The government is set to announce changes to planning laws to boost housebuilding, according to levelling up minister Lee Rowley.
He told GB News: “We are demonstrating that we’re making a lot of progress on this, but the importance behind house building is that it gives people the ability to own their own homes, to get on the housing ladder, to make sure that people can build capital, can start a family and that’s hugely important.
“So we’ve made some progress, but there’s more to do, which is why Michael [Gove] is going to announce tomorrow some further changes, which hopefully will help us build more homes but also vitally build them in the right places.”
In an interview with Camilla Tominey, he continued: “We brought in some changes to allow conversions of offices and shops to houses and that’s worked pretty well, it brought on near enough 100,000 houses in the last seven years.
“So I think the record is relatively positive and what we now need to do is to try and allow more and more to happen there to give people more choice. And if we give people more choice that allows people to get more on the housing ladder, as I say, and then to to build their lives. And that’s exactly what we want to do as a Conservative government.”
Asked if the sovernment should drop its commitment to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030, he said: “We’ve got a target. Let’s all go and try and do as much as we can to get there.
“But more broadly what the ULEZ message showed in Uxbridge on Friday is if you don’t take people with you, if you do things without due consideration, as Sadiq Khan has done, if you don’t think through your policies, as the Labour Party clearly aren’t, that people will say I don’t think so.
“So the job of government is to take people with us and to try and hit these ambitious targets but also do it in a way which works.”
We don’t need planning changes unless it’s to protect greenbelt. As 40% of all sites with planning permission never actually get built on the Government should compel developers to build on them and to build the type of housing needed (affordable homes with good insulation standards, not expensive mock Tudor yuppie places) and properly contribute to local infrastructure. This won’t happen as the developers are a powerful lobby. So failing that, fund Councils to do the building especially on land they already own and especially on Brownfield sites.
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It is social housing which is desperately needed. This is not the private developer market – indeed it is not a market! The problem being the Government and Councils want such housing donated to them by way of planning gain, infrastructure charges etc. Planning Gain is fine but like everything that starts off as a good idea and quickly become abused and turned into a cash cow. Then loses what it set out to achieve. Greed rules in ALL sectors. This article is all about spin with little subsatnce.
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100,000 in 7 years that’s 14,286 per year on average.
When we need to be building 300,000 a year to catch up.
Can somebody PLEASE call these effing politicians out on their complete BS.
Somehow Lee Rowley has managed to achieve a positive spin on something that is an embarrassment and has been allowed to get away with it.
Then he’s been allowed to use the opportunity to be negative about the opposition.
The quality of journalism in this country terrifies me.
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You will be hearing all sorts of promises in the coming year from all parties ….. an election is not far off. Following through is another thing.
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Why aren’t homes being built on all the land that is reportedly banked in large quantities by developers? How about scrapping council tax and replacing it with an ‘amenity land tax’, hitting those who own land and are doing nothing with it? Should be quite easy to calculate the sqm of a plot, then charge an annual tax accordingly.
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