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Miliband challenged to learn about house building

The chairman of one of the country’s leading house builders has challenged Ed Miliband to learn more about the problems facing the industry, after the Labour leader accused developers of land banking.

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Speaking to Inside Housing at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s conference in Manchester, Redrow chairman Steve Morgan said Mr Miliband was ‘trying to make a political point, and doesn’t understand what he is talking about’.

‘The reality is it is complex and it is not a simple as it looks from the outside,’ he said. ‘I’ll extend an open invitation to Ed Miliband or anyone else who wants to come and take a look.’

Mr Miliband has suggested landowners should be put under pressure to develop homes, and raised the possibility of giving councils the power to seize land from the worst offenders.

However Mr Morgan said land banking was not to blame for the failure of the house building market to deliver enough homes to meet demand.

Speaking during a session at the CIH conference, he said: ‘It is not because builders are holding back, it is because of the planning system. As a company we spend more money on planning that we do on bricks, which is a disgrace.’

Mr Morgan said the government’s attempts to reform planning through the national planning policy framework have improved matters, but that there is still too much local opposition and bureaucracy. He said ‘local politicians who daren’t vote through a planning application’ are sometimes to blame.

Speaking in the same session, Trudi Elliott, chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute, also argued more needs to be done to address local opposition to housing developments. ‘We have to address the gap in what we need in this country and what we are actually providing,’ she said.

Ms Elliott added that her organisation has commissioned research on the need for homes, and suggested the commonly used figure of 240,000 homes a year may not be accurate.

‘It may be that we have underestimated demand based on the census figures,’ she said.


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Miliband targets land banking in building driveMiliband targets land banking in building drive

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