I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of changes to the National Planning Policy Framework. I am pleased to see you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I am grateful for the time to introduce this debate on the impact of the changes to the national planning policy framework. I called for this debate following a decision affecting the village of Yatton in the north of the Wells and Mendip Hills constituency, with 190 homes set to be built on a site known as Rectory Farm, Yatton Batch. Yatton Batch is in flood zone 3a, which is the highest level of risk, according to the Environment Agency. The consequences of this decision affect not just the people of Yatton, as I believe it sets a precedent for every other community living with flood risk across this country. I will give the Minister some context to the geography of my constituency, which matters enormously. Wells and Mendip Hills falls roughly in two parts. One part comprises the limestone Mendip hills and the rest, the majority of the constituency, is wetlands and coastal plains: the Somerset levels and the North Somerset levels. Fifty-one per cent of my constituency is less than 20 metres above sea level. I will send the Minister a map, on which he will see that the Somerset levels are a man-made landscape. The monks, led by the Abbot of Glastonbury, drained the land hundreds of years ago by digging what locally we call “rhynes”, which is why the map shows the waterways as straight lines in my part of the world. It does not take a PhD in geography to work out that low-lying coastal wetlands are prone to flooding. It has taken centuries of careful management and regular maintenance of the local waterways to keep this land habitable at all.

On the subject of keeping land habitable, the hon. Lady will be familiar with the fact that the Lincolnshire fens, and particularly South Holland and The Deepings, are entirely flat, without even the undulation equivalent to the Mendip hills. Our land is drained, and much of it is reclaimed from the sea, yet there are perpetual attempts to put critical infrastructure on it, including solar, pylons and suchlike. That is incompatible, and those things cannot be reconciled. I entirely endorse what the hon. Lady says about the character of the land, its propensity to flood and what we should do with it.

I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point. I will suggest to the Minister that, if he wishes to pursue a policy of building on land that will almost certainly flood, we need to put those buildings on stilts. That is not impossible, and there is certainly one very beautiful house on the levels that sits on stilts. Yatton, the village subject to the decision, sits within the North Somerset levels, barely 2 km from the Bristol channel. On Friday 12 June, the High Court handed down its judgment permitting the development of 190 homes in this flood-prone area, on a site that failed the flood risk sequential test. The judgment follows the NPPF exactly, as the judge had to, and prioritised building homes over protection from flooding. It imperils not only the new homes—I should explain that the judge said that homeowners threatened by flooding had sufficient time to vacate their houses before the floodwater reached them—but the homes and businesses in and around the Yatton site. The impact of flooding does not disappear just because people can get away safely. This is about property as well as people. The damage to wellbeing and mental health takes its toll on those affected, as does the damage to property, which can take months and sometimes years to remedy and replace. I would not want the Minister to think that this is a case of nimbyism and anti-development sentiment by those in rural areas. My Lib Dem colleagues and I agree with the Government’s desire to meet the huge need for housing across the country. There are 12,800 people on the Homefinder list in Somerset, which covers 66% of my patch, and a similar proportion on the North Somerset list. I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on flooding and flooded communities. Many of our discussions centre on the Flood Re scheme, which was a great initiative that meant insurers could cover flooding claims and the premiums for home insurance in high flood risk areas were not astronomical. The scheme comes to an end in 2039, and the Government have been very clear that it will not be extended. As set out in legislation, homes built after 2009 are not covered by the scheme. As we get closer to that 2039 date, more and more homes built in high flood risk areas are not covered by the scheme and so risk becoming uninsurable and consequently unmortgageable. The consequences for developers and those who have already bought the homes will be awful. And the Yatton decision compounds the problems with the NPPF in allowing the need for home building to override common sense. To press the point, it is very likely that residents of new homes built on floodplains, such as those in Yatton, will face flooding damage in the coming years. Not only will they not be able to make an insurance claim, but any new buyers will likely struggle to access a mortgage. Residents may well end up trapped, unable to sell a home that might cost them thousands of pounds in repairs every winter. The Minister knows the weather experts say that what we are experiencing now is the most stable weather that we are ever going to see. I mentioned that the current neighbours would also be affected due to the simple fact that the floodwater must go somewhere. If developers choose to build up the land on which they wish to develop, the floodwater may well not hit those homes precisely, but will cause the existing homes and businesses in the area to be flooded more greatly. I have a lovely set of photographs of the land I am speaking about, which I will send to the Minister, showing exactly how it floods every year.

I commend the hon. Lady for the ambition she has put forward. Does she not agree that there is a risk of severe regulatory divergence? If the English planning system undergoes massive deregulation and introduces a faster, rules-based yes by default to major projects, capital will do what it always does and flow through the path of least resistance. The Government and the Minister need to ensure that the possibility she outlines for her constituents does not happen elsewhere.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The point I would like to make to the Minister is that, if developers choose to raise the level of the land on which they wish to build, we make a complete mockery of the Environment Agency’s work in relation to the LiDAR data that it uses to measure flood risk. There will be little pockets that are no longer in flood zone 3a, for example, but everybody else is then in a more problematic area for flooding. The current neighbours would be affected, because floodwater has to go somewhere. In the event of flooding, if the properties are lifted above sea level by raising the land, the displaced water goes straight into existing homes and businesses. The Association of British Insurers has been clear that, while it supports the Government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million homes, it has serious concerns about allowing developers to bypass the flood risk sequential test in areas at high risk of surface water flooding, which is precisely the kind of decision we have seen play out in Yatton. The scale of the risk to which it points is sobering. The Environment Agency’s national assessment of flood and coastal erosion risk shows that 6.3 million homes in England are already at risk of flooding, 4.6 million of them from surface water alone. In just the first quarter of this year, insurers paid out £846 million in property claims, with the average weather-related claim reaching £6,040—the highest first quarter figure on record. Subsidence claims, often linked to the same extreme weather, rose 9% year on year to £17,820. Research commissioned by Aviva suggests that 11% of new homes built between 2022 and 2024 are already at risk of flooding, and that figure is projected to rise to one in seven by 2050, once climate change is factored in. That is why I believe the Association of British Insurers, together with UK Finance and flood campaigners, has written directly to the Secretaries of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Housing, Communities and Local Government to raise the alarm. The message is simple: rather than weakening the sequential test, the Government should mandate sustainable drainage systems, finally implementing schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. That legislation has been in the ether, unimplemented, for nearly 16 years. It is telling that 66% of the public already say that they do not believe the country or their local area is prepared for future flooding. Ignoring the industry that pays out when floods happen is really not the way to change people’s minds. I put it to the Minister that Somerset council is required to deliver 75,000 new homes in the next 20 years, and I believe that North Somerset has to produce nearly 25,000 new homes in the next 15 years. To repeat something that one of my colleagues on Somerset council says, it has taken since the dawn of time for the population of the Somerset council area—not including the North Somerset council area—to reach 560,000. I am keen to know why the Minister and his Government believe that the population will grow by more than 75,000 people in the next 20 years. That is a 13% increase, when it has taken centuries to get to 560,000. It is a ridiculous population increase, and it is not realistic in the slightest. For context, the Office for National Statistics projects that the entire population of the United Kingdom will grow from around 70 million to around 72 million over the same period—a rise of just 2.8%. I am the first to recognise that Wells and Mendip Hills is a lovely place to live—actually the best—but, even allowing for that huge appeal, I struggle to understand why the Government believe that such a disproportionately rural area will see growth at almost five times the national rate. The NPPF changes will affect much more than just flood risk—our area and its green spaces will be under pressure. It seems especially disproportionate when I look at Bristol, my local city, which I love dearly. Its population is projected to grow by about 10%, which is again above the national average. It seems that those in Somerset and North Somerset will be asked to take a huge number of new residents. I do not know where they are coming from, and I cannot quite see how the Government have come to those figures. I would be grateful if the Minister could write to me on how his team has come to that assumption. The last matter I would like to raise is that farmers run factories. Those factories are the agricultural land—it is just that we do not have roofs on them. That is no different from any other part of the country that has some sort of manufacturing. Farmers use fields, and they do not have roofs, so it is quite hard for people to spot the fact that they are food factories. In the interests of an honest debate, I acknowledge that many in the farming community welcome what is set out in the new NPPF, but that comes with real caveats. It is worth the House hearing what they are. A lot of our greenhouses are more than 40 years old and in urgent need of modernisation, yet large glasshouse developments are still routinely treated as major infrastructure projects, which triggers huge delays that again undermine our domestic food production. My colleagues will need no second invitation on this point: food security is national security. I am really glad that the Government recognised that in February. Ensuring that our farmers can produce the food this country needs is of critical importance in what is a very unstable world. Will the Minister consider the points that I have made and write to me about the population figures? I want to make absolutely certain that he does not misunderstand me; this is not a sentimental case for nature and green spaces. It is very realistic damage that is happening to Somerset.

Order. I impose a four-minute time limit on speeches.

I apologise to the Minister; I am hopping between two different debates in two different Chambers. I told my constituents that I would make this point about planning policy in my area, which has fought for decades to protect the green belt. The introduction of the concept of the grey belt means that developers are now turning green belt into grey belt by dumping, cutting down trees and despoiling the area, and then applying for planning permission for development. The concept of grey belt has undermined all that we have spent decades campaigning for.

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt). I will try to cover four aspects of the NPPF in just short of four minutes. The first is what the NPPF says on intentional unauthorised development. I welcome the move towards stronger wording in that area. I should stress that I am not talking about a house extension or somebody accidentally not complying with regulations, but entire new dwellings and wilful non-compliance. I welcome the move from material consideration, as it is known, to substantial weight, but I fear it does not go far enough. As I said in my submission to the consultation, it should be set out very clearly that “wilfully ignoring planning consent requirements will not result in retrospective planning permissions being granted”, and that this cannot in normal circumstances be overridden by personal circumstance arguments. Other things could be done in support, such as making sure that stop notices are easier to issue, and restrictions on things like delivery of construction materials and mobile homes to unlawful sites. The Minister and I have discussed the NPPF housing formula many times across this Floor. He is a very diligent Minister and, although he always robustly defends the Government line, which is kind of annoying, he always does it with great courtesy. I thank him for that. The problem is that this formula has meant a massive increase in housing numbers for the countryside. It is not a north-south thing; it is an urban to countryside shift. Whereas the numbers have gone up by 50% for the country overall, in East Hampshire they have doubled. When that happens overnight, no one has a five-year land supply that can deal with it, so we get speculative developments. That has been brought into sharp relief by the issue of water supply, which has particularly come to prominence since South East Water’s submission to the Basingstoke and Deane local plan. The Basingstoke area that it talks about—zone 4, as it is known—extends to Alton and around my constituency. The Environment Agency has stopped the extension of the abstraction licence at Greywell Fen because of the degradation of that globally rare site of special scientific interest. I met South East Water recently to discuss this. There are questions outstanding, particularly regarding parts of my constituency. Clearly, action should have happened before now, but a doubling of the housing target hugely exacerbates the issue. Large-scale development should not go ahead unless and until this issue is resolved.

I commend the right hon. Gentleman on his speech. I know that the Minister is not responsible for my constituency across the water, but does the right hon. Gentleman feel that recommendations and good things learned on the mainland should be shared with us back home to ensure that we do not have the same problems that seem to be repeating over and over again here?

I agree. There is no practical limit on what we can learn from one another in the home nations of the United Kingdom. I want to come on to what is known as policy L3, which concerns the minimum density requirements for areas around train stations. I have written about this in my submission to the consultation. I fear that a policy that is, on the face of it, sensible—“Let’s have people living close to train stations where they can commute to work or whatever it might be”—is really designed for urban town areas. But it will also have an impact on market towns in places like East Hampshire and in villages that just happen to have a train station. The sorts of densities discussed in the NPPF would be wholly inappropriate for market towns like Alton in East Hampshire and rural villages like Bentley or Rowland’s Castle. Finally, I want to address how the NPPF interacts with local government reorganisation. I am totally opposed to the Government’s top-down reorganisation of Hampshire local government for multiple reasons, including the fact that it splits up an area with an identity—namely, East Hampshire. It puts the lower parts into a new Portsmouth super-council area and the rest of East Hampshire into this vast new Mid Hants unitary. Local plans have been built around existing district council geographies. For councils that are part-way through the process and about to have this enormous reorganisation thrust upon them, what is the guidance from the Government on how they should proceed?

Three-minute limit!

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing a debate on this important topic very much in the spirit of end-of-term relaxation. I want to start with some of the positives of the new draft NPPF. My district councils locally have welcomed its structure, usability and the good aim, at least, of a more streamlined planning system and reduction of duplication. They also welcome the separation of plan making and decision-making guidance. Overall, the aim of speeding up the plan-making process to 13 months is welcome. Local plans take many years to be produced and involve a huge amount of resource. I am certainly interested to hear from the Minister whether he feels that the Planning Inspectorate has the resources to cope with an increase in the number of plans to examine and assess. The right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) made a very important point about the implications of local government reorganisation. Significant concerns remain about how the Government seem to be moving away from local decision making and community empowerment. As this new scheme of delegation will reduce the input of elected councillors in planning decisions, involving communities and needs specific to local geography become even more important, yet there are concerns that spatial development strategies will be agreed to far away from communities. More could be done to clarify the planning system and permissions for houses in multiple occupation. Such properties are often associated with parking and waste issues and, unlike larger HMOs, they may not be subject to requirements on parking provision, room sizes or amenity space, potentially resulting in poorer living conditions. Requiring planning permission for all HMOs for a single use class could help address those issues by ensuring consistent standards. The environment is a big concern. The NPPF has insufficient focus on our climate and environmental obligations, and certainly not enough on flood and extreme temperature resilience and standards for homes. As highlighted by Wildlife and Countryside Link, the draft NPPF would limit local ambition and powers by preventing local planning authorities from requiring biodiversity net gain above the statutory 10% minimum. That seems like a retrograde step. Finally, my biggest concern is one I have raised with the Minister many times and in many different forums: the Government’s ambitious housing targets are not being supported by the same focus on the infrastructure and public services that will be needed, which makes it harder to get local communities invested in the importance of more housing. In Oxfordshire, where the rate of housing growth has been extremely fast, the challenge is ensuring that infrastructure such as doctors, schools, public transport and affordable housing is available to support our growing population. Development should remain plan-led and be guided by evidence of local need, not by market forces alone. That is my biggest concern about both Government policy in general and the NPPF in particular. I hope the Minister will add to his previous comments on what the Government will do to ensure that our house building targets and population growth are supported by infrastructure and public services.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this important debate. Planning and local development is one of the most commonly raised issues in my email inbox, as I am sure is the case for many others in the room. First, I would like to make it clear that I am completely aware of the dire need for housing in this country. Many young people have expressed to me their fears that they will never get a foot on the property ladder, or that they are having to move away from the communities they know and love to find affordable places to rent. Affordable housing is a need, not a luxury. However, new homes do not need to come at the cost of the community that is already there, and nor should they be placed on flood plains. Local people and local elected officials should have a role in deciding the future of their area, because they best understand it. When local people are given the opportunity to help shape their future, it can be a roaring success. In the village of Holt, in my constituency, a neighbourhood plan shaped the development of a derelict, unused tannery site into an award-winning mixed-use development, combining homes and new commercial space, while still preserving the village’s distinct character and acknowledging its history. Meanwhile, in Seend, near Devizes, the village’s community land trust has delivered affordable homes for local residents, built to the highest passive house standards of energy efficiency. That demonstrates what rural communities can achieve by working with partners, such as local councils and Homes England, for the benefit of residents and the environment. Although there is a lot of good in the framework, I am particularly concerned that it fails to commit to new homes being zero-carbon or held to the highest energy efficiency standards, as was shown to be possible by the development in Seend. It also contains no clear commitment to deliver actually affordable homes, and it risks encouraging more executive housing to make more money for developers, while failing to tackle the housing crisis. I welcome the proposed presumption in favour of development near railway stations. Transport-oriented development is precisely the kind of planning approach needed to move away from car-dependent housing estates located far from town centres.

It is a very good idea to have development near railway stations. However, I have another application on the horizon in Yatton, which is the village I was discussing earlier, that involves a plan to build on the railway station car park. Does my hon. Friend think that that is a good idea?

