Ed Balls Slams Labour’s Housing Delays And Says Party Has Been ‘Twiddling Thumbs’ In Opposition

Posted on 31/07/2024 by Boris Clair

‘You’ve had 14 years to get ready. Surely you need to go a bit quicker than that?’@edballs questions Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook on why it could take up to a year to identify where to build more homes. pic.twitter.com/R2HI7M6iHL

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) July 31, 2024

Ed Balls accused the Labour Party of “twiddling their thumbs” for the last 14 years in a spat over delays to housing reforms.

The ITV Good Morning Britain host was interviewing the minister Matthew Pennycook over the government’s plans to ease the housing crisis this morning.

This includes a new task force “to present a final shortlist of recommendations on appropriate locations” to build new homes to ministers, according to the gov.uk website.

So Balls asked Pennycook: “Given the urgency, is that new towns task force going to report in September or October?”

The housing minister said they had asked to report within a year, to which Balls said with incredulity: “A year? I thought it was urgent? Are you serious?

“Are you actually saying a year from now?”

Pennycook said: “Up to a year, but we’ve made very clear to Sir Michael [Lyons] that if the task force can identify appropriate locations quicker than that, we will get moving on them immediately, shovels in the ground.”

Regeneration expert Sir Michael will be leading the new task force.

Balls pushed: “Why are they taking a year?”

“Because, they are doing in a sense, Ed, a high-level spatial strategy,” Pennycook began, but Balls interrupted.

He said: “You’ve had 14 years to get ready. Surely you need to go a bit quicker than that?”

Pennycook said he had only three years shadowing the housing minister role before the general election.

Balls hit back: “You’ve been in in opposition for 14 years, twiddling your thumbs as a party, ready for this moment – you come in, you say you want new towns and we’re not going to have a report for a year!”

“We want to give the expert task force the time to report back,” the minister said.

It was not an easy morning for Pennycook on the broadcast round, as he was then called out on Radio 4′s Today programme, too – but this time, for setting “unrealistic” targets.

Presenter Amol Rajan said it seemed deputy PM Angela Rayner wanted to see housing completion in new towns within five years.

He said: “Given a normal scheme of 2000+ homes takes around seven years to get to completion, Angela Rayner’s target of five years is totally unrealistic, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it’s unrealistic to have spades on the ground on several of these large scale housing communities by the end of the five-year parliament.

“That would be our objective,” Pennycook hit back.

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\"Given a normal scheme of 2000+ homes takes around seven years to get to completion, Angela Rayner’s target of five years is totally unrealistic isn’t it?\"@amolrajan asks Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook, as the government announces a new housing taskforce.#R4Today

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) July 31, 2024

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“Given a normal scheme of 2000+ homes takes around seven years to get to completion, Angela Rayner’s target of five years is totally unrealistic isn’t it?”@amolrajan asks Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook, as the government announces a new housing taskforce.#R4Today

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) July 31, 2024

PM’s Planning Reforms In ‘Tatters’ After By-Election Defeat, Tory Rebel Says

Posted on 18/06/2021 by Boris Clair

Boris Johnson’s planning reforms have been left in “tatters” following the Tories’ humiliating by-election defeat in Chesham and Amersham, a veteran MP has said.

Sir Roger Gale told HuffPost UK the defeat was a “wake up call” for the prime minister amid a significant backbench rebellion over the plans, which MPs fear would concentrate house building in the party’s southern heartlands.

The Liberal Democrats took the Buckinghamshire seat for the first time in its history, winning a majority of 8,028 over the Tories on a stunning 25% swing.

The party focused heavily on the planning reforms in leaflets the seat, quoting Tory rebels including Theresa May attacking the policy.

Here it is. The anti-planning reform leaflet the Libs were handing out during the Chesham by-election.

Quotes from Theresa May (pictured) and IDS criticising the reforms. (One Tory MP who visited a dozen times told me these ‘cut through’) pic.twitter.com/MmSSq0W44S

— Ben Riley-Smith (@benrileysmith) June 18, 2021

The defeat has now intensified the rebellion, as MPs fear the pattern could be repeated across so-called “blue wall” southern traditional Tory seats.

Gale said that on Tory WhatsApp groups on Friday “the only thing anybody is talking about is planning”.

“The common theme is ‘me too, me too, me too’ – right across the south of England,” he told HuffPost UK.

“They are worried about the policy.

“But of course they’ve got an eye on their reelection chances.”

Johnson on Friday stressed that there has been “misunderstanding” about the reforms, insisting the government would not build on green belt land.

“What we want is sensible plans to allow development on brownfield sites,” he said.

“We’re not going to build on green belt sites, we’re not going to build all over the countryside.”

But Gale said the rebels were concerned about building on greenfield sites like agricultural land, stressing: “We’re not talking about green belt.”

He backed calls for the government to instead focus on building houses on brownfield sites, empty commercial properties, and forcing developers to build on around a million unused planning consents.

On the upcoming planning bill, he said: “My personal view is: the policy is in tatters.

“They’ve got to wake up and smell the coffee.”

It came as leading rebel Bob Seely said the by-election result was “the start of a significant push-back from communities on planning”.

“Relentless housing targets – very often the wrong housing in the wrong areas – just feeds the hamster wheel of planning doom,” he told the BBC.

“We need a better way of doing things.

“We want to work with government to make this a success.

“But more of them same will be political suicide, and, as Winston Churchill said, the problem with political suicides is that you live to regret them.”

Johnson is facing fresh rebellion over planning after MPs on his own side last year effectively killed off a so-called “mutant algorithm”, which would have dramatically increased house-building in southern Tory cities and shires.

But the PM is believed to think home ownership is key to cementing the party’s gains in the so-called “red wall” in the north and Midlands and returned with fresh proposals to overhaul planning in last month’s Queen’s Speech.

The government has said it wants to speed up the planning process to deliver new homes and infrastructure more quickly, at the same time as protecting the environment, as part of efforts to hit Johnson’s target of building 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s.

But Tory rebels and countryside campaigners have warned that the bill will divide places into areas earmarked for either growth or protection, and that growth areas would undermine local democracy and give developers a green light to build on rural land.

Why This Couple Have Been Welcoming Homeless Strangers Into Their Home During The Pandemic

Posted on 25/12/2020 by Boris Clair

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Coronavirus Could Deepen Inequality. Planning Law Changes Risk Being An Accelerant

Posted on 06/08/2020 by Boris Clair

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