Lucy Frazer MP is the Minister of State for Housing and Planning.
Our homes are not just places where we live. They are where we raise our children, care for our elderly, and make connections to our community. Owning your own home gives you an increased sense of security, stability, and belonging. No matter our background or our upbringing, we all deserve the opportunity to collect the keys to our first home.
That opportunity is currently out of reach for far too many people in England. As the party of home ownership, we recognise that this status quo is untenable. We have a moral responsibility to end it.
When our Prime Minister took office in October, he promised to make fairness this Government’s lodestar. In my role as Housing and Planning Minister, this means reforming our planning system for the better and building on the work we have already done to make the dream of home ownership a reality for many more people.
So, thanks to the extensive efforts of MP’s from across the party, that is what we are going to do in 2023 when we get the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill onto the statute books.
I want to thank my Conservative Party colleagues for helping us get to this point. We listened, we engaged, and we amended our legislation to make it even more focussed on ensuring the planning system and the systems which interact with it work better so that they are innovating and improving for the benefit of all our constituents.
The result is a piece of legislation we can all be proud of. Reforms that will modernise our Byzantine planning system, give communities a greater say on developments in their area, and get spades in the ground to build the homes we need, in the places we need them most.
And, most importantly, it will do these things in the right way, in a Conservative way. Today we are taking another important step on this journey with the publication of our consultation on how we will go about modernising the National Planning Policy Framework.
It’s a prospectus that reflects the belief that Michael Gove, the Levelling Up Secretary, and I both share that our houses are not just bricks and mortar, they are homes. Those that live around us are not just our neighbours, they are our communities. This is the first step in setting out our changes to the framework and we will continue to shape it over the coming months, informed by the feedback we receive from colleagues in parliament, stakeholders across the planning industry, and the public.
It was Churchill who once said, ‘we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.’ Our legislation has this principle at its heart, recognising our focus has to be on delivering streets and neighbourhoods that lift our spirits and enrich the character of our villages, towns and cities
This is going to be possible with an unwavering focus on BIDEN. As well as being the leader of the free world, BIDEN means Beautiful development; the right Infrastructure; a more Democratic, community-led system; enhancing our Environment and; Neighbourhoods shaped by people who live in them.
Levelling up is nothing if it does not mean communities where people and businesses want to live and to set themselves up for the long term. That is the way we will reverse depressing economic trends and give people reasons to be optimistic for the future of their area.
Recognising this, we know that our number one priority has to be on building the right homes in the right places rather than shoehorning developments into an area just to meet a target.
Our changes do not mean our ambition has been diluted. We are fully committed to our ambition of building the 300,000 homes that England needs to build, every year, by the mid-2020s. But for this to be possible, it has to be backed by our communities who have to live alongside that development every day.
And we have solid foundations to build on. Although we know we will have difficult times ahead, the three highest annual rates of additional housing supply in over 30 years have all come in the last four years. Since 2010, government-backed homeownership schemes like Help to Buy and Right to Buy have helped almost 800,000 households to purchase a home.
This Prospectus also outlines the huge scale of our ambition when it comes to not just preserving, but enriching our environment. Our housing stock is among the oldest in the world and houses are among the biggest sources of carbon emissions in the UK.
Through our reforms we are making the environment a centrepiece of the planning system with a focus on biodiversity and wildlife recovery. By doing this, we are going to lay the foundation for planning to assume a much more proactive role in promoting nature’s recovery.
We want to empower our communities. That is what this bill does. We know that we can do more to ensure that when we expand our communities, we do so in the right places, with the right infrastructure, with the support of local people and local representatives. The changes we are proposing through the Bill and policy reforms are going to help us do that in 2023.
Lucy Frazer MP is the Minister of State for Housing and Planning.
Our homes are not just places where we live. They are where we raise our children, care for our elderly, and make connections to our community. Owning your own home gives you an increased sense of security, stability, and belonging. No matter our background or our upbringing, we all deserve the opportunity to collect the keys to our first home.
That opportunity is currently out of reach for far too many people in England. As the party of home ownership, we recognise that this status quo is untenable. We have a moral responsibility to end it.
When our Prime Minister took office in October, he promised to make fairness this Government’s lodestar. In my role as Housing and Planning Minister, this means reforming our planning system for the better and building on the work we have already done to make the dream of home ownership a reality for many more people.
So, thanks to the extensive efforts of MP’s from across the party, that is what we are going to do in 2023 when we get the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill onto the statute books.
I want to thank my Conservative Party colleagues for helping us get to this point. We listened, we engaged, and we amended our legislation to make it even more focussed on ensuring the planning system and the systems which interact with it work better so that they are innovating and improving for the benefit of all our constituents.
The result is a piece of legislation we can all be proud of. Reforms that will modernise our Byzantine planning system, give communities a greater say on developments in their area, and get spades in the ground to build the homes we need, in the places we need them most.
And, most importantly, it will do these things in the right way, in a Conservative way. Today we are taking another important step on this journey with the publication of our consultation on how we will go about modernising the National Planning Policy Framework.
It’s a prospectus that reflects the belief that Michael Gove, the Levelling Up Secretary, and I both share that our houses are not just bricks and mortar, they are homes. Those that live around us are not just our neighbours, they are our communities. This is the first step in setting out our changes to the framework and we will continue to shape it over the coming months, informed by the feedback we receive from colleagues in parliament, stakeholders across the planning industry, and the public.
It was Churchill who once said, ‘we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.’ Our legislation has this principle at its heart, recognising our focus has to be on delivering streets and neighbourhoods that lift our spirits and enrich the character of our villages, towns and cities
This is going to be possible with an unwavering focus on BIDEN. As well as being the leader of the free world, BIDEN means Beautiful development; the right Infrastructure; a more Democratic, community-led system; enhancing our Environment and; Neighbourhoods shaped by people who live in them.
Levelling up is nothing if it does not mean communities where people and businesses want to live and to set themselves up for the long term. That is the way we will reverse depressing economic trends and give people reasons to be optimistic for the future of their area.
Recognising this, we know that our number one priority has to be on building the right homes in the right places rather than shoehorning developments into an area just to meet a target.
Our changes do not mean our ambition has been diluted. We are fully committed to our ambition of building the 300,000 homes that England needs to build, every year, by the mid-2020s. But for this to be possible, it has to be backed by our communities who have to live alongside that development every day.
And we have solid foundations to build on. Although we know we will have difficult times ahead, the three highest annual rates of additional housing supply in over 30 years have all come in the last four years. Since 2010, government-backed homeownership schemes like Help to Buy and Right to Buy have helped almost 800,000 households to purchase a home.
This Prospectus also outlines the huge scale of our ambition when it comes to not just preserving, but enriching our environment. Our housing stock is among the oldest in the world and houses are among the biggest sources of carbon emissions in the UK.
Through our reforms we are making the environment a centrepiece of the planning system with a focus on biodiversity and wildlife recovery. By doing this, we are going to lay the foundation for planning to assume a much more proactive role in promoting nature’s recovery.
We want to empower our communities. That is what this bill does. We know that we can do more to ensure that when we expand our communities, we do so in the right places, with the right infrastructure, with the support of local people and local representatives. The changes we are proposing through the Bill and policy reforms are going to help us do that in 2023.