Stuart Jeffery speaks about mandatory housing targets

Stuart Jeffery, from Maidstone council leader, speaks about mandatory housing targets

Transcript

00:00The bringing back of mandatory targets is a bit of a joke because they never actually went.

00:06If you speak to any councillor across the country, the rhetoric from the last government was

00:13simply a lie. I mean, those targets were mandatory. Nobody got away with reducing them.

00:19What I'm more worried about in many respects is the kind of approach that it heralds. We've

00:26already had a really top-down approach over the last however many years it is in terms of

00:32house building and targets and where things go, how they progress and so forth. What we're seeing is

00:43the new government is kind of doubling down on that and that doesn't spell a great deal of

00:49promise for local democracy, for local people. So it means that we are going to have to shout

00:55louder and harder and fight our corner even more. Rachel Reeves was talking about where,

01:03not how many. That's always been the case as far as I can see. But she's also talking about

01:13overturning previous planning applications that were declined. So that kind of contradicts that

01:19where, because if we said not there, somewhere else, then why is she talking about enforcing

01:27that first place? There was one good bit of it, which I must point out, the lifting of the

01:33onshore wind ban. That's clearly a positive, but that was the only real

01:39glimmer of light within that speech that I could see.