Speeches by Curtis.

“There has been an announcement today on new standards for local councils. I speak to many of my fantastic parish councillors and clerks in my local area about some of the horror stories that they have heard about where standards have not met what would be expected. Can you confirm that these changes will also apply to …”

“That is a good segue because I want to talk about accelerating progress on building social and affordable homes. If you will indulge me, it would be helpful to start with some numbers. The last year where we have full data for completions of homes is 2023-24. The number of new homes for private sale built that year was…”

“Yes. I am asking because I can see the cynicism. I have two points. There is one thing that has been implied but not confirmed by the Department. Originally, this was all going to be on top of local authorities’ housing targets. For a range of reasons, I assume that is not always going to be the case. If you take mine,…”

“If you were to move forward with Tempsford, say, which is one we want to get done by the time of the next election, and you did make the decision as a Department—it is a greenfield site; I do not know why you would not—that a development corporation is the ideal standard, you are confident that you would be able to get…”

“Just on that point, what is the expectation for the Department of the average length of time it would take to set up a development corporation?”

“You are very open-minded towards development corporations in some cases.”

“What does “innovative way” mean?”

“Can you give us an indication of what it will mean in practice to be a new town? As an example, Homes England has not sent out any indication so far that it is going to give preferential funding to new towns programmes or things like that. If these sites do get moved forward, what is it going to mean in practice for th…”

“On new towns, the announcement that came out implied that we were only going to get three locations started during this Parliament. I am sure there is an ambition for more, but why at this stage are we only confident that we will be able to get started on three?”

“What level of confidence do you have in that? It is a bit embarrassing for the country. We have this massive site—”

“I would like to tie together two things that you said in the planning reform section. First, you talked about trying to make consultees behave in a more rational and responsive way; secondly, you talked about building around train stations. We have a really good example of this. Natural England has blocked building aro…”

“What bothers me on this is that we have made a commitment as a Government, for example, to get planning permission for Heathrow by the end of this Parliament. Nobody thinks that is possible under the current legislation. Unless you disagree, you either have to change the legislation or accept that we cannot get plannin…”

“I will ask the question slightly more vaguely then. Is there anything missing from the first Planning and Infrastructure Bill that ideally you would wish in hindsight had been in there and that you might want to put into a second Planning and Infrastructure Bill?”

“We have heard lots of speculation about a second Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Are you now working to the assumption that there will be a second Planning and Infrastructure Bill or something like that?”

“If it is not cleared by the new year and we are not running to standard timelines, are we going to then be coming back and looking at further changes?”

“One thing that you did not mention, which is the thing that developers probably mention most, is the pretty appalling hold-ups and delays from the Building Safety Regulator. As far as I can tell, it is one of the most incompetent organisations in the country. It is almost entirely refusing to find ways of signing thing…”

“Why have they risen?”

“It is the delta. It is the change. The costs have not disproportionately risen in London compared to the rest of the country over the last 12 months—”

“This is the point that I wanted to get to with the question, though. The numbers are down, but they are not down uniformly. Most of the drop has been because of London. Why has it been such a disaster for housebuilding in London over the last year?”

“They are down.”