Meeting of the Parliament 24 October 2023
We will support the legislative consent motion, while recognising that the bill legislates in devolved areas. Scotland and Britain need to get building to tackle our housing crisis, and we can see why powers are needed to align planning data and report on environmental outcomes, but the Tories’ bill is desperately lacking in ambition and is as thin as the white paper that came before it.
Planning information must be used to drive improvement, but it will also expose the fact that a decade of Government cuts has hollowed out local authority planning departments. We want planning that delivers more genuinely affordable housing, serves communities well and helps local businesses and town centres to thrive. The bill will not achieve that for Scotland, but the national planning framework does not do that, either.
It is welcome that the UK Government may make planning data regulations only after consulting the Scottish ministers or if they are outside devolved competence, but the bill has been beset by Tory back-bench rebellions and Government U-turns, which ended up in the UK Government ditching mandatory housing targets. In ditching those targets, the Tory Government let the SNP Government off the hook for failing to set its own all-tenure targets, which we desperately need to get back to building the 25,000-plus homes a year that we need.
As with the Government here, the UK Government lacks ambition in its bill’s reform of compulsory purchase rules for England, which will hinder progress on development, on delivering more houses and on bringing empty homes back into use. The measures in the bill will do little to address the deep inequalities that exist in Scotland and in every part of the UK. Major decisions will continue to be made in Whitehall, with communities forced to compete for small pots of money that are handed out by Tory ministers. Many of the poorest areas will miss out entirely, which seems to be a badge of honour for the current Tory Prime Minister. If neither current Government will deliver on the promise to level up the country, Labour will.
18:04