What steps are being taken by the Department to support house building?

Will the Minister support a campaign for an investment zone in Wolverhampton North East, stretching from Springfield brewery to the science park?

What further support is available to encourage the site owner to complete more than 100 homes planned for a site?

Does the Minister agree that developer contributions should be spent on improving local infrastructure affected by major housing developments?

What is being done to ensure successful and timely integration of vital facilities such as play spaces and healthcare services in new housing developments?

What steps is the Minister taking to address capacity challenges in local planning authorities and increase the supply of social rented homes?

Will my hon. Friend condemn the council's move and assure me that no Homes England money will be used to backfill the gap?

I do not doubt the Minister's good intentions on house building, but does she accept that housing starts fell by 12% year on year in the first three months of this year? That is down to a figure of just more than 37,000 starts, which is half the figure needed to hit 300,000 homes a year. On that basis, does she conclude like me that not merely is her policy not succeeding in hitting the housing targets, but it is considerably contributing to their failure?

We do not just need to build affordable homes; we also need to build high-quality homes that are fit for the future and climate-resilient. In the past six years, the average cost of repairing a home from flood damage has been £60,000 a property, and Aviva calculates that one in four homes is now at risk of flooding. Will the Government ensure that their proposed national planning policy framework will finally prevent unprotected homes from being built in flood risk areas?

In Westmorland and Lonsdale, average house prices are 12 times average household incomes. The danger we have is that when we see houses developed, we are meeting demand, but not need. Should the Government not give us far greater planning controls, so that we can ensure that we do not see 100 homes built that are a waste of bricks going into the second home market? Instead, we should ensure that they are affordable homes, socially rented for local families.

The Government are notoriously bad at disposing of public land—I need only look at NHS Property Services and the seven-year wait on the Bootham Park hospital site, and at Ministry of Defence land—so will the Minister look at how that can be co-ordinated and handed over to Homes England so that we can get building the housing that is desperately needed in places such as York?

Among the SNP failures that the Secretary of State chose not to mention is the fact that, since the SNP came to government in 2007, we have been building new council and social-rented houses at nine times the rate of any Government covering England. Does the Minister accept that if successive Labour and Tory Governments had followed the SNP's example in Scotland, the housing crisis in England would be far less than it currently is?

I thank the Minister very much for her responses. One of the key issues is for urgent planning decisions to be made. The Minister has a keen interest in Northern Ireland, where the population has risen by about 100,000 up to 1.9 million. One thing that needs to be done is on infrastructure decisions, which need to be made here nationally, not regionally. What discussions has she had with the Northern Ireland Assembly to ensure that those decisions can be made to the benefit of all of us in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?

Do the Government realise how absurd all of this sounds? Their own flagship Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which is currently making its way through the House of Lords, has measures in it to block new homes from being built, and yet the Minister stands here berating councils for getting in the way. All of this is happening because Conservative Back Benchers have more control of housing policy than their Government.

It is literally in the Government's own Bill—they are trying to block new houses from being built. They have had 17 housing Ministers and three planning overhauls, and house building is at its lowest level for a generation.