Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

Just this September, new construction colleges have started opening around the country to train up the next generation of builders, plumbers and engineers, so that we can build both the housing infrastructure and the other infrastructure our country desperately needs. We have reformed the apprenticeship system, so that we can have more foundation apprenticeships for a shorter period of time to quickly get people the skills they need. Not requiring people to have a grade C or equivalent in maths and English to access an apprenticeship programme is also so important for young children who maybe did not get the grades they wanted in their GCSEs, but deserve a chance of a good apprenticeship and a job offering a decent wage.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

There is planning permission in this country for 900,000 properties that are as yet unbuilt, so maybe the issue is not that the planning laws are too restrictive but that they are not prescriptive enough. In my constituency, the average income needed to buy the average house is £71,000 a year—11 times the average income in my communities. Is it not right to ensure that, if the Chancellor changes planning law, we have to build more genuinely affordable homes in communities like ours, rather than giving developers carte blanche?

[Rachel Reeves]

That cannot be an excuse, though, for blocking developments and blocking people who own land from building more homes on that land. In the end, the simple law of supply and demand means that if we are not building homes, prices will continue to be unaffordable for the hon. Gentleman’s constituents. We are not allowing builders to build carte blanche and he absolutely knows that. We put the biggest investment into the affordable homes programme that has ever been seen, because it is important that the homes being built are affordable for families in his constituency and in mine. We must not just always block things, whether they be airports, housing or other infrastructure; we have got to back the builders.