Angela Rayner has promised her planning changes will not lead to “a load of ugly houses”, as she set out plans for more GP surgeries, roads and schools around developments to win over the “nimbys”.
Unveiling her targets for each council area across England, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary said the government would be taking a more planned approach than the “haphazard situation at the moment”.
The new housebuilding targets are aimed at increasing construction in areas of high demand, although the ambition in London is being cut from 100,000 to 80,000 new homes.
Rayner said the method of calculating which areas needed housing was still being reviewed but that London’s target was still stretching.
She also defended the decision to remove the requirement for new homes to be beautiful, saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show, the housing secretary said newbuilds would still have to be in keeping with the area, as well as being “safe, warm, and sustainable”.
“Beautiful means nothing really. It means one thing to one person and one thing to another,” she said. “All that wording was doing was blocking preventing and development. That’s why we think it’s too subjective … I don’t buy this idea that I’m just going to build a load of ugly houses.”
Housebuilders have welcomed Rayner’s changes to the planning system set out on Wednesday that will allow for more building on the green belt, and reintroduce targets for each local area. Ultimately, it could force councils in England to build on low-quality green belt sites if they fail to reach mandatory construction targets.
The deputy prime minister said it was vital that local residents still have a say but that they could be reassured if new developments came with the infrastructure to prevent pressure on public services – such as schools and GP surgeries.
She told ITV’s This Morning: “People are not like nimby for nimby reasons … They’re saying: ‘Well, hang on a minute our roads are already congested, we can’t get a GP appointment and now you want to build more houses here?’ so infrastructure is critical.
“And that’s why our rules will make sure that we get that infrastructure as well, because I’ve heard what people have said on that: ‘We need these homes, but Ange we need the infrastructure in place.’”
The housing secretary also gave a hint that right-to-buy policies could be restricted to people who have been in their homes a long time, after launching a review of the Tory initiative first brought in under Margaret Thatcher. The government is also likely to look at reducing the discounted rate at which council tenants currently have a right to buy their home.
“The real challenge we’ve got at the moment is the 2012 changes to right to buy meant that we can’t replace the stock, because the taxpayers are funding us creating social homes and then we’re not able to replace them once they are sold off at a highly discounted rate,” she said.
“We think right to buy is something people should have, if you’ve raised your family in your home, you’ve been in it a long time, then this should be a way for you to buy it. But we don’t think the current situation is tenable when we want to build more social housing.”
Rayner also announced a new towns taskforce, which has been asked to recommend sites for new towns within 12 months, chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, an economist, former council chief executive and former chair of the BBC. The deputy chair is Dame Kate Barker, an economist and former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, who has also led housing policy inquiries for previous governments.