It does sound most odd, if I may say so. That principle lies at the heart of the Bath and Wiltshire metro proposal, which I support. It has the potential to unlock brownfield regeneration in Melksham town centre, revitalise the riverside and strengthen the high street through sustainable, rail-connected growth. However, if that ambition is to be realised, local areas must have access to the resources needed to develop robust transport business cases, masterplans and infrastructure programmes. I am therefore concerned that the removal of funding for sub-national transport bodies risks creating a significant obstacle to the station upgrades, service improvements and strategic transport planning required to support the housing and regeneration opportunities that the policy seeks to encourage. Without adequate investment in the transport network itself, the benefits of transport-oriented development may be difficult to deliver in much of the country.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. First, I thank the Minister for his assistance in progressing the local plan in my constituency. Horsham faced a unique problem with water neutrality, which the previous Government showed no sign of ever grappling with, and I am grateful for his personal involvement in that. However, when it comes to the national house building strategy, I have to be critical. Difficulty with obtaining planning permission is only one, and no longer even the most important, of the many obstacles to house building, so why do we obsess over it to the exclusion of all else? Local targets are set through a compulsory process called the standard method, under which an area that has high local house prices, but only modest local wages, will have steeper housing targets. That formula is a terrible way to assess local housing need in practice, but its worst aspect is how it destroys local authorities’ negotiating power against developers. Like most planning authorities, Horsham district council builds very few council houses directly, so the vast majority of its new housing stock must come from private developers. Developers are not stupid; they know that if a council has a target to build 1,800 homes each and every year—a target that Horsham may face—it will have to say yes to practically every site put in front of it, no matter whether a site was rejected the year before. Try explaining that to residents. Developers with options for the land bid against each other, with a price based on the highest possible outcome, but achieving that price means them having to build zero social rent homes and lots of highly priced, executive homes. That is a bizarre case of competition only ever driving prices up, not down. Incredibly, in Horsham, we would be better off if we negotiated a monopoly for a single company to develop the whole district. That is why we have the paradox of having a chronic housing shortage at the same time as 1.5 million unbuilt houses with planning permission. Meanwhile, as collateral damage in this process, we are ripping apart local democracy. Councils are forced, with zero local consent, to approve sites that are deficient in transport and water supply and that are mostly on greenfield sites. Local authorities have to take the word of statutory consultees as gospel; even where authorities know perfectly well that land will flood, if the Environment Agency says it will not, that is the end of it. I know that the Minister is committed to solving the national housing problem, and I wholeheartedly support him in that, but the current situation is all sacrifice with no benefit. The sites we approve today will sit on the housing market like a dead-weight for years to come. High land prices are being locked in for wasteful schemes that take up three times the land that they need to. We need a reset, so I hope the Minister will agree to meet me to consider alternative solutions.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this debate. It is clearly essential to build homes. One reason why I am sitting in this place is my work to support victims of domestic abuse. For those, often with children, who are on a six-month stay in a refuge while fleeing the most dreadful violence, a secure home is the first step towards a new, safe future. However, the Government have introduced no targets for council or social housing, despite the Liberal Democrats making many calls for them to do so. The dreadful shortage left as the legacy of successive Conservative Governments is, at the very least, not being remedied by this Labour Government. That problem needs fixing, and the NPPF changes not only do not address it, but open up a raft of other problems. The Conservative Administrations that previously ran Hart district council and Basingstoke and Deane borough council failed to produce local plans. That left those areas subject to speculative development granted on appeal, resulting in the building of large housing estates on the edges of our towns and villages, with no accompanying infrastructure. To make the best of a bad situation, the Liberal Democrats on Hart district council introduced a local plan, which, crucially, meant that houses were built sustainably on brownfield land. When the Lib Dems took joint control of Basingstoke and Deane borough council, a local plan was prioritised and progressed. However, this Government’s new housing targets have rendered those new plans all but redundant. Those council areas are now easy targets for entirely inappropriate housing developments. When the balance tips in favour of appeal, it is not the people but the developers who benefit. In Basingstoke and Deane, planning permission for around 6,000 new homes has already been granted. In Hart, the major developer working on the biggest housing project has slowed down building: instead of building and selling 200 houses at a time, it is now building 50 to protect its profits. The new houses are no more affordable—in fact, properties in North East Hampshire are some of the most expensive outside London—but under the Government’s housing policies, developers are being allowed to land-bank: to push through application after application, despite the lack of infrastructure, and to hold on to land for years or decades as it increases in value. Applications come in for a raft of inappropriate places, and all the while, there is no statutory consultee for our most important resource. Water is out biggest concern, and it is absent from the Government’s plans. South East Water, which supplies fresh water to most of North East Hampshire, produced a five-year plan in autumn 2024 that is largely a work of fiction, citing a new pipeline that would supply new and existing homes that would come online in spring 2025. Nobody believed that that could be completed in six months, but Ofwat has no powers to compel South East Water to publish a plan that is in any way based in reality. The consequences of this regulatory and legislative failure sit with local people and the environment. Failure to supply local fresh water has obvious consequences, but the environment also suffers. We have heard already about how the Environment Agency has cancelled the supply of water in Greywell, yet South East Water continues to abstract from the site.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this debate. My constituency is large and rural, containing the towns of Thornbury, Yate and Chipping Sodbury, as well as numerous villages and hamlets, and stretches from the internationally designated Severn estuary all the way to the Cotswold escarpment. A large part of the countryside that surrounds those communities is designated green belt, with all the protections that that used to bring, but now that protection is under threat. Before I go further, I will provide some context. Under the current administration, South Gloucestershire council recognises the need for new housing and has developed a plan to deliver its housing need, which recently went through its examination in public. More than that, the council recognises the importance of homes for social rent and has been punching above its weight in their provision. With around 0.6% of the population of England outside London, it delivered 1.6% of total new social rent completions last year. However, there is an implicit deal with local people in that local plan, which delivers homes while protecting the remaining countryside from speculative development. The Government’s grey belt policy fundamentally threatens that. Green belt land will now be parcelled up into cells for assessment, and it will be difficult to show an individual cell’s contribution. The changes to the framework around the grey belt essentially make purposes C and E void, and particularly C, which protects countryside from encroachment. The danger is that pockets of land will be considered in isolation and be judged only to contribute to purpose C. Indeed, the 2022 West of England combined authority report, in the local plan evidence, showed that the primary reason for just about all the land in the local green belt is purpose C. However, the cumulative impact of developing those pockets of land would degrade the green belt as a whole. Some of our green belt is very narrow, and it will only become more so if this is allowed to happen. Our towns and villages will slowly be swallowed up by Bristol, and the distinctiveness of our communities will be lost. My constituents do not want that, and I suspect that the good people of Bristol do not want it either, although some hon. Members may think otherwise. The Government rightly want to speed up housing delivery, but indiscriminate housing built by big developers with no regard for the environment or the people living nearby is not the answer. Ironically, far from increasing the speed of housing delivery, as the Government claim it will, in my area the grey belt changes the level of risk, creating more delays by distracting planning officers from the planned sites and from the Government’s new town proposal. Time will be wasted arguing with speculative developers about what constitutes grey belt, when it could be spent delivering local housing need through the local plan. I urge the Minister to listen to hon. Members across the Chamber, who are rightly raising concerns, and to advise the new Cabinet and the incoming Prime Minister that rural voices must be heard, and the NPPF revisited.