Speeches by Pennycook.

“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.”

“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 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…”

“In general housing supply terms?”

“I think there is a short-term localised impact, depending on how many homes are built in a particular housing market area. In aggregate, the best analysis we have is departmental analysis, based on academic research, that estimates that a 1% increase in housing stock should, everything else being equal, decrease prices…”

“I will try to clarify as best I can, and Melanie may then want to add to that. It is very difficult to estimate the precise number of homes that you will get from a 10-year programme. We made the best estimate we could, which is that the programme, over its lifetime, will produce around 300,000 homes, about 180,000 of …”

“I am sure there will be further conversations with the Treasury on policy matters, and we keep all these matters under live review, as you would expect.”

“We now have a really constructive relationship with Treasury colleagues across all the areas we will discuss today, on the demand side as well as the supply side. Let us take social and affordable housing, which you have rightly focused on in these opening questions. Now that we have clarity on rent convergence, on the…”