The Conservatives have blasted Labour with claims that the “majority” of their massive new housebuilding programme will mainly benefit new migrants.
The Party’s shadow housing secretary Kevin Hollinrake told the House of Commons that Ms Rayner’s new 1.5 million housing target will concrete over the greenbelt just to accommodate new immigrants over the coming years.
He told MPs: “This planning framework pushes development to rural areas, concreting over green belt, green fields and over our green and pleasant land, rather than focusing and supporting building in urban areas where we need to build the most.”
“And to what end? Due to the loosening of restrictions on the visa requirements such as the salary threshold and the scrapping of the Rwanda deterrent, the majority of the homes they deliver will be required for people coming into this country rather than for British citizens.”
He added: “What we do not welcome is the war on rural England he is pursuing. Following on from the family farm tax, the withdrawal of the rural services delivery grants, now we see the massive shift, mass house building in rural areas and on green belt.”
However Labour housing minister Matthew Pennycook hit back, accusing the Tories of “scaremongering”.
Mr Pennycook fumed: “He knows as well as I do that the majority of homes that developers sell in this country are to British nationals, that most parts of the country have local allocation rules in place and local residency requirements that means that non-British nationals can’t access housing, that only those who are eligible for no recourse to public funds can do so.
“He knows those rules. He is scaremongering. It is beneath him. I know that the honourable gentleman doesn’t really believe it.”
The Government finally revealed its new planning rules today, which will force local councils to hike up new housebuilding.
It will also reclassify areas of greenbelt land as ‘greybelt’, in order to allow local authorities to build homes on patches of greenbelt land of low quality.
Labour has been accused of planning on “bulldozing” through local objections, and imposing a “Whitehall diktat” to councils who know their areas better than the government.
The full targets, published a short time ago, reveal that Labour will build around 370,000 homes a year in order to meet their election target.
This is a significant increase to the number of new homes built each year at the moment, which is around 230,000.
Speaking in the Commons this lunchtime, minister Matthew Pennycook could not say how many of the new 1.5 million homes will be affordable, refusing to put a “precise number on it at the moment”.
He also denied waging a war on rural England, describing the claim as “simply wrong”.
