Housebuilding: Government Targets

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Young of Cookham]

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether it remains their policy to build 300,000 homes a year.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)]

The Government remain committed to continuing to work towards our ambition of delivering 300,000 homes a year, as set out in the 2019 Conservative manifesto. We are making good progress. Annual housing supply is up 10% compared with the previous year, with more than 232,000 net additional homes delivered in 2021-22. This is the third-highest yearly rate for the last 30 years.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that renewed commitment, but does she recall the 2019 White Paper Fixing Our Broken Housing Market, which listed a number of reasons why we might not hit that target? The first one said that

“some local authorities can duck potentially difficult decisions, because they are free to come up with their own methodology for calculating ‘objectively assessed need’.”

Does my noble friend understand that asking local authorities to make the housing target discretionary rather than mandatory makes it less likely that we will hit the 300,000 target, because you cannot rely on the good will of local authorities to meet a national mandate?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, we remain committed to a plan-led system. National planning policy expects local planning authorities, through their plans, to make sufficient provision for housing and to identify the sites to deliver much-needed homes to meet local needs. To get enough homes built in places where people and communities need them, a crucial first step is to plan for the right number of homes. That is why we remain committed to the 300,000 homes target and to retaining a clear starting point for calculating local housing needs. We are currently consulting on changes to the planning policy that will support how we plan to deliver the homes our communities need.