Those in favour of more housebuilding in this country like to tell the story of Winston Churchill’s deal with Harold Macmillan in which the Prime Minister told his housing minister to meet the Tory target of building 300,000 new homes. ‘It is a gamble – it will make or mar your political career,’ Churchill told Macmillan. Well, Macmillan hit the target a year early, and we all know what happened to his political career.
Given George Osborne was clearly thinking about the implications for his own career of this week’s Budget, it is perhaps hardly surprising that housing plays a strong part. The Chancellor has today announced plans to get more homes built in this country, and these ‘sweeping’ changes form the second half of the Budget. They include automatic planning permission on all suitable brownfield sites and the government intervening to write local plans for councils which have failed to produce them.
The local plans policy is particularly interesting, given a failure by a council to produce a local plan is one of the reasons why development gets forced upon a local area against the wishes of those already living there.
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