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) on securing the debate, and all other Members for their excellent contributions, which I strongly endorse. I particularly wish to highlight the contribution of the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff), which I hope was a bid to catapult him into becoming Secretary of State under the new regime—I would certainly strongly support the approach he is taking. A lot of people have referred to the inequity and inappropriateness of the way in which the Government have introduced national targets and the manner in which they have imposed them, through the national planning policy framework. It certainly reinforces the weakness of the whole system, because it is based on a delusion that private developers will collude with the Government in driving down the price of their finished product. During my nine-year sabbatical from this place, I was chief executive of a registered social landlord—a community land trust—and tried to deliver in those circumstances, so I am certainly aware of the difficulties in trying to meet the need for affordable homes. My primary point is that the national planning policy framework has fundamentally weakened the rural exception policy, which was introduced in the early ’90s under planning policy guidance 3. That was the first time that planning had switched in principle from “planning use” to “user”, and took the user into account so it was meeting local housing need. That has been productive in a number of areas, especially in Cornwall, where it has for many years been the primary source for the delivery of affordable homes within the duchy. The problem is that because of the way in which the framework has been brought in and because local authorities can no longer demonstrate that they can meet their five-year land supply, all areas that previously could be designated as rural exception sites to meet affordable housing needs can no longer be designated as such. A lot of them have been converted to open-market housing developments. I think that impact was unintended by the Minister, but it is entirely counterproductive, because in many rural areas, the primary means by which affordable housing could be delivered is now not being used. The planning system is fuelled by greed rather than need, and as long as we have weaknesses like that in the system, we cannot meet housing need.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) and all the hon. Members who have contributed today, including my hon. Friends the Members for St Ives (Andrew George), for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young), for Horsham (John Milne), for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) and for Melksham and Devizes (Brian Mathew). One of the abiding themes of the debate is that water and other infrastructure seem to escape the demanding targets that are applied to the delivery of housing. We need an infrastructure-first approach in which infrastructure is as prioritised as housing. The Liberal Democrats welcome the ambition to deliver more homes, particularly the 150,000 social and council rent homes that the country needs, which we established as a target in our manifesto. But the right way to deliver those homes is by working with local communities and trusting them, not through more centralisation into Whitehall. Housing targets, for us, should be established firmly in a community-led process. The incoming Prime Minister has talked a lot about devolution and giving power back to local communities, and he is right to do so. Communities know what works for their area, but this proposed framework does the opposite, stripping power away from local decision makers rather than handing it to them. The proposed framework comes off the back of the recent regulations and direction that mean that decisions, both small and large, are now removed from local councillors, so that they have no power or control over those decisions. It also means that proposed developments such as those at Orchard Portman near Taunton—where 1,100 acres of farms were sold off by the Crown Estate to a house builder without the usual return of payments to the public purse being required in the event of planning permission—could be decided in Whitehall, not by our elected counsellors in Somerset. For all applications now, the draft NPPF, which was recently out for consultation, is filled with policies that weaken local plans and community involvement. It is a power grab by central Government. Across the proposed new framework document, that centralising instinct repeats itself, starting with the presumption in favour of sustainable development. Today, that presumption is a backstop, applying only where the local plan is absent or out of date, or where there is no five-year land supply. That rewards communities for investing in an up to date local plan. That presumption in favour of sustainable development is now to be abolished; instead, policies S3, S4 and S5 would impose a de facto presumption in favour of development in every circumstance for certain kinds of development. That begs the question: will councils continue to invest all their time and effort in local plan preparation? The same instinct runs through proposals on the weight to be given to different policy considerations, giving the same weight to housing, economic development, and heritage and landscape, leaving Historic England to raise concerns about how those will be balanced. It could mean that the historic setting of the Wellington monument on Oldway Road in my constituency, currently subject to appeal, could be another victim of these proposed policies. That approach could also be in contravention of the well-known wording in the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 that “special regard” will be paid to preserving heritage. Nowhere is the centralisation of such decisions in Whitehall’s grasp going further than in the green belt. The Town and Country Planning Association has called the framework “unprecedentedly permissive” for good reason. Three elements combine to have that effect. First, the standard method, where 0.8% of the existing housing stock is applied as a multiplier and then a further multiplier is applied according to areas of high house prices. By definition, green belts constrain supply; that is their purpose. Therefore, they are areas of higher prices. In short, the standard method takes the consequence of protecting a place as a justification for building more on it. That cannot be logical or acceptable. Rural councils have therefore been subject to much higher housing targets. For example, in Somerset, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills put across very well, the 75,000 new dwellings will come as a surprise in terms of population growth compared with what has ever been achieved in the past. Urban areas where regeneration is needed have seen their targets reduced. The second element driving development in rural green fields is green belt policy GB7. In short, that means that a developer can secure consent anywhere in the green belt, regardless of what the local plan says, on condition that it is near a town with a railway station. Ironically, an area with no green belt might be better protected because it is not subject to those policies to allow development around railway stations. The third and final part of the policy that leads to this greenfield development is GB2 for the grey belt. Few of us, and certainly not the Liberal Democrats, would object to local communities deciding that underused green belt land is degraded and could be released for development. But this policy overrides that local plan process, and disapplies protections against encroachment on the countryside, removing villages from the green-belt protections that they have had for decades and generations.

