Speaking in the Committee considering the Localism Bill today, Nick Raynsford, MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, highlighted the extent to which the Government is trying to justify its ill-considered changes to the planning system on an entirely false prospectus.

Ministers have repeatedly claimed that the existing planning system is broken and could never deliver the number of houses needed.

Using the Government’s own housing statistics, Nick Raynsford pointed out to Decentralisation Minister, Greg Clarke, that far from being broken, the existing planning system had delivered six years of continuous increases in additions to England’s housing stock, culminating in the highest figure for almost 20 years - 207,370 homes in 2007-8.

Nick Raynsford says: “The Government is quite simply wrong in claiming that the existing planning system is preventing more homes being built. Ironically, it is the Government’s own policies that are damaging the prospects of recovery from recession. Confidence was returning to the housing market a year ago and the number of new homes being started was rising again. But since the General Election, that trend has gone into reverse. A mortgage famine, more than 50% cuts in social housing investment and maladroit changes to the planning system have all contributed – and the Tory-led Government is to blame for all of them”.

In response to the question from Nick Raynsford in an earlier session of the Localism Bill Committee (Tuesday 25^th January), Pete Redfern, the Chief Executive of Taylor Wimpey, one of Britain’s major housebuilders, estimated that at best it would take six years to get housebuilding back to the 2007 level and the effect of the Government’s changes to the planning system could add a further year or two’s delay.

Nick Raynsford added: “The Conservative-led Government is seriously damaging the prospects of new and better homes for millions of people in England, and their ill-considered planning changes in the Localism Bill will make things worse”.