Housebuilding near train stations to get ‘default yes’ under new planning changes – UK politics live | Politics

The shadow housing secretary, James Cleverly, has told Sky News that the loosening of planning rules in England – that will allow more new homes to be built near stations – are a “smokescreen to disguise the fact that they (Labour) have catastrophically failed to get stuff built”.

Cleverly said “housebuilding in the UK has collapsed” in part because Labour made the process “prohibitively expensive”.

He said: “You need building professionals, you need building materials, you need to be able to raise the capital.” Cleverly failed to mention that housebuilding targets were repeatedly missed under previous Conservative administrations.

Robert Jenrick, Reform’s finance spokesperson, will detail the plans for £20bn of cuts to disability benefits overall, as well as another £21bn from stopping foreign nationals – including EU citizens with settled status – claiming almost any benefits, among other cuts.

The party said the plans were aimed at reducing the welfare bill by a quarter, with personal independence payments (Pip) replaced by another cash benefit that would be restricted to only the “gravely ill and severely challenged”.

It said “lower level conditions” would get support overseen by councils and mayors.

In relation to foreign nationals, the plans extend proposals set out by Nigel Farage last year in which he claimed that banning migrants from claiming some benefits and scrapping indefinite leave to remain would save £234bn over several decades.

Jenrick claimed paying benefits to non-British people was “plain immoral” – even though many would have paid into the tax system through working. He also wrote in the Telegraph over the weekend that the amount spent on disability benefits was “not generosity … it is suicidal empathy”.

However, Jenrick was accused by campaigners of making life harder for disabled people and of not understanding that it would not save money. You can read more here:

Reform UK has said foreign nationals would be banned from claiming almost all kinds of benefits in the UK if the party came into power following the next general election.

The affected welfare payments include housing benefit, pension credit, jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, free childcare and disability benefits. There would be only a small number of exemptions, including the War Widows Pension and Armed Forces compensation.

The ban would cover EU nationals with settled status in the UK, something that would require the party to renegotiate Britain’s EU withdrawal agreement and potentially mean British expatriates in the bloc losing equivalent rights.

Reform claims the policy would save up to £21bn a year by its fifth year, but Labour highlights the fact that the “vast majority” of migrants have no access to benefits.

A Labour spokesperson said:

These plans would mean ripping up the UK’s withdrawal agreement with the EU, plunging the UK back into years of Brexit renegotiations and stripping support from potentially millions of people who have lawfully lived, worked and paid taxes in Britain for years, and in many cases decades.

That includes people with settled status who are part of our communities, raising families, working and contributing to our economy.

Robert Jenrick, Reform’s finance spokesperson, is expected to outline £50bn of cuts to benefits for disabled people and foreign nationals at a Westminster press conference today at 11am. Mothin Ali, the deputy leader of the Greens, said:

Once again, the establishment parties are all trying to outdo each other when it comes to who can be the most xenophobic, who can punch down the hardest to the most vulnerable in our country, and who can cut the most support from disabled people.

It is cowardly to take from the most defenceless when we should be taxing the super wealthy including those who are in the privileged position of accepting £5m donations.

Andy Burnham exchanged messages with someone impersonating Donald Trump’s chief of staff, according to reports. According to Politico’s Playbook, the prime minister talked with someone posing as the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, before he became suspicious and concerns were raised about the incident.

Downing Street sources have downplayed the significance of the messages. But the incident prompted serious concern at the British embassy – so much so that officials raised their concerns with their counterparts in the US.

Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI had launched an investigation into efforts to access Wiles’ phone after an unknown person contacted prominent Republicