Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to support planning and development on brownfield sites.

The revised National Planning Policy Framework makes clear that local authorities should prioritise brownfield land for development, especially for new homes to meet local need. We now require every local authority to publish a brownfield register; these registers have identified an estimated 26,000 or more hectares of brownfield with potential for around a million homes.

Government also offers practical support for regeneration, including brownfield redevelopment: for instance, the £4.5 billion Home Building Fund provides loan funding, some of it supporting the re-use of brownfield sites; the Single Housing Infrastructure Fund helps with provision of roads, schools and other infrastructure for housing schemes; and Land Remediation Relief can reduce taxation for companies cleaning up contaminated land.