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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I am happy to be ruled out of order—that sounds like a speech on Second Reading—but we have not been building the homes that we require in this country for a generation. Since the 1970s—for 35 years—housing supply, as opposed to housing demand, has been woefully inadequate. We need to do something about that. We need to take into account the rising aspirations of the people of this country and the social changes. We are all living longer and need appropriate homes. More of us live on our own, perhaps as a result of marital breakdown. We need to do something about that. We need the homes that this country wants and deserves. To do that, under the evidence-based policy that we have put in place, we need to build 240,000 homes a year, and I hope that the whole House will provide consensus on that.