The government is set to announce changes to planning laws to boost housebuilding, according to levelling up minister Lee Rowley.
He told GB News: “We are demonstrating that we’re making a lot of progress on this, but the importance behind house building is that it gives people the ability to own their own homes, to get on the housing ladder, to make sure that people can build capital, can start a family and that’s hugely important.
“So we’ve made some progress, but there’s more to do, which is why Michael [Gove] is going to announce tomorrow some further changes, which hopefully will help us build more homes but also vitally build them in the right places.”
In an interview with Camilla Tominey, he continued: “We brought in some changes to allow conversions of offices and shops to houses and that’s worked pretty well, it brought on near enough 100,000 houses in the last seven years.
“So I think the record is relatively positive and what we now need to do is to try and allow more and more to happen there to give people more choice. And if we give people more choice that allows people to get more on the housing ladder, as I say, and then to to build their lives. And that’s exactly what we want to do as a Conservative government.”
Asked if the sovernment should drop its commitment to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030, he said: “We’ve got a target. Let’s all go and try and do as much as we can to get there.
“But more broadly what the ULEZ message showed in Uxbridge on Friday is if you don’t take people with you, if you do things without due consideration, as Sadiq Khan has done, if you don’t think through your policies, as the Labour Party clearly aren’t, that people will say I don’t think so.
“So the job of government is to take people with us and to try and hit these ambitious targets but also do it in a way which works.”
