The post you are reporting:
The PM writing in the Telegraph.
England needs more homes. For many decades and under successive governments, we simply haven’t built enough to meet steadily rising demand, and it is our children and grandchildren who are paying the price. In 1997, the average home cost around 3.5 times the average salary. By 2010 that ratio had doubled. And higher house prices mean rents are higher too.
Today, 20- and 30-year-olds are forced to spend three times as much of their income on housing as was the case for their grandparents. I’m sure Telegraph readers will understand that we need to build more homes than even the 217,000 that were completed in 2016/17 – one of the highest levels of net additions for 30 years.
At last year’s party conference, I set out my personal commitment to fixing our broken housing market. Today sees the latest step in that process, as the government rewrites the planning rulebook, overhauling it to make the system fairer, more transparent, and get more of the right homes built in the right places more quickly. The new rules will speed up the planning process, ensure that permissions are turned into homes more quickly, and see to it that new developments are supported by appropriate infrastructure.
But building the homes our children and grandchildren need doesn’t have to mean destroying the open countryside we all treasure. Across England, Green Belts continue to serve a valuable purpose, preventing the kind of unchecked urban sprawl that has led to vast, faceless megacities in the USA.
The local character of small, rural towns and villages is important to people, and should not be unnecessarily sacrificed in order to boost developers’ profits. So our new, fairer planning rules include extra protection for Green Belt land, with more stringent tests that raise the bar local authorities will have to clear before being allowed to open it up for housing. This includes ensuring that any use of Green Belt for new homes focusses first on sites that have already been built on.