That didn’t take long. Last week, less than a month since Labour won the general election, the deputy prime minister Angela Rayner stood up in the House of Commons and made some of the most ambitious pronouncements about housing since her party’s government of 1945 – 1.5 million new homes in the term of this parliament, new towns, more social housing.
Local authorities will be obliged to set ambitious targets for numbers of homes. The green belts around the country’s cities, a hugely successful planning concept that has turned in some places into an agent of suffocation, can, Rayner said, sometimes be relaxed.
