Angela Rayner suggests ‘nimby’ objections to new housing will fade if infrastructure is improved – UK politics live | Politics

Jeremy Vine is interviewing now Angela Rayner on Radio 2.

Rayner starts by saying every family is affected by the housing crisis.

Q: How will building more homes make them more affordable?

Rayner says the changes to the national planning policy framework include requirements for affordable housing.

Vine plays a clip from someone worried that the green belt could be “gone for ever” under Labour’s plans.

Rayner says the government will protect areas from urban spread. Only 30 local authorities have an up-to-date urban plan. She will require them all to have one.

Vine asks about claims that Tory areas are disproportionately affected. He quotes the Fareham example. (See 10.17am.)

Rayner says some authorities are seeing their targets going up because they are not meeting local needs. The Conservatives promised to build 300,000 homes a year. But they repeatedly failed to meet it, she says.

Q: Why is the target going down for London?

Rayner says the target for London was a “nonsense” one. (See 11.04am.)

In her interview on ITV’s This Morning Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, urged pensioners at risk of losing winter fuel payment to check whether they are eligble for pension credit.

On Monday Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, announced that the government will stop giving the winter fuel payment, which is worth up to £300, to all pensioners. Instead it will be means-tested.

Rayner told ITV that the government was doing this reluctantly, because of the “horrendous” state of the public finances left by the Tories, and that pensioners should check to see if they are eligible for the benefits that would allow them to continue getting the winter fuel payments. She said:

There’s thousands of people that are eligible for pension credit that are not currently receiving it.

So my plea to people who are listening to this is check out whether you’re available for pension credit because there’s so many people that won’t, and those people will continue to get the winter fuel payment.

According to government figures, only 63% of people eligible for pension credit actually claim it.

Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, has suggested that people will drop their objections to new homes being built in their communities if there is proper infrastructure in place.

In an interview with ITV’s This Morning, Rayner argued that people do not oppose new housing just “for nimby reasons”, but because they fear the local infrastructure cannot cope.

Rayner has announced plans intended to trigger a big increase in housebuilding. But previous governments have found it hard to make this happen, partly because while voters tend to favour more homes being build in principle, developments often provoke intense local opposition from so-called “nimby” (not in my back yard) campaigners.

Rayner said these objections might fade if people were not worried about local roads, schools and surgeries being overcrowded. She said the government was requiring councils to produce up-to-date development plans, and that these would have to cover infrastructure.

She went on:

There isn’t a family that hasn’t got a housing need that isn’t met in the UK at the moment, so 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 Ang we need the infrastructure in place.’

In his LBC interview Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, also defended the government’s decision to cut the housing target for London from 100,000 new homes a year to 80,000. He explained:

What happened in London under the previous system is that this arbitrary 35% urban uplift was imposed on every borough in London, different from any other metro area in the country, and got you to a figure of around 100,000.

What we’re saying to the mayor – and let’s be very clear on this, the current London plan is around 52,000 homes, current delivery in London is just over 30,000 – we’re saying the London target is 80,000. That’s incredibly stretching. The conversation I’m having with the mayor and officials in City Hall is we need you to do more.

In a thread on X last night, Robert Colvile, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a Tory thinktank, criticised these plans for London. The CPS welcomed the main thrust of what Angela Rayner announced yesterday. But Colvile said the government should be demanding more homes in London.

His thread starts here.

I like a lot of things about Labour’s housing reforms. But the decision to let London off the hook has me properly fuming. Quick thread.

And here are some of the points he makes.

When you’re in power, you get to fuck over the people who didn’t vote for you. That’s life. The Tories did that with the ‘urban uplift’, which hacked housing targets in order to force more homes into the big cities. And now Labour have done the opposite.

The result is the pattern in this chart (via @JenWilliams_FT) – housing targets hiked in the North and the shires, lowered in the big cities. (Uplift was 35%, which helps explain some of these figures.)

But London isn’t like other places! It’s where everyone is moving to, and everyone is migrating to (approx 30% of migrants). As this 2022 chart from @NeilDotObrien shows, once you account for population change, it is absolutely not building anything like enough houses.

In an interview with LBC Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, rejected claims that the new housing targets set for local authorities are politically motivated.

Yesterday Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, said that the system used to calculate local housing targets is changing. She published tables showing what the new figures would be, authority by authority, and this has led to claims that Tory-voting communities are being forced to accept many more homes.

On LBC Nick Ferrari, the presenter, said that in Fareham, where Suella Braverman is the MP, the target for new homes would rise from 115 a year to 794. In North Yorkshire (Rishi Sunak) it would go up from 1,360 to 4,230, he said, and in Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden) it would rise from 277 to 959.

