Countryside campaigners have hit back at a Norfolk MP's call for more homes to be built on greenfield land - and accused government leaders of abdicating responsibility for the housing crisis.
Great Yarmouth MP Brandon Lewis has written a piece for the Conservative Home website in which he backs planning reforms local government secretary Michael Gove says would speed up the planning process and get more homes built.
But, while Mr Gove's reforms stated councils would not have to earmark greenfield land for new homes, Mr Lewis suggested some such land should be built on.
And the former justice secretary attacked councils for taking too long to approve plans for new homes - despite a number of councils in his own county being prevented from approving applications because of nutrient neutrality rules from government advisors.
Mr Lewis said there had been a "repeated failure" to hit the annual target of getting 300,000 new homes built.
He said: "The core culprit is our sclerotic, expensive, and unstable planning system. Developers and housebuilders are having to wait years for approvals, while good councillors have an equally difficult battle to ensure their communities can grow sustainably and logically with good quality homes where they are needed."
He said building on brownfield sites was important, but there is less of that available in some areas than others, while it can be costly to build on.
Mr Lewis said: "Building on the green belt often leads to claims that it would result in the eviction of Thumper from his burrow.
"In fact, some of it is not what you might call green at all. Moreover, we would only need a mere 1.8pc of green belt land to build more homes than we have completed in the last 10 years.
"Of course this does not mean we should be simply bulldozing through green belt land without taking local residents into account.
"Instead, we should be garnering support from local communities by letting them directly share in the benefits of new homes in their area.
"Contrary to the gloom surrounding our electoral prospects were we to build on green belt land, this would be a popular proposal."
But Chris Dady, chairman of the Norfolk branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), which has called for a green belt to be created around Norwich, said the government would have more success in tackling the housing crisis by helping to get social housing built.
He said Mr Lewis was wrong to blame councils. He said there are 35,000 homes which either have planning permission or the presumption of permission, but have not been built because developers have yet to begin construction.
He said: "Housebuilding rates are entirely governed by what developers can sell, hence they control the market absolutely.
"This is the fundamental flaw in the government's housebuilding policy - relying on the private market to provide houses for social to rent, affordable to rent and buy, and market full-price houses for sale.
"Demand for the first category peaks when demand for the third category is low, a perfect housing crisis-creating situation.
"The government is abdicating responsibility. This is the old chestnut - blame a failed housing policy on the planning system, If we go back in time to the 1960s, for instance, when the planning system was tighter but better funded than it is now, there were years when over 400,000 houses were built.
"The private market built houses for sale, the government built houses to satisfy the social provision.
"The impact of this was to ensure full house availability, and it stopped the housing market becoming investment-led."
He said the right-to-buy scheme had slashed the number of socially rented homes, forcing people into privately rented housing and exacerbating the crisis.
The debate comes as new figures revealed there are now more than 11,800 on waiting lists for social housing in Norfolk - the highest it has ever been.
In Mr Lewis' Great Yarmouth constituency, there are 813 applications for new housing, with a further 1,096 yet to be assessed and more than 100 households in temporary accommodation.
In addition to those in Yarmouth, the figure includes 4,300 people in Norwich, 1,625 in Breckland, 1,021 in Broadland and South Norfolk, 1,469 in West Norfolk, and 2,499 in North Norfolk.
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