It will bulldoze through local concerns and lead to individual applications bypassing elected councillors and planning committees.
It will reengineer housing targets to switch house building from urban areas into rural areas and it will fail to deliver housing to the areas where the jobs are and where people actually want them.
Although we built a million homes in the last five years, more are clearly needed. But that does not mean the Government can ride roughshod over local peoples’ voices.
Any attempt to exclude local consent from the planning process and for faceless planning officers and inspectors in Bristol and ministers in Whitehall to dictate where they should go instead is doomed to failure.
Worse still, Labour has taken an axe to our measures to get people on the housing ladder. Right to Buy, First Time Buyer Stamp Duty relief and the affordable homes to purchase programmes cuts have all been cut.
It’s no wonder that Labour Governments never deliver on housebuilding – the last one saw it fall to its lowest level since the 1920s and Sadiq Khan’s record in London is abysmal.
Our plan was to increase housing in cities and areas, but Labour has bizarrely done the exact opposite. Housing targets in cities have been slashed, whereas they have ramped them up in the countryside.
It beggars’ belief that North Yorkshire is having to build more houses than Manchester or that targets are being cut by up to 50% in Newcastle, Nottingham and Coventry whilst doubling in Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness.
It is such a poorly thought through policy that it is pretty clearly the latest episode of Labour’s war on rural England.
Housing policy is about more than just building houses, it is about supply and demand. Part of the need for all this extra housing is Labour’s lax approach to immigration rules which will significantly fuel demand. That is just not acceptable.
We tightened up rules such as the £38,000 salary threshold because we knew numbers were just too high.
But everything Labour has done since they have got in has been to increase migration, including reducing this threshold to £29,000 and by scrapping of the Rwanda deterrent. Unpicking our efforts to curb illegal and legal migration will wipe out much of the benefit of any efforts to increase housebuilding.
Homeownership is central to what it means to be British and it gives people the stake in society that most people aspire to. Clearly, this hard Left-wing Labour government just doesn’t get it.
Kevin Hollinrake is the shadow housing secretary
