Over the weekend, Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary Angela Rayner won applause from YIMBYs across the board when she stated newts should not be more protected than people who need housing. She tore into the building blockers clinging to archaic EU habitat laws, declaring the government “won’t accept this nonsense anymore”…
A punchy soundbite from Rayner, though so far it’s all talk and no action. Rayner’s department (HCLG) is currently resisting a Supreme Court appeal aimed at unblocking the construction of 650 new homes in Somerset. A project stalled by those very nutrient neutrality rules she slammed just days earlier….
Meanwhile, the Home Builders Federation argues the current issue is blocking 44,000 new homes that already have planning permission. Unsurprisingly, environmental campaigners are backing the Local Government, claiming it’s right to halt developments near a protected site. The newts may not need to fear the wrath of Rayner after all…
Anger is brewing at Defra Secretary Steve Reed over his decision to approve plans for a new reservoir in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. All while blocking homes in his own constituency…
Reed wrote to Sadiq Khan in July to ask the mayor to call in an application for 237 homes (35% of which were going to be “affordable housing“) in his constituency in Streatham. Reed claimed “many of my constituents” believed the proposal to be “out of proportion” with other buildings. A classic NIMBY argument…
A petition from the Campaign to Protect Rural England has got 4,466 signatures as the organisation last week launched legal action to judicially review Reed’s approval of a reservoir in far away Abingdon. Happy to develop in constituencies other than his own – there’s a word for that one…
Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock was asked if Burnham will take Britain back into the EU:
“Yes, sure – his commitment is authentic. He really does understand from the grassroots up why restoring what I think of as normality in our continent is vital for every party economically, politically, culturally, in terms of security, and he’s able to articulate it in language that people can understand. So yeah, he is definitely”.