Houses in Multiple Occupation
Councils have that power. I do not know off the top of my head whether the hon. Gentleman’s local authority has consulted on and put in place an article 4 direction, but if it has not, I strongly encourage him to make that case so that his local authority makes full use of its powers. This is the crucial point. Are the powers in place inadequate—in which case let us have that conversation among hon. Members—or are individual local planning authorities unable or unwilling, for whatever reason, to exercise properly the powers that they have? If that is the case, we need to understand what more they need in the way of resources, support and guidance to be able to do so. Let me briefly touch on social and affordable housing. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields rightly said, the ultimate solution to ensure that we have enough housing supply in any given area is to build enough homes of all tenures, including social and affordable homes. She has welcomed our new £39 billion 10-year social and affordable homes programme, the largest long-term investment in social and affordable housing in recent memory. Our ambition is to deliver around 300,000 homes over the lifetime of that programme. As she knows, our target is for at least 60% of the homes delivered to be for social rent, to provide the genuinely affordable homes that families need in her area and others. We are also taking decisive action to reinvigorate council house building, including a new 10-year housing rent policy, and we have reinstated rent convergence. That will strengthen councils’ capacity and confidence for building new homes. We are taking action to reform the right to buy, including returning right-to-buy cash discounts to between £16,000 and £38,000. Again, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields knows, we will go further in implementing the next phase of reforms through our Social Housing Bill, which is making good progress in the other place. Its measures include allowing councils to keep 100% of the receipts generated by right-to-buy sales, with increased flexibilities in how they can be spent. We are already seeing many the fruits of many of the reforms that we have put in place. Data released just this morning by Homes England and the Greater London Authority in respect of affordable housing starts and completions shows that starts are up 26% and completions are up 8% on 2024-25, and we are delivering the highest number of social rent starts since 2010-11. My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields mentioned the national scheme of delegation. We are modernising how planning committees function, and we have been very clear about the case for doing so. We want to ensure that in exercising their democratic oversight, planning committees are focused on the applications that require member input, not on revisiting applications and decisions that have already been taken. We published a working paper on this in December 2024, and we carried out extensive engagement following that. We formally consulted twice on the reforms, once in May 2025, on the principle of a two-tier system with some decisions delegated to planning officers, and once in March 2026, on the draft regulations and guidance. We are to debate those guidelines next week. I will gently push back on my hon. Friend’s contention that local voices and objections are cut out. Nothing in those regulations will stop local residents objecting to applications or registering their discontent, but we do think that on a certain set of applications, it is right that expert planning officers make the decisions. I also just make the point that schemes of delegation are in place across most local authorities in the country. The problem is that there is huge variation, which is creating issues in the planning system. We want to streamline that with a simple set of rules across the country and a national scheme.