Speeches by Pennycook.

“Because social rented homes are the most affordable type of homes, and there is an acute and pressing need for those homes, not least to provide stable and secure homes for the many families that now live in temporary accommodation for whom other affordable tenures would not be affordable. Again, we can go over the rea…”

“In general, the Government want to see more empty homes brought back into use across the country. That is a very clear and simple message. I would draw attention to, as Minister Rigby said, some of the tax changes that are rebalancing the market away from investors of all kinds towards more families looking to buy. We …”

“If the Committee has any specific suggestions or proposals in this area, I very much welcome them. It is a live issue; as I said, we are looking at what more we can do to strengthen local authorities’ powers.”

“That is a really good point. I often get challenged by people—occasionally people who do not want to see house building in their area—that we do not need to build any more houses because empty homes will resolve the issue. I want to be clear that we think bringing more empty homes back into use can make an important co…”

“We revised how affordable housing is defined in the NPPF glossary, specifically distinguishing between social rent, as the most affordable type of product, and other types of affordable housing. But ultimately it is for local planning authorities to say, through their local plans, and then on an individual site basis t…”

“If I have understood you correctly, we are talking about two separate and distinct issues here: there is general house price affordability, which the ONS tracks, and the OBR has said it expects it to broadly track incomes; and then there is affordable housing, as defined in the glossary of NPPF, which encompasses a ran…”

“We have just announced the extension to March 2027. Any further announcements, you will forgive me, will be made to Parliament in the usual way.”

“We will set out a position for future years at the appropriate point, but I well understand the point about local authorities needing as much certainty as possible.”

“I have referenced twice now the analysis that the Department has carried out on what we expect an increase of supply to do to house prices, all things being equal. However, there are short-term and localised impacts as well. I think you are driving at an affordable target for local areas. We expect local areas to set t…”

“Forgive me, but I feel like I have answered both of those questions already. We have set ourselves a 1.5 million new homes target. That is the target for this Parliament. We would expect that to have positive impacts in terms of affordability. I hope I have been clear that that we do not want a sugar rush of house buil…”

“From my perspective, it has already been mentioned that we have extended the preferential public works loan board borrowing rate for council house building. We also made a number of other changes—some quite early on in our period in Government—in co-operation with the Treasury that are having a real impact on councils’…”

“We have not directly instructed or encouraged them to do that. I am extremely interested in that model. I think that is a potential way to bring together the necessary skills and resources across our area and get the benefit of those economies of scale.”

“There are real challenges with the HRA and significant, quite acute challenges in certain parts of the country when it comes to individual local authorities. We think the self-financing model is the right one. We do not intend to change that, but there are certainly pressures there. As I said, wider changes have fiscal…”

“I think I have already mentioned them, but we have made a series of changes that make it easier for councils to build. We have made recent announcements in relation to the housing revenue account, including raising the threshold from 200 to 1,000, at which local authorities can take on those responsibilities. There are…”

“Simply, the previous Government’s schemes ended. In the Department we are doing a full evaluation of what previous rounds of help to buy meant for outcomes, both in terms of supply and price impact. Lots of the studies that have taken place—Mel can provide useful detail on this—do not really provide us with a huge amou…”

“I want to be really clear that it is a systemic problem, rather than the result of bad behaviour on the part of any individual developer. Developers, particularly the volume house builders, are acting entirely rationally in the framework they operate in, in which land is inherently constrained. That is at the root of l…”

“It is a support fund to help those councils to bid into that £39 billion pot. We have sustained the public works loan board rates for another year, and we are allowing councils to benefit from the rent convergence policy that we have just announced. There are a variety of ways in which we can get councils back on the p…”

“That is a separate pot, forgive me.”

“We have taken a number of steps through the changes we have made to the planning system to try to modernise the way that local planning authorities operate—I recognise that some people here were very involved in the debates on the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, for example. We are modernising planning committees…”

“First, we need a planning system that facilitates enough new homes coming forward. That is partly related to the amount of land we release into the system, but also to how the planning system works and the extent to which it is streamlined, effective and provides for timely outcomes. I think the changes that we made to…”