As my hon. Friend is aware, I am very fortunate to have secured a place in the ballot for private Members’ Bills, and my Bill will be on affordable homes. The details have not been written, so there is an opportunity to work on that with him, and indeed with the Secretary of State. I am very keen to do so and to adapt a number of those policies so that it provides a framework within which the Government can work with Parliament to improve and adjust planning policy to achieve the desirable aims.

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. He reminds me that, frankly, I struggle with the fact that such a momentous and significant policy instrument is going through Parliament without a vote. It can hardly be right that these major policy changes, which will unleash development all over the country and reverse decades-old planning policies, will not be subject to a vote, considering that we quite rightly spend weeks and months going through Bills. I am very grateful that my hon. Friend has chosen to prioritise these issues and is bringing them forward in his private Member’s Bill. I wish him well. I know that the Minister always works constructively across the House, and his work is appreciated for that. I know the Minister will work with my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives on his private Member’s Bill, as of course will I. Together, the existing and proposed frameworks begin to look like a greenfield-first approach. The golden rules, which would rightly require more affordable and social housing where green belt is released, are absolutely right. But the Government have consulted on allowing viability assessments to potentially undermine that. I encourage the Minister to say something on whether land should escape the golden rules requiring more social housing just because it has been previously developed. The binning of the garden city principles in the draft is equally damaging. They are the very foundation of what made the new post-war towns, such as Milton Keynes with its famous 22 million trees, some of the best places to live. That is no doubt a bit of drafting by those who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Similar centralising is proposed on nature and climate. National development management policies, along with constraints on local standard setting, will stop councils exceeding the statutory 10% of biodiversity net gain. Again, proposed policy PM13 will prevent councils from setting more ambitious energy targets. We saw the folly of that under the previous Government, who refused to continue with the zero-carbon homes programme. If they had continued that, and we had had solar panels on every house built since then, we could have avoided the need for an entire 900 MW power station—perhaps a small nuclear reactor or a gas-fired power station. Finally, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wells and Mendip Hills pointed out, policy F5, paragraph 2(b)(ii), would create a new exemption from the sequential test for sites at risk of surface water flooding. As my hon. Friend said, the insurance industry has pointed out that there could be as many as 400,000 mortgage prisoners in the future, unable to afford insurance as a result of these kinds of policies. To conclude, the Liberal Democrats are firmly committed to delivering the housing that we and our communities need, but placing all the emphasis on increasing permissions for private sector homes that few can afford is not the answer. We know that that will not reduce—and has not reduced—prices to make homes affordable. New homes are only 5% of the market, after all. With 13,000 homes with planning permission unbuilt in Somerset and 359,000 empty homes in the country, we should be redoubling our efforts to deliver on both of those fronts first. What a community-led approach really means—and this framework lacks almost anything about community involvement—is homes that people can afford: council and social rent homes, alongside rent-to-own to help people get on to the housing ladder. The environment, our people and our communities are not the blockers of development; they are—or at least should be—the reason for development, and we can enhance the life chances of both if we get it right.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond, and to take part in this debate about the impact of changes to the national planning policy framework. At the outset, I thank the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) for securing this important debate. She made a strong speech, particularly focused on the danger of building in areas prone to flooding. I also thank the 10 hon. and right hon. Members who have made speeches—and the three who have made interventions—so far in this debate. The NPPF is the rulebook by which our planning system is guided. It is an extensive and comprehensive statement of the Government of the day’s policy direction, and perhaps the clearest signal to developers, local authorities and local people about how a Government will approach changes to their surrounding built environment. It covers everything from roads to housing, local communities to land use, and provides the overarching checks, balances and direction in the planning system. We are not in blanket opposition to everything that the Government are seeking to do with the NPPF. However, we do have significant concerns about some aspects of it, and I will focus on those in my remarks today. Since coming to power two years ago, this Government have twice proposed revisions to the NPPF, both times with severe consequences for our green spaces, rural towns and villages, and local democratic voices. In their first revisions, made just before Christmas 2024, the Government’s policy direction was clear. Unfortunately, what was on offer was an unwelcome gift of urban sprawl. That was because the Government made it easier for local authorities to release green-belt land for development in more ways than one. The first, and most obvious, was the announcement that new golden rules would need to be met to expand on to the green belt. That effectively invited developers to test the waters by highlighting that the NPPF stated that, where a development complied with the golden rules, local authorities should give “significant weight in favour” of approving the scheme. The second release came from the Government’s spurious grey belt designation. Concocted in the bowels of Marsham Street, “grey belt” is a disingenuous label. The Prime Minister has told us that it means low-quality land made up of “disused car parks”, but that is far from the truth, because, for too many sites, grey belt is simply a façade for releasing green-belt sites for urban sprawl and overdevelopment. That is backed by research in December 2025 by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which showed that, a year after the first NPPF reforms, of the 13 developments of 10 or more homes approved by Government planning inspectors on so-called grey-belt land, 88% of those 1,250 homes “will be built on previously undeveloped countryside”— not disused petrol stations, low-quality land or any other trumped-up example taken straight from a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government press release, just our countryside. Worse, those developments make up more than 90% of homes granted planning permission on grey-belt sites by inspectors; a further 21 smaller schemes, totalling no more than 91 homes, comprised the remainder. That is not the only attack on our green spaces. The 2024 NPPF revisions also reintroduced mandatory top-down housing targets across England by removing the word “advisory” from the relevant paragraph concerning housing targets, alongside references to exceptional circumstances for alternative approaches to determining local housing targets. As other Members have said, that came alongside a new standard method for housing targets. The hon. Members for Horsham (John Milne) and for Wells and Mendip Hills highlighted some of the bizarre assumptions underpinning the housing targets generated by the new standard method, alongside some of its counterproductive outcomes. When examined together, those disproportionately redistributed top-down housing targets on to rural areas from urban areas. For example, under the Government’s targets, housing numbers were cut by 11% in London, 38% in Birmingham and 55% in Coventry, while increasing by 106% in the New Forest, 199% in North Yorkshire and 487% in Westmorland and Furness. That is particularly concerning given that major cities—and not least here in central London—have the infrastructure needed to support development. However, even in Greater London, although the collective target has been reduced by 11%, that has been achieved by sharp drops in urban inner London, whereas in the more rural outer-London areas, huge increases have been imposed. For example, in my London borough of Bromley, which is the largest borough in Greater London and is mostly rural, the target has been increased by 400%. The conclusion is inescapable. The NPPF changes show very clearly that this Government are determined to build all over the green belt. What has been the result of these reforms? It certainly has not been large amounts of extra housing. As I pointed out in this place yesterday, the Government’s own figures show that the number of net new additional dwellings in England was just 208,600 in Labour’s first year in power—a 6% drop from 2023-24 under the last Conservative Government’s final year in office. Indeed, the Government admitted that they will not hit the target through their own net additional dwelling forecasts, predicting that by 2029 they will have fallen well short. It does not have to be this way. The Opposition recognise the need to build more homes, and we made it clear from the start of this Parliament that we are broadly supportive of the ambition to build many more homes. However, the Government’s actions, through some of their revisions to the NPPF, are the wrong way to go about it. A future Conservative Government will employ a genuine brownfield-first approach rather than releasing swathes of green belt or relabelling it under the murky and disingenuous designation of “grey belt”. We will not just pay lip service to brownfield development, but prioritise it and make it easier. That can and will be done. The CPRE reported that a large proportion of England’s housing could be swiftly met using brownfield land that already has planning permission, without encroaching on undeveloped greenfield or green belt land. It estimates that there is enough brownfield land to build 1.41 million homes in England, based on the most up-to-date data from local planning authorities’ brownfield land registers up to 2024. That amounts to 93% of the Government’s parliamentary target. Furthermore, it has shown that England’s brownfield sites are increasing in number, land area and minimum net dwellings—up 54%, 6% and 34% respectively between 2018 and 2024. That is why, not for the first time, I press the Minister to go further and faster in helping local authorities and developers to access brownfield sites rather than freeing up our green belt and steamrollering over local democracy, local voices and local communities. Recent history shows that this approach can work. If the Government want to see urban regeneration or densification done right, they can follow Conservative examples and pursue brownfield-first and not greenfield-first. We will not only abandon the Government’s offensive on our green spaces, but harmonise supply and demand-side policies. I will finish with a small note on that point. As the Government continue to tweak the NPPF, they are doing nothing to back first-time buyers, families and downsizers by axing demand-side schemes and cutting stamp duty relief. There is no point in delivering supply-side reforms if the demand is not there to make it worth while. To conclude, it is evident from the speeches here today and the evidence before us that the impact of recent reforms to the national planning policy framework has failed to deliver more homes, failed to protect our green belt, failed to support the housing market, failed to make brownfield sites viable and failed to deliver for voters. Regardless of the outcome of that, the Minister is a man I have a great deal of respect for. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) that he is a decent and thoughtful man, and I sincerely wish him well in the pending reshuffle. Regardless of its outcome, he has the chance to raise this with whomever his new boss will be after next week’s coronation. I hope that he grasps the opportunity with alacrity and delivers the right homes in the right places and with the right infrastructure—just as the country deserves.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) on securing this important debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. I also thank all hon. Members who have participated in this wide-ranging debate, and the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and the hon. Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon) for their contributions. The degree of praise that I received from Opposition Members is slightly damning of my chances in any upcoming reshuffle, but I thank them for their kind words. Members raised a wide range of concerns and asked many questions. In the time available to me, I will respond to as many as possible, but I will concentrate on those relating to the national planning policy framework. Issues such as the national scheme of delegation of planning functions—our modernisation of planning committees—are outside the framework, but I am more than happy to have a conversation with my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) and others about them. The national planning policy framework sets out the Government’s planning policies for England and how they should be applied. It makes it clear that the purpose of the planning system is to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. Accordingly, it provides a framework within which locally prepared plans can provide for homes, commercial development and supporting infrastructure in a sustainable manner. As hon. Members know, the framework must be taken into account in preparing local plans and is a material consideration in planning decisions. The Government’s manifesto included a clear commitment to immediately update the NPPF. Within three weeks of taking office, we consulted on changes to the framework, finalising them in December 2024. Among the many changes made in the initial revision of the framework were the restoration and raising of mandatory housing targets—the Conservatives abolished them when they were in government, which contributed to the low number of net additional completions in our first year in office— a new standard method for assessing housing need, which is aligned to our 1.5 million new homes target; greater support for social and affordable housing provision; a strengthening of policy relating to brownfield land development; a modernised strategic approach to green-belt land designation and release; and support for key economic sectors and clean energy infrastructure. As hon. Members know, in December 2025, we published a fuller and more definitive overhaul of the NPPF for consultation. The proposed new framework represented the culmination of a sustained effort over the first 17 months of this Parliament to revamp our planning system so that it meets housing need in full and unleashes economic growth. It represents the most significant reform to national planning policy since the original NPPF was introduced more than a decade ago. The new NPPF that we consulted on is wholly restructured. It maintains and builds on the initial revisions that we made in December 2024. It includes a range of new measures to support key economic sectors. As hon. Members have noted, it incorporates new, clear, rules-based national policies for plan and decision making. The proposals will make the NPPF easier to navigate for communities, local authorities and developers alike. The new decision-making policies in the framework published in 2025 are designed to make development management more certain, consistent and streamlined; to standardise policies that apply across the whole of England, particularly where we have national standards in place and do not need that degree of local variation any longer; and to reduce duplication and avoid unjustified local deviation from national policy in local plans as they are being prepared. To ensure that those changes made an immediate difference, the Government proposed that the new national decision-making policies effectively override conflicting policies in local plans from day one. As part of that overall change to the framework, we also proposed new polices to boost housing supply and unlock economic growth in the years ahead. They include, as has been noted, a permanent presumption in favour of suitably located development; the establishment of in-principle support for suitable proposals that develop land around rail stations within existing settlements, and around well-connected train stations outside settlements, including on green-belt land; and policies designed to drive urban and suburban densification to secure a diverse mix of homes, including stronger support for rural, social and affordable housing and setting clear expectations for accessible housing to meet the needs of older and disabled people. Our proposals also include policies that embed a vision-led approach to transport, further embedding the changes that we made in December 2024; policies that better address climate change mitigation and adaptation; and policies designed to ensure that we are better conserving and enhancing the natural environment, including changes to reflect local nature recovery strategies, to recognise landscape character and conserve and enhance existing natural features, to incorporate swift bricks, and to provide guidance on sites of local importance for nature.

