BPF Westminster Update - 23 December 2025

📣 Read our last Westminster Update of 2025 with our Head of Communications Dominic Curran!

In the update, Dominic reflects on a busy year of parliamentary engagement, major legislation and the issues that have dominated conversations in Westminster. Read it below!

🗣️ 2025 has been a year of deepening and positive engagement with parliamentarians across the Commons and the Lords, and also with many of the political and pressure groups within the policy ecosystem. The BPF has been strengthening relationships with the various Yimby groups that have sprung up across the political spectrum, as well as think tanks like Labour Together and the Centre for Policy Studies. We have particularly developed our relationships with the Labour Growth Group and the Conservative MHCLG team, with Mike Reader MP from the former and Gareth Bacon MP from the latter speaking to the BPF’s Corporate Affairs Committee during the year. We have also been reaching out to Reform, with Richard Tice MP sponsoring a debate we secured on the Building Safety Regulator, and the BPF attending the party’s conference in Birmingham.

There has been a lot to engage with Government on. Major pieces of legislation have gone through Parliament, with the Renters’ Rights Act being passed, the Planning and Infrastructure Act just receiving Royal Assent, and the English Devolution Bill, which seeks to ban upward-only rent reviews, going into the Lords committee in late January. That is not to mention the non-statutory Government ambitions to analyse and respond to, including the Industrial Strategy, the Homelessness Strategy, and an apparent non-stop conveyor belt of planning changes, from the delayed homes penalty to the most significant rewrite of the NPPF since its inception.

We have, of course, also been fighting hard to press home major issues of concern to the industry, most of which ultimately fall into the bucket of viability, or lack thereof. Most prominent has been the performance of the Building Safety Regulator. We worked with members of the Labour Growth Group and MPs across the House to secure a backbench debate on the issue in the autumn, which followed monthly meetings between the BPF, industry, the BSR and the Minister to flag problems and develop solutions. This has resulted in more funding and wider organisational changes, which are positive, although we have yet to see conclusive evidence that they have eliminated the backlog as promised. We have also raised the issue of viability more generally with officials and MPs through our report setting out the issue in accessible detail, which you can read here.

➡️ Next year will come round all too quickly, and will hopefully be the year when development viability begins to turn around as lower debt costs and planning reforms bed in. We will continue to press industry priorities with all key stakeholders on members’ behalf.