Badenoch slams Labour housing plans

Kemi Badenoch has poured cold water on Labour’s housing plans in a fiery first meeting at the despatch box with Angela Rayner, who she now shadows in the housing, communities and local government brief. Speaking in the King’s Speech debate, Badenoch said resistance from communities in the green belt, which now accounts for a significant part of Labour’s constituency base, would slow down proposed planning reforms and make them both difficult and time consuming to implement. “It’s not that 1.5m homes by the end of this parliament is unachievable, it’s that it’s going to require the sort of systemic change which they are not ready for,” said Badenoch. “I know they’re not ready because of how they voted in the last parliament and how they campaigned in their own constituencies.” Badenoch claimed Labour MPs will struggle to sell housebuilding to their constituents. She said: “Many of them have been thinking that they’d get into government and concrete over lots of Tory constituencies. Three weeks ago, just 15% of the green belt was in Labour constituencies, now it’s 50%. They aren’t Tory constituencies now, they are Labour. “They are now your voters and your electorate and you’re going to have to tell them that you’re going to do something that many of you promised locally that you would never do, not that long ago.” But Rayner said reforms were already under way and promised an updated national planning policy framework by the end of this month. “We have already taken early steps to unblock our planning system, creating a new taskforce to accelerate stalled housing sites in our country, beginning with four that alone could deliver more than 14,000 of the homes Britain so desperately needs,” said Rayner. Rayner also said the reforms would unlock development not just for housing but for the commercial sector. She said: “The current system just isn’t working, not for housing at a local level and not for projects at a national level – the data centres, labs and research sites which should unleash a modern economy, not to mention large scale projects which should improve the environment.” Photo by JONATHAN-HORDLE-ITV-HANDOUT-EPA-EFE-Shutterstock