The Minister says that the purpose of the policy is, among other things, to drive the desperate need for affordable homes. Does he accept that, in rural areas, he is also driving affordable homes off rural exception sites and making them unaffordable? The setting of targets means that local plans are no longer viable and appropriate, and therefore developers can come in and simply insist that their developments should be permitted because they are delivering the housing numbers.

We have had this debate many times. I will come on to housing targets and the fact that if there is an up-to-date local plan in place, the housing targets do not need to be immediately revised. On the specific point about rural affordable housing, the framework makes it easier for rural exception sites to come forward through clearer national policy. It makes it far easier for rural authorities to require affordable housing on smaller sites, including removing the need for legislative designation. We have received over 20,000 responses to the consultation. We have made very good progress in analysing the responses and making final policy decisions, but unfortunately, as a result of the announcement made by the Prime Minister on 22 June that he was resigning as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party and the associated constraints on Government business in the period ahead of the summer recess, including the prohibition on initiating new policy commitments, it has not been possible to respond to the consultation and publish the final framework before the summer recess. We will seek to do so in due course. The issue of flooding, which was raised by the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills, is of particular concern in her constituency, as she made clear. The NPPF outlines a sequential approach to flood risk management, requiring inappropriate development to be directed away from areas at highest risk and providing strong safeguards where development is necessary in those areas. In plan making, a sequential approach should be employed. That involves applying the sequential test and, if needed, the exception test. In decision making, where necessary, planning authorities also apply the sequential test and, if needed, the exception test to ensure that flood risk is minimised and appropriately addressed.

