This week the Prime Minister said the planning system is a chokehold on the growth that our country needs. He is right. It's a blockage in our economy so big it obscures our entire future. Indeed it has locked a generation out of the dream of home ownership.

It means that many grown-up children are unable to leave their childhood homes and others are left struggling with soaring rents or wondering how they can find a deposit, let alone pay a mortgage. The next generation have been left behind by the housing market, the keys to a better future further out of reach, their opportunities denied and their aspirations suffocated.

Then there are those who are even worse off - the 160,000 children who will wake up on Christmas morning to an uncertain future in temporary accommodation. They are casualties of the worst housing crisis since we rebuilt from the rubble of war.

I know first-hand how a secure home is the foundation of a better life. But for too long and for too many, those foundations have been left to crumble. Housing starts and permissions are at the lowest for a decade having plummeted on the previous Government's watch. The Tories failed to build the homes our country needs.

We've never been anything other than candid that building 1.5 million homes over five years is ambitious. But with the dire inheritance left by the previous government we need bold and decisive action. It's why I won't cave in to the blockers as the last government did, and it's why this week I will be reversing their damaging changes to the National Planning Policy Framework that saw mandatory housing targets scrapped and torpedoed housebuilding. Because rebuilding Britain is part of our plan for change which will deliver growth that has been held back for the last 14 years.

Councils must play their full part in getting spades in the ground because we all must do our bit to build the homes we need. We will overhaul local planning committees, allowing planning officers to make more decisions to speed up the approvals process. Unblocking the clogged-up planning system means providing greater certainty to developers that good quality schemes aligned with democratically agreed local development plans will be approved in a timely manner to get spades in the ground. It also means ensuring that residents know non-compliant or speculative schemes that depart from their local plans will be subject to appropriate democratic scrutiny.

We expect every area to adopt a plan to meet their housing need. The question is where the homes and the local services that people expect alongside them get built, not whether homes are built at all.

Keir and I know these are tough decisions for all of us - but the impact of inaction is not something that we can stomach. Every couple who can't afford to move in together and start a longed-for family suffers. Every parent who draws down a chunk of carefully-saved pension to get a child on to the housing ladder suffers. Every 30-something who's still sharing a rented house with strangers suffers too. It can't go on.

This government is open and honest about the scale of the challenges. The housing crisis we have inherited cannot be fixed overnight. But our Plan for Change sets the trajectory towards the milestone of building 1.5 million homes.

We're changing the planning system so it works for everyone, and for generations to come. We're backing the builders, including by unlocking £700 million in government funding through the extended Home Building Fund to support small and medium-sized housebuilders next year to deliver up to 12,000 new homes. These housebuilders must be the bedrock of our plans, and we are giving them the support they need to deliver.

To the people who say we can't get things done in our country, we are saying you no longer have the upper hand. We're getting Britain building and make home ownership a reality once again. It's how we'll unlock a more secure future for all of us.