Trouble ahead as Sunak faces open revolt on two fronts

Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have certainly calmed the markets, but sadly their record is not so good when talking of their parliamentary colleagues. The new prime minister is facing open revolt on two fronts over his Levelling Up Bill.

One is the move by former cabinet minister Simon Clarke (you might remember him from the 49 days he was secretary of state for Levelling Up), supported by two former prime ministers Boris Johnson (hard to forget admittedly) and Liz Truss (yes, those 49 days again), to use an amendment to reverse the ban on onshore wind.

Personally, I’m with the dozens of MPs who’ve supported the move. It seems daft to ban one of the best value renewable energy sources simply because some people don’t want to see the windmills from their kitchen window. But what is hugely significant is that Johnson and Truss, in so openly opposing their successor, are marking a huge aggressive break with convention. I sat in parliament for many years when Ted Heath sat yards away from Margaret Thatcher, who for understandable reasons he cordially loathed. But Ted never ever opposed her government’s bills, however much he might have disliked them.

This is a very significant move by these two ex-PMs. Their votes are not vital in themselves. They could well have simply abstained and every parliamentarian would have understood. By being so openly hostile to Sunak, they have sent a signal that, from now on, he cannot count on their support and that of their supporters. And that spells real trouble.

But Sunak is facing an even more existential threat from his own side over something much more relevant to the property industry. The former Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers has put down an amendment to scrap the mandatory housing targets that have shaped the provision of housing since Labour introduced them and make the targets advisory only.

Villiers is MP for Chipping Barnet, an attractive area of North London that is just the sort of place where the default position on practically any planning application is ‘no’. She recently led opposition to housing being built over a local tube station, despite all the evidence that building over a transport node is the ideal way to reduce car dependency. She is certainly doing a job her constituents will approve of, but what she is actually doing in the process is kicking the ladder away from the only way any housing gets built in this country where it’s actually needed.

When the then secretary of state John Prescott introduced the requirement for housing targets, the Tories described it as Stalinist top-down dictatorship. They and their Liberal Democrat Coalition partners introduced the Localism Act in 2011, which was designed to scupper the initiative, although in 2015 the Infrastructure Act largely preserved the notion of targets and gave us the framework we use today.

For all its manifold inadequacies the system has delivered thousands of homes that would otherwise not have been consented. The best estimate is that we will build around 250,000 homes this year, short of the target of 300,000 but still respectable. The best estimate of the effect of the Villiers amendment becoming law is that we might be looking at 140,000 next year. NIMBYs will no doubt be grateful, but surely the more important question is why would anyone under 40 have any reason to vote Conservative?

We have an acute shortage of affordable housing in, believe it or not, the areas where house prices are too high for newcomers. There’s no point in allocating big swathes of land for housing in places nobody wants to live. Michael Gove will do his best to present this shift back to BANANA (build nothing anywhere near anybody) as catnip to Tory supporters, but those who have children may not be so grateful. Here real danger lies.