Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Reed and Gareth Bacon

Monday 12th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

At the outset of the Secretary of State’s answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), one could be forgiven for thinking that we had an entirely new Mayor of London. In fact, this year we celebrate, or perhaps more appropriately commiserate, a decade of Sadiq Khan’s tenure as London Mayor. In that decade, in the most prosperous city in Europe, Sadiq Khan has overseen not just stalling but consistently falling rates of private construction starts. Recent figures from Molior show that London began building just 3,248 new homes in the first nine months of 2025, leaving it on track to start building fewer than 5,000 in total in 2025.

Incredibly, the Government’s response has been to cut their floundering mayor’s housing targets by 11%, but skyrocket targets in outer London authorities, where the vast majority of greenbelt land is. That includes an increase of almost 400% compared with previously approved London planning targets in my local council area of Bromley. Will the Secretary of State please explain why people living in places such as Bromley and our local greenbelt must pay the price for Sadiq Khan’s decade of failure and uselessness?

[Steve Reed]

Of course it is not the Mayor of London who can change planning legislation but the Government, and despite knowing the problems, the previous Government did nothing for 14 years. It has taken this Government to make those changes, even though we have been in power for barely a year and a half. The hon. Gentleman mentioned Bromley; the figures for Bromley show that it managed just 70 housing starts last year across the entire borough. That is entirely inadequate and it needs to do better.

[Gareth Bacon]

What the Secretary of State did not say is that local boroughs are not in charge of building out planning consents, and he did not acknowledge that London boroughs are subject to the London plan. The Secretary of State claims that he is working with the Mayor of London, who writes the London plan, to build more homes, but unlike the Secretary of State, the facts do not heed the mayor’s spin. According to Molior, there were just 3,950 new homes sold in London during the first half of 2025 and just 3,248 private housing starts in the first nine months of 2025, against a nine month target of 66,000. The Secretary of State said last year that his own job should be on the line if he fails to meet his housing targets, so why does he not practise what he preaches, do Londoners a favour and tell sorry Sadiq to pack his bags over his decade of failure?

[Steve Reed]

As the hon. Gentleman should know, changes to the London plan were part of the package that I announced with the Mayor of London, because this Government are prepared to work with the Mayor of London to get the homes built. The previous Government wanted to hobble the Mayor of London so that he could not get the homes built, in order that they could score silly little political points rather than giving people the homes that they need to live in. The previous Government were happy to sit back and watch homelessness double over 14 years. We are not: we are going to build the homes that this country needs, including in London.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Reed and Gareth Bacon

Monday 24th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

Ministers are claiming that this is a record amount of funding for affordable housing in South Shields and across the rest of England, but why are they consistently refusing to publish a breakdown of the annual funding under their 10-year programme? Is it because the majority of the cash is backloaded into future Parliaments and then exaggerated by inflation? The small-print prospectus says that the homes must be completed by 2039. That is 14 years away. As with Labour’s house building target, is this not just an exercise in hoodwinking people by promising homes that are never going to see the light of day in this Parliament?

[Steve Reed]

It is ironic that the hon. Gentleman mentioned 14 years, because that is the amount of time his party was in government, and it left us with this crisis, rather than building the social homes this country needs. The £39 billion is a record. It will give us the biggest increase in social and affordable homes that this country has seen in a generation. Conservative Front Benchers should be welcoming that, as we do here. Bids to the social and affordable homes programme will open early in the new year, and we will then start to get those homes built so that people who were denied a decent home under the Conservative Government will get one with this Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Steve Reed and Gareth Bacon

Monday 13th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It falls to me to open the bowling for the Opposition Front Bench, so I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his appointment and welcome him to his place today.

The previous Government awarded the Mayor of London almost £9 billion of funding to build a total of 151,000 affordable homes in London. The second tranche of that money amounted to £4 billion, which was to build 35,000 homes between 2021 and 2026. To date, only 997 have been completed, with 443 of those homes being acquisitions rather than newly built. What plans does the Secretary of State have to hold the Mayor of London to account for this lamentable failure?

[Steve Reed]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words, but I think it is disingenuous to blame the Mayor of London for failings that were the fault of the previous Conservative Government and, I am afraid, current Conservative boroughs in London such as Bromley, which is a shocking 95% behind its house building target. We cannot tolerate that.

The previous Government choked off house building everywhere by scrapping house building targets and crashing the economy, sending mortgages through the roof so that people could not afford to buy new homes—of course, the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Braintree (Sir James Cleverly), was a major cheerleader for the Prime Minister who carried that through. In the last four years of the previous Government, housing consents collapsed by one fifth. It is this Government who will take the steps to remediate that situation, this Government who will get 1.5 million new homes built and this Government who will work with local government partners across the whole country, including here in London, to ensure that the homes this country needs are built.

[Gareth Bacon]

The whole House will have heard that the Secretary of State has no plans to intervene on the Mayor of London. Under section 340 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999, the Secretary of State has the power to direct the Mayor of London to review and revise specific policies of the London plan if they are seen to be hindering housing delivery. There are a plethora of policies—including an obsession with dual facing and twin staircasing and a bizarre aversion to corridors—that developers are united in saying are massively hindering development in the country’s largest city, which has the highest demand for affordable housing. The Secretary of State is holding all the cards and the purse strings. Why will he not intervene?

[Steve Reed]

First, I do recognise the challenges the hon. Gentleman has outlined. They should concern us all, and I thank him for raising them. He will be aware that we are making legislative changes right now, with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill that is going through Parliament, to speed up the planning system that is holding back so many homes from being built. We will be tabling further amendments to the Bill to tackle some of the challenges the hon. Gentleman is talking about.

I am working with the Greater London Authority and the Mayor of London on an acceleration package that targets London in particular. We will make announcements on that within weeks, and the hon. Gentleman will then see the action that we intend to take here in the capital city to ensure that home building continues apace. We will also be looking nationally, because every region of the country needs new homes built to meet people’s dreams of having somewhere affordable to rent or buy.