‘Angela Rayner is the ultimate anti-NIMBY and in my book that’s terrific’

Whether she’ll deliver a million and a half homes in five years, Angela Rayner is certainly determined to try. While other wheels appear to be falling off the government’s wagon pretty fast, she has earned respect from her officials at the renamed MHCLG as a minister who actually reads her official papers, engages well with her staff, who by all accounts like working with her, and clearly means business.

Phase one is reversing Michael Gove’s most egregious decisions. I wrote at the time that I wasn’t sure what her predecessor was smoking, but it was blindingly obvious that Rayner’s first step would be to reimpose mandatory land supply plans for all local planning authorities. Already some are complaining their targets are too high, but I doubt that will cut much ice with the secretary of state.

She has also reversed Gove’s strange decision not to approve the rebuilding of M&S’s store in Oxford Street and consented Berkeley Homes’ 165 homes scheme in Kent, which Gove had refused citing the scheme’s “generic suburban” look. Also in Kent, she’s called in an 8,400-home scheme near Sittingbourne that the local authority was about to refuse. All this is sending a very clear message that, whatever the council’s political persuasion, unless there’s a strong reason for refusal, she is expecting people in local government to understand that the priority is to get stuff built.

Her announcement over the weekend raises the temperature even higher because her proposition is that if an application complies with the local plan and the NPPF it can be approved by officers without councillors being involved. She is working on the assumption that councils now have a very strong motive for getting their local plans approved and that, if that’s the case, there is no reason for lots of bureaucracy getting in the way of consent.

She’s now openly questioned the ability of the great crested newt, the bat or the jumping spider to cause huge delays to much needed projects. Most developers I know privately think this stuff is ludicrous and a classic example of how we have made a worthy objective ridiculously bureaucratic and a waste of time and money. We need to be careful of the environmental impact of any project however worthy but on the basis of common sense, not dictat.

What of the nutrient neutrality directive we inherited from the EU? Despite there being no evidence in Europe of any government having an issue with it, in the UK, its application has been interpreted to the letter by zealous civil servants, resulting in 160,000 homes, many of which had been consented, being refused permission. When the last government proposed to override the directive, Labour opposed the idea. If the secretary of state means what she says about cutting through unnecessary red tape, I assume the directive is now not long for this world.

The most important aspect of her announcement is that it highlights the real issue behind so much of our ludicrously sclerotic planning system – the ability of a local council to say no to a perfectly acceptable housing development simply because the locals don’t like it. She is the ultimate anti-NIMBY and in my book that’s terrific.

I was parliamentary private secretary to the late great Nick Ridley who introduced the principle that if a council lost an appeal it had to pay the costs of the applicant. What was missing was that not a penny of that came from the pockets of the councillors themselves. So, here’s my suggestion to Ms Rayner. If a local council loses on appeal, every member of the planning committee who refused consent should lose all their allowances for the next 12 months. My suspicion is this will go down like a lead balloon. It might lead to a lot of councillors resigning. But it might also help deliver the million and a half homes this country desperately needs and that, in my view, is a price worth paying.