Speeches by Curtis.

“Minister, we heard from Sir Michael about the urgency and the direction that was given from the original piece of work, ensuring that work can begin quickly on all these sites. Do we think that three sites with spades in the ground—whatever “spades in the ground” means—by the end of this Parliament meets that sense of …”

“We have just had what I think most people regard as an incredibly successful planning process where over the course of a few months your Department has signed off on an incredibly substantial, significant infrastructure project with Universal in Bedford through an SDO process, which I do not think has been used for man…”

“There could be 10 pence sitting somewhere or there could be tens of billions of pounds, or billions of pounds.”

“That is how they are being made to feel, often, by the Department at the moment. How can we get away from that culture to one that is far more ambitious and focused on deliverable—”

“A vague number would be—a sense of scale—”

“You must have an idea in your head of how much there is in that section and how much potential there is money-wise. I assume you broadly have a number on that which you can share with us.”

“That is not going to come from the $39 billion or the $16 billion from the housing bank. Where is that money going to come from and how much is there? You cannot make the offers yet because you have not made the decisions yet. You can only offer what you have.”

“I mention it because, having spoken to some people, they have not quite felt that level of ambition come through in the implementation progress. There is one person from the private sector who apparently described it as like applying for a job when you do not know what the job is, whether there is a vacancy, or what th…”

“That would be good, as obviously I am asking because we talk a lot about increasing supply and the impact that would have on affordability, which is a big, important focus of this Government. But it would be good to have the two numbers side by side: what could be achieved by increasing supply and decreasing transactio…”

“The Government have announced plans to replace the lifetime ISA. What improvements would you like to see to that product?”

“Do we have a comparison of what the number would be in Australia?”

“Is the £450,000 cap on the lifetime ISA high enough?”

“It would be good to quantify some things that we have been talking about. Do you have the numbers for, say if you were to buy an average property for £300,000, what the cost of that transaction is, broken down by the biggest elements? Obviously on that property you would not pay any stamp duty, but how much would the r…”

“Would that be another 1%?”

“So we are probably looking at somewhere around 2.5% plus stamp duty on top of that.”

“I am guessing it is a particular problem for new builds and, particularly in the south of England, you are not going to get one for less than £450,000, even as a first-time buyer.”

“Just to come back to David a second; we talk about viability but what we really mean is that you cannot build a house for the cost you can sell it for. Is that right? Often the answer we get from industry is, “Can the Government give us loads of money, please, or subsidise us with Help to Buy?” The Government are right…”

“These are effectively national design standards.”

“Chris Curtis, MP for Milton Keynes North.”

“Are there any barriers, on the Government side at least, to your system becoming as efficient in the UK as it is in Australia?”