A squirming Labour minister denied large swathes of the green belt will be concreted over to help Britain cope with record levels of immigration.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to override planning « blockers » with sweeping changes to the system.
The Prime Minister and his deputy Angela Rayner have pledged to build 1.5 million homes and take decisions on 150 major infrastructure projects this parliament, with Sir Keir promising to « overhaul the broken planning system ».
But Housing Minister Matthew Pennycock faced numerous questions over the link between the demand for housing and Britain’s immigration levels.
He told Sky News: “Some migrants, legal migrants, are obviously in the private rented sector. Some may have been able to buy homes.
“I think it is far too simplistic to say, a proportion of your homes are going to migrants.
“But we’re talking about, in the round, that we’ve got to have a planning system that plans for the homes we need for our population, those living here today, those who will come forth, including legal migrants.
“Illegal migration is a different issue.”
Ms Burley asked: “What is going to happen to those two and a half million legal migrants projected to come to the UK?”
The Office for National Statistics said net migration to the UK hit 906,000 in the year to June 2023, amid an influx of foreign students, a spike in non-EU workers, particularly in the health and social care sectors and the introduction of the Ukraine and Hong Kong refugee visa schemes.
And 2.5 million migrants are projected to move to the UK over the next five years.
Mr Pennycock admitted: “They will need homes to live in. If they have got a legal right to stay in the country, of course they can buy a home if they are in a position to do so.”
Asked why Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner insisted there was plenty of housing for migrants, the Housing Minister said: “I think you are conflating two different issues. There’s illegal migration and how recently arrived migrants are housed. I was talking about legal migrants.”
The Housing Minister faced questions about how the Government will house asylum seekers currently living in hotels.
Some 35,651 asylum seekers are staying in taxpayer-funded hotel rooms, Home Office figures show.
The Home Office splurged £5.38bn on accommodation and support for asylum seekers in the year to June 2024 – up £1.43bn from the year before.
Mr Pennycock said: “There’s a separate conversation about how migrants are housed and how we deal with that specific challenge.
“We’re talking here about building homes for first time buyers – I don’t know many migrants who are coming in and buying first time homes of the kind that will come online through our reforms.”
Mrs Burley then challenged the answer, warning: “You said a lot of people couldn’t afford it, so that’s why you’re helping them with their first time purchases. Are you not going to help migrants do that?”
But the Housing Minister responded: “I think that the issue of migration, where migrants are housed, how we move them out of hotels over the medium to long term.”
The Sky News host then demanded: “Where are you going to put them?”
The Labour minister continued: “We’ll come forward with solutions to that, into different types of accommodation.
But the Government’s pledge to build 1.5 million homes over five years does not break down to 300,000 per year, Mr Pennycook said.
He would not put a number on how many homes will be built annually.
He told Sky News: « Projections put supply at less than 200,000 homes this coming year, so we’re in a trough and we’ve got a steep climb out of that trough.
« So it’s not as simple as to say we’re going to do 300,000 every year. That’s why we deliberately picked that 1.5 million target. We’re not putting a number on it as we come out. »
He agreed that the number of homes built annually would need to rise significantly later in the Parliament to meet the goal.
« In the later years of this Parliament, we will be on a trajectory of much higher housing numbers if all of our reforms are accepted, if they work, if they start to build in that is the trajectory, » he added.
He said developers need to « step up » and local authorities need to « match our ambition ».
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