Planning Reform

Roger Gale Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

I do not have the time to go into incredible amounts of detail on why we did not choose to take a statutory approach to national development management policies. Suffice it to say that the approach carried considerable uncertainty and risks. There has been a long debate—I can see Members who served on the Bill Committee—about what a conflict between statutory NDMPs and a local development plan would mean in practice. We were concerned about the chilling effect that might have on the system as a whole, so we have decided to proceed, as I have said, with agile changes to national policy. I remind hon. Members—Opposition Members often complain about this—that national planning policy carries significant weight. Since our December reforms, an unprecedented 80% of major residential appeals relating to grey-belt land have been approved. That is the power of national policy in action, but we will keep the matter under review.

[Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) (Con)]

We do not have green belt in east Kent. We used to have something called farmland; it is now called blighted land, because it has been zoned for housing, but it is not being built on. House building in east Kent has virtually come to a grinding halt, and houses are not selling as a direct result of this Government’s policies. How many unbuilt-out housing consents have already been granted? Should we not be using those before we start taking further agricultural land for building?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I will say two things to the right hon. Gentleman. First, the draft framework we have published today continues to provide the protections for agricultural land that are in place in the NPPF as revised last December, including a preference that development be directed towards areas of poorer-quality agricultural land. On consented sites, he is absolutely right. We want to see more consented sites built out, and that is the whole purpose of our new homes accelerator, which we established to take forward those sites. We published a working paper on build-out transparency, but I am afraid that it remains the case that we have to oversupply consents into the system to drive up the number of houses delivered.