Rayner must defy her own backbenchers and build, baby, build

Angela Rayner has clearly been reading City A.M.. In a statement to the House of Commons yesterday the housing secretary outlined plans to build 370,000 homes a year, in a clear victory for our Build, Baby, Build campaign. 

The challenge now is to realise that ambition in bricks and mortar. It is encouraging, then, that she has reinstated mandatory housing targets, which were scrapped by the previous government in a shameful – and ultimately fruitless attempt – to save the seats of Nimby backbenchers. To those Tories who argued that the targets were ‘stalinist’ and ‘top down’ it’s worth reiterating that there’s nothing conservative about denying generations of people the dignity and security of owning their own home.

Rayner has correctly emphasised that targets should reflect local needs and produced a new method for calculating this. Preempting accusations that the new formula would yield some “surprising” results, she said “no method is perfect and the old one produced all sorts of odd outcomes”. But the new one has already produced one particularly odd outcome: lowering the target for London from 100,000 to 80,000. Any calculation that indicates a city where house prices are 12 times average income should be building less, not more, is very surprising indeed. So surprising that one suspects it may have something to do with burnishing the building credentials of a powerful Labour mayor.

Nevertheless, 80,000 is an ambitious target in itself, especially compared to the 35,000 London managed last year. This government may find, as the last one did, that the biggest barrier to delivery is their own MPs. Not only does Labour now represent 50 per cent of the green belt, it also includes members ideologically opposed to the private businesses whose investment will be needed – or “sh***y corporation[s] or two-bit developer[s]” as Norwich South’s Clive Lewis calls them.

But if Rayner can overcome them she will free the British economy of one its most cumbersome drag anchors on growth – City A.M. wishes more power to her elbow.