I wonder how the High Court came to its decision over the site in Yatton. What the Minister says sounds good to me, but it can be swept away because the NPPF is what the judge decreed was the way to go and, because there is a need for homes, the sequential test can be completely ignored.

That is not quite my reading of the Yatton judgment. The judge confirmed that even if a site fails the formal sequential test for flood risk, elements of the exception test remain valid material considerations that can outweigh flood risk under the tilted balance in paragraph 11(d). The High Court made a judgment in that case on the application of the policy, but it applies, as I have set out—[Interruption.] I will give way briefly, but I do want to cover the other issues raised in the debate.

Will the Minister meet me and those in my constituency who are particularly concerned about this to discuss it?

If I remain in post after the summer recess, I will be more than happy to meet the hon. Lady. Where the sequential and exception tests have been applied as necessary and are not met, the framework is clear that development should not be allowed. I want to push back gently on the assertions made by the hon. Lady and the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington, that we have weakened the sequential test. We have not weakened the sequential test in any way. We have clarified through changes to the PPG the triggers for the sequential test as well as its application, but we have not weakened it. If it is found necessary to build homes in areas of flood risk, the statutory guidance accompanying the building regulations promotes flood-resilient building work in flood-prone areas through approved document C, and the framework makes it clear that developments of all sizes should use sustainable drainage techniques where the development could have drainage impacts. The draft NPPF that we have consulted on includes a dedicated chapter on planning for flood risk and coastal change. This seeks to clarify how existing policies should operate and aligns the NPPF with recent updates to planning guidance. It also included policies incorporating a new requirement that sustainable drainage systems should be designed in accordance with the national standards for sustainable drainage systems to provide a consistent basis for improving their design. On the presumption in favour of sustainable development, we are trying to drive up the coverage of up-to-date local plans. Several hon. Members have spoken today who represent areas that do not have up-to-date local plans and five-year housing land supplies. We are making great progress in driving up plan coverage. Over 60% more local plans are at examination now than at this time last year, but it will take time to boost coverage. It is important, where policies are not up to date or where there is an insufficient supply of land, that there is a fallback to encourage planning permission to be granted, and that is what the presumption provides for. However, the NPPF we published in December 2024 not only improved the operation of the presumption by clarifying the circumstances in which it applies, but introduced new safeguards to make it clear that its application cannot justify poor-quality development. Under the revised draft presumption published for consultation last year, the default support in principle is turned off in certain situations, including where the development would conflict with sites allocated for specific uses or would use parks and open space or land identified for flood risk management. It would also be disapplied where development does not achieve acceptable standards in relation to harm to nature, heritage assets, flood risk, design and being an effective use of land. I have only a short time available to me and a wide range of other issues were raised. I will touch on each briefly. On our housing target and the standard method we have introduced, in our view the new method better responds to affordability pressures by using a higher affordability adjustment in its calculation. That recognises the importance of housing affordability in assessing housing need and helps direct more homes to where they are most needed and least affordable. It also provides greater certainty to the sector through more stable and predictable housing numbers, compared with the previous approach that relied on out-of-date demographic predictions and unevidenced and arbitrary judgments. On brownfield, grey-belt and green-belt land, the hon. Member for Orpington knows full well that we strengthened the policy in the December 2024 NPPF on brownfield land. We have gone further in the draft framework that is out for consultation. It is not the case that there is enough brownfield land, particularly not viable land in the right locations on brownfield land registers across the country. In certain exceptional circumstances, local authorities need to release green-belt land. We ask them when they do so to explore all options in maximising brownfield land, working with neighbouring authorities and where necessary reviewing their green belt. The definition of grey belt is set out in the glossary of the NPPF. There is no confusion about what it means. Where grey belt is being brought forward, it cannot fundamentally undermine the policies of the green belt across the wider plan area; we included that safeguard in the framework. On train stations, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) was right that we want more development to come forward in sustainable locations around train stations. We obviously took a different approach to all stations, as opposed to well-connected stations, where we are looking for higher minimum densities to come forward. I must be clear that the proposals do not grant automatic permission on suitable sites or remove appropriate local oversight of the development control process. They add weight to what needs to be considered as part of an overall planning judgment, as is the case with all material considerations. I will not dwell on rural or urban housing targets. I have said before and say again that across city regions the new standard method increases targets by 20% and, through that, housing growth is directed to a wider range of urban areas and smaller cities as well as our larger city areas. I commend the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills and the Backbench Business Committee for giving the House an opportunity to debate these important matters. Over the past two years, the Government have sought to revamp the planning system to ensure that it will facilitate the delivery of high and sustainable rates of house building and high-quality infrastructure in the years ahead. To the point on infrastructure, the new NPPF strengthens expectations in that area as well. More needs to be done to transform the failing housing system we inherited, but the revised NPPF we published in December 2024 and the wholly restructured framework we will publish in due course are integral to our plans to improve housing availability, affordability and quality in this Parliament. I thank all hon. Members for their considered contributions today and wish them all, and you, Sir Desmond, an enjoyable and productive summer recess.

I am grateful to you, Sir Desmond, and to the Minister for everything he has said. I very much hope that he stays in his place because we would like to carry on the conversation; I want him to stay exactly where he is. I know that the Government are not in favour of leaving notes, but if in a ghastly moment the Minister decides that something is not right and moves on, will he leave a long note for his successor? I do not particularly wish to argue in the last moments of the debate, but as I understand it the national planning policy guidance permits surface water flooding sequential tests to be disapplied. I need to continue that conversation with the Minister, if I may. I point out that our local plans are up to date until such time as the housing numbers change, and then of course the local plans will not be in date any longer. In Somerset alone—I am not talking about North Somerset—18,000 new homes have passed planning but have not been built, which all relates to phosphate stuff. Those homes do not seem to be taken into account at all, given that we have another 75,000 on top of those, which seems inappropriate. I note the Minister’s comments about station parking; I really hope that we do not build on station car parks, as that would be mad. There are a number of other points that I would have liked to make—

Order. Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).