Housing secretary says conversations with Treasury needed over stimulus for the sector
The consultation process over the government’s national planning rules must be quicker, the housing secretary told an audience in Leeds yesterday as he hinted at stimulus measures to support the sector through disruption from the Middle East conflict.
Speaking alongside Homes England chair Pat Ritchie at an event at the UKREIIF conference, Steve Reed told an audience questioner that the final version of the latest National Planning Policy Framework would be published “very, very shortly”, without giving a specific date.
He said it was “very frustrating how long these consultations take” and said his department “need to be looking at how we can speed that up”.
Reed said that some of what had come back from the consultation was “going to make it more effective than it was to start with”, adding that the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government “understand the urgency to get that going”.
The secretary of state also addressed concerns around demand for new homes, which has been rocked by the conflict in the Middle East. Multiple housebuilders and house market indexes have already noted the impact on the sector.
The housebuilding sector has long called for demand-side support for first-time buyers, similar to the Help to Buy scheme which ended roughly three years ago, having closed to new applicants in October 2022.
“We know the market needs further support,” said Reed, adding that he was expecting questions from the audience around demand-side stimulus.
“Now that we’ve tackled a lot of the barriers that were in the way through unnecessary burdensome planning regulations, that is what people are looking at,” he said.
While noting that the six interest rate cuts in a row that were made by the Bank of England from August 2024 to December 2025 were a form of stimulus, he said that “of course there are conversations we need to have” about further support “given what’s just happened in the Middle East”.
“The final quarter of last year saw a 24% increase in housing starts,” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of trajectory we needed to go on, but events overseas are affecting that, so we know we need to sit down and have conversations, myself with Pat [Ritchie], with the Treasury and with the sector”.
“Urgent support is required to keep us going through what we hope will be a limited period of disruption, and then we get back to the trajectory we need to be on to build the homes that we know can help speed up economic growth, but also tackle the housing crisis we have in this country,” he said.
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