A Tory revolt that threatens to derail a government promise to boost housebuilding shows Rishi Sunak is “too weak” to make the changes the country needs, Labour says.
The prime minister has ducked the first big Commons test of his premiership by delaying a vote – after nearly 50 of his MPs vowed to free local councils from government targets on new homes.
The move is widely seen as the death knell for the pledge to build 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s, although that target was already highly unlikely to be hit.
In the Commons, Keir Starmer hit out at the prime minister for “killing off the dream of home ownership”, linking it to other alleged failures to take tough action.
“He won’t follow Labour’s plan to scrap non-dom status – instead, we’ve got an NHS staffing crisis,” the Labour leader told Mr Sunak.
“He won’t follow Labour’s plan to make oil and gas giants pay their fair share – instead he hammers working people.
“And he won’t push through planning reform – instead he kills off the dream of home ownership. Too weak to take on his party, too weak to take on vested interests.”
But Mr Sunak claimed he was the one displaying “leadership”, pointing back to the Tory leadership campaign when he attacked Liz Truss’s “fairytale” economics.
“This summer I stood on my principles and told the country what they needed to hear even though it was difficult. When he ran for leader, he told his party what they wanted to hear,” he told Sir Keir.
The vote, an amendment to the flagship Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, was due next Monday, but has been pulled while crisis talks take place between ministers and the rebels.
Several former cabinet ministers, including Damian Green and Theresa Villiers, are among the backers of the attempt to abolish targets that councils must take into account when deciding on planning applications.
The government is not in danger of losing the vote – because Labour would not support the Conservative rebels – but faces the embarrassment of relying on the Opposition to win it.
The revolt has been condemned by the co-author of the 2019 Tory manifesto, Robert Colville, who warned it would “enshrine ‘nimbyism’ as the governing principle of British society”.
The Country Land and Business Association said the rebels were “strangling rural communities with the very same cotton wool they want to wrap us in”.
“The lack of housing stock is driving young people out of the countryside, and high prices are preventing families from moving into it,” said its president, Mark Tufnell.
But Ms Villiers, the MP for Chipping Barnet, in north London, and a former environment secretary, said: “Top-down targets are not the right way to run our planning system.
“Local decision-making matters and if we are to build the right homes in the right places we need to restore that principle in the planning process.”
