Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced mandatory housing targets and an end to the ban on onshore wind energy to get “Britain building again”.
The UK’s first female chancellor has said the Labor Party will create a new taskforce “to fast-track stalled housing sites across our country”.
She promised that her government would build 1.5 million homes over the next five years, as promised in the Labor Party’s election manifesto.
“We do not intend to renege on our manifesto commitments,” she said in her first speech as chancellor after Labor won the election last Thursday.
“We received this strong mandate. We will fulfill this mandate.”
Ms Reeves announced that the government will:
• Restore mandatory housing construction targets
• Build 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliament – including council and affordable homes
• End the ban on onshore wind farms
• Create a new working group to accelerate stalled housing sites – starting with 14,000 new homes in Liverpool Central Docks, Worcester, Northstowe and Langley Sutton Coldfield
• Support local authorities with 300 additional planning officers across the country
• Review previously refused planning applications that could help the economy – planning appeals for data centers in Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire are already being reconsidered
• Prioritize brownfield and gray belt land for development to meet housing targets where necessary
• Reform the planning system to “provide the infrastructure our country needs” – unresolved infrastructure projects to be prioritized
• Define new policy intentions for critical infrastructure in the coming months.
The Labor manifesto promised to “immediately” update the National Policy Planning Framework to undo changes made by the Conservatives, including the restoration of mandatory housing targets.
His party promised during the election campaign a 10-year infrastructure strategy to guide investment plans and give the private sector certainty over the project pipeline and the creation of a National Infrastructure and Services Transformation Authority for supervise the schemes.
Labor has also committed to updating planning policy to facilitate the construction of 1.5 million homes, as well as laboratories, gigafactories and digital infrastructure.
The chancellor had warned before the election that the next government would inherit “the worst set of circumstances since the Second World War”, and said today: “What I have seen in the last 72 hours has only confirmed that.”
Asked by Sky’s Ed Conway when people can expect economic growth to begin, Reeves said: “We are now moving forward with delivering [growth]. These are our first steps towards recovering economic growth. I mean business and we’re continuing that work to unlock that growth.”
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