Backlash from councils over Rayner housing targets

"I don't think the land is actually available here to build that much housing on,” he said, “unless you were to go and build specifically on arable farmland”.

Dowling claimed the new way of determining targets would not match the housing need in West Lancashire either and called on ministers to “have a look at the responses” to the consultation “and see what's been said”.

Current housing targets are largely based on projections about how many people will live in a local area in the coming years.

Instead of regularly updating targets whenever these projections changed, the last Conservative government chose to lock in housing targets based on projections made in 2014.

The Labour government claims this has led to targets that would not solve the country’s current housing crisis or provide significant economic growth.

They want the targets for new homes to be based on the current number of houses in an area and how affordable those properties are, rather than the number of people expected to be living there in years to come.

In July, Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told MPs the government would be even more ambitious than first anticipated, and would “rise from some 300,000 a year to just over 370,000 a year”.

If all councils hit that target, it would result in significantly more homes than the 1.5m pledge that the government has made.

But last Wednesday, housing minister Matthew Pennycook told a select committee the government would not be imposing national annual targets in the way suggested by Rayner.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “This is the worst housing crisis in living memory, and in order to fix this we need to build 1.5 million homes.

“That’s why we have introduced mandatory housing targets for councils and laid out clear plans to support their delivery, including by changing planning rules to allow homes to be built on grey belt land and recruiting 300 additional planning officers.”

The Local Government Association has called on the government to “give councils the tools we need to help build these much-needed new homes”.

Adam Hug, the LGA's housing spokesman, added that “any national algorithms and formulas would strongly benefit from local knowledge” provided by the people who “know their areas best”.

Graphics by Daniel Wainwright