Labour further develop their solution to the housing crisis

The Guardian reported that yesterday, Sir Michael Lyons, the chair of Labour’s review into housebuilding, said that local councils must be judged not just on the “allocation of land” available for development but also “the extent to which that land is being development.”

He said: “We are breaking eggs to make omelettes. The backlog is so serious here that we have to do everything we can.” But he went on to note, Labour recognised that in order to do so “you cannot put councils in that position where you push their backs against the wall without giving them the tools to actually get involved in develop and building those sites themselves. The direction of my work is if anything we will turn the screw on the process to make absolutely clear that every community has to do its best.”

Lyons also said that the coalition “too often to respond with piecemeal and top-down initiatives rather than fully mobilising the potential of local government”. To move away from this approach, he said that Labour would try to recapture the post-war home building confidence, stressing that local councils need to play a bigger part in the process:

“We need to get local government back in the business of housebuilding. We have only consistently achieved the level of houses we need when councils were delivering a great many of them – a contribution that has never been replaced.

We are building fewer than half the homes we need each year. We are at the lowest levels since the 1920s and we have stored up a backlog estimated at someone near to 1m homes. It requires new freedoms and courageous local leadership to speak up for future generations. We have to ask ourselves whether the planning system is used too often as a sword to attack any development rather than a shield against inappropriate developments.

We should no longer tolerate the situation where we leave the job of finding land to the housebuilders, but then place obstacles in their way as they try to develop it.”