Housebuilders: Information Sharing

Lord Best Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, irrespective of the merits of the £100 million deal done between the CMA and the seven volume housebuilders, does the Minister agree that we should be reducing and indeed eliminating our dependency as a nation on a small oligopoly of major housebuilders? We need more variety; we need SME builders doing more; and we need the new development corporations set up at arm’s length to local authorities by mayors and combined authorities to replace our dependency on a very small handful of large-scale housebuilders which, I am afraid, will always let us down.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I have much sympathy with what the noble Lord says. He has great expertise in this area, and I recognise that. Our focus is on creating a more balanced and competitive market overall by addressing the systemic barriers that prevent SMEs and others delivering more homes. We are taking action to support SMEs across the three main challenges that we know they face: access to finance, access to land, and an uncertain and complex planning system. We have announced two immediate packages of measures to support buildout and SMEs via £100 million in SME accelerator loans and measures to support faster decisions on smaller sites, which I hope will help.