have the Government made any progress with Sir Oliver Letwin’s radical and important proposals for local authorities to set up corporations that would acquire sites and capture the value for the public good, instead of leaving it to those volume housebuilders who, I am afraid, let us down every time?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

The Government fully recognise the importance of increasing the number of small and medium-sized housebuilders in providing the housing in this country. He is absolutely right to point out the dominance of the large housebuilders. We have done quite a lot to encourage SMEs in this space, and at the last Budget we announced up to £1 billion of new guarantee support schemes for SMEs, to be implemented by the British Business Bank. To go further into Sir Oliver Letwin’s report, I would rather write to the noble Lord with a fuller reply.