Labour’s planning reforms look like a way of punishing Tory voters

Is the government’s housing policy aimed principally at increasing the stock of homes and making them more affordable or at punishing Tory voters? I ask because of its obsession with Nimbys and the green belt. According to Keir Starmer last week the planning system exerts a ‘chokehold’ over the housing supply. Writing at the weekend Angela Rayner declared: “I won’t cave into the blockers as the last government did”.

True, Nimbys exist. Green belts help to strangle cities – green wedges would be better, where development is allowed to fan out along corridors with good transport connections. And sure enough, there are a few parts of the green belt which better fit the government’s concept of ‘grey belt’ – disused car parks etc. But you have to be somewhat blinkered to think that the reason young people find it so hard to do as their parents did and get on the housing ladder in their twenties is mainly down to Nimbys greedily defending the views from their rural homes and starving the country of new homes so that they can continue to feast on sharp capital gains caused by a shortage of housing.