Pennycook has been vocal about government promises to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliament.

Speaking to the UK Real Estate and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF), housing minister Matthew Pennycook said: “The case for fundamentally transforming the housing system that we inherited is unarguable.

“By any metric, it has been an abject failure.

“As I’ve argued many times, in many different parts of the country: the crisis of housing availability, affordability and quality that that system has produced is blighting lives and hampering economic growth and productivity.

“That is why, as a government, we set ourselves the task of reforming this failing system root and branch.”

Pennycook went on to describe the government’s plans to change planning rules, provide more funding, and speed up development so more homes can be built.

The government wants more investment to be brought in, and 1.5 million new homes to be delivered.

Pennycook said these changes are the biggest update to the housing and planning system in decades.

He also recognised that the industry is facing tough economic conditions and said the government and developers need to keep working together to solve problems, build more homes, and support economic growth.

Pennycook added: “While much has been done, there obviously remains much more to do as we strive to hit our incredibly stretching target of 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament.

“We do need to finalise a range of legislative and policy measures. We have to publish a final, revised NPPF, and we will do so this summer. We have to bring into force our new National Scheme of Delegation, and we will lay the required regulations in the coming weeks.”

Hampshire Trust Bank managing director of development finance Neil Leitch said:

“There is no question that many of the areas being discussed reflect things the industry has been raising for a long time and additional focus on planning capacity, SME developers and housing delivery is welcome. The bigger issue for me, however, is whether any of it starts changing what people are actually seeing on the ground because that is ultimately what matters.

“If we step back and look at housing delivery itself, I think there is still a fair question around where meaningful improvement is being seen. The ambition to build 1.5 million homes is clearly significant against recent delivery levels, but the wider requirement itself is not new. We’ve known for more than twenty years that around 300,000 homes a year were needed and yet here we are still discussing broadly the same requirement today despite population growth materially exceeding assumptions made at the time.

“That should concern all of us because over that period we have seen reforms, interventions and policy initiatives come and go, yet many of the underlying barriers are still sitting in exactly the same place.

“When I sit with developers, the conversation rarely starts with housing targets or policy announcements. It starts with sites, schemes and the practical reality of trying to move projects through a system which, for many, increasingly feels unpredictable and at times simply broken. I hear stories regularly around applications taking significant time simply to register, planning officers changing midway through a process and different interpretations being applied to live schemes despite neither the application itself nor local planning policy having materially changed.”