Yesterday, in the House of Commons during a Ministerial Statement on ‘House Building’ by the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, Rayleigh and Wickford MP, Mark Francois, slammed proposed plans by Labour for “mandatory” housing targets and a new method for calculating housing need.
In his question to the Deputy Prime Minister, Mark said:
“It is possible to have successful development, but from experience it has to be something done with people and not to people. This policy is the latter. These pernicious top-down targets have the practical effect at ground level of setting one town against another, one village against another and one local community against another; and given the Chancellor’s statement on public spending yesterday, who will pay for the tens of billions of pounds-worth of infrastructure that would be required to make all this work? All experience shows that, on development and house building, the man or woman in Whitehall really does not know best. Why then, is the Secretary of State going back to the old, failed way of doing it, which will not work?”
