Sunak says he ditched housing targets due to concerns from ‘thousands’ of Tory members

The prime minister said his decision to effectively ditch local housing targets was taken after “thousands” of Conservative councillors and activists raised concerns.

Rishi Sunak, in an interview with the Conservative Home website yesterday, said he spent last summer speaking to party members when on the leadership election campaign trail.

He said: “What I heard consistently, particularly from our councillors and our members, was what they didn’t want was a nationally-imposed top-down set of targets telling them what to do.

“That it [the imposition of top-down targets] wasn’t a particularly Conservative thing to do and doesn’t recognise that all parts of our country are different.”

Sunak said he spoke to “thousands and thousands” of Conservative members and “heard the same message from all of them”.

He added: “We do want to build the right homes and the right number of homes and build them in the right places and in the right way. And that means we do need to put local people at the heart of that process and that’s why strengthening local plans is so important.”

 Watch the interview  below (the comments on housing are from the 10min mark onwards)

Housing secretary Michael Gove in December announced changes to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill which would give councils flexibility to depart from housing targets. Instead of being calculated through a central formula, from which councils can only depart with strong reasons, the targets would instead become merely an advisory “starting point” . The move was a compromise after 50 MPs backed calls for the scrapping of targets altogether.

Sunak said he believes the new-look planning system proposed by the government will be “striking the right balance” .

In addition to the weakening of local housing targets, the government is also proposing dropping the requirement to review green belt land in order to deliver a local area’s housing need as well as removing the duty to co-operate between authorities to deliver housing targets. It has also set out of a whole raft of other reasons why authorities might be able to justify not meeting the housing numbers produced by the government’s “standard method” formula.

The uncertainty around the changes has led to several local authorities putting their local plans on hold, prompting concerns of a drop in housing delivery.

The proposed changes have also met opposition from figures who believe the government should be doing more to support the housebuiding industry.

Steve Morgan, the founder of Redrow and a past Conservative donor told Building last month that “there’s no help from the government” for the industry, pointing to the planning changes and regulation on nutrients. He added: “It’s almost like the government wants to destroy the industry.”