Asked to explain why the figures were changing so dramatically, Pennycook said:

What we’re proposing in the consultation that was released yesterday is to change the methodology about how housing targets are calculated.

At the moment, they’re calculated on an outdated population-based projection, figures from 2014. And what that means is the areas of the country that have not grown a lot, but need to, including some of those you’ve mentioned, have very low housing targets.

We’re changing the method. We’re saying that every part of the country needs to grow by at least 0.8% of its existing housing stock. We’ve got an adjustment for affordability.

When it was put to him that the seven-fold increase for Fareham seemed unreasonable, Pennycook replied:

We simply don’t have enough homes. That is why we got a housing crisis. That’s why we got 150,000 people housed in temporary accommodation. More than a million on the housing register etc. We’ve got to tackle the crisis.

We were elected on a very clear mandate to build those homes and more parts of the country are going to have to do more.

Ferrari asked if party politics was a factor. Pennycook replied:

Not at all, because we have a very simple, clear and straightforward methodology that produces those numbers.

Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, has been giving interviews this morning, and on the Today programme he had to respond to a series of sceptical questions from Amol Rajan, the presenter, who pointed out that both the last Labour government, and the coalition government, promised new towns that never materialised. Here are the main points from the interview.

• Pennycook said that building work on some of the new homes in the new towns identified by the taskforce announced today could start before the election. Rajan said that Angela Rayner claimed before the election she would like to see housing completion in new towns within five years. Asked if that was realistic, Pennycook said:

I don’t think it’s unrealistic to have spades in the ground on several of these large-scale new communities by the final year of the parliament, and that will be our objective.

• He accepted that new towns on their own were “not a solution in and of themselves” to the housing crisis. He was responding to a question from Rajan who quoted from a post on the Planoraks planning blog, by Zack Simons, about Labour’s new towns policy. Writing last month, Simons said:

We have a shortfall of well over 4 million homes. Take all the new towns we’ve built since 1950, add ‘em all up… under 3 million people live there. Which is to say: new towns can be hugely powerful, but they’re not close, not anywhere close, to being a full solution to our needs for housing and other kinds of development.

Pennycook said that today’s announcement had to be taken alongside yesterday’s announcement about the target for new homes being raised from 300,000 per year to 370,000 per year. “And there is more to come,” he added.

But we will succeed where others have failed partly because we’ve got a comprehensive plan to drive this forward in a way [we didn’t have] on previous occasions.

• He dimissed suggestions that having a large number of MPs representing marginal seats would make it hard for Labour to approve lots of new housing. Those MPs recognise there is “an urgent need” to address the housing crisis, he said.

Good morning. Parliament starts the summer recess today, most of the Westminster political class will be making plans for a post-election holiday, but the business of government goes on and this morning ministers are announcing plans for what they say will be “a new generation of new towns”.

Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, is setting up a new towns taskforce which has been asked to recommend sites for new towns within 12 months. It will be chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, an economist, former council chief executive and former chair of the BBC who has unrivalled experience as an adviser to governments, particularly on local government matters. 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 previous housing policy inquiries for previous governments.

The taskforce will recommend where new towns should be built. But, reading the announcement from the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government, it is clear that many of these new towns won’t actually be new towns, but extensions to existing towns.

Rayner also wants these developments to aim for a 40% affordable housing rate.

Explaining what the taskforce will do, the department says:

The programme of new towns will create largescale communities of at least 10,000 new homes each, with many significantly larger. These places could deliver hundreds of thousands of much-needed affordable and high-quality homes in the decades to come, tackling the barriers to growth and helping more working people across the country own their own home.

The new towns will help unlock the economic potential of existing towns and cities across the country, and the government will continue to drive growth and regenerate areas that have been held back by constraints on their expansion for far too long. While the programme will include large-scale new communities that are separate from existing settlements, a far larger number of new towns will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the grain of development in any given area.

These new communities will be governed by a ‘new towns code’ – a set of rules that developers will have to meet to make sure new towns are well-connected, well-designed, sustainable and attractive places where people want to live. They will have all the infrastructure and public services necessary to support thriving communities. The towns will also help meet housing need by targeting rates of 40% affordable housing with a focus on genuinely affordable social rented homes.

Rayner will be talking about this later. She is on ITV’s This Morning at 10.30am, and then on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show at noon.

Otherwise, the diary looks quite empty. But doubtless of God of News will provide something.

We are also covering the Southport riots, but on a different blog. Yohannes Lowe is writing that. It’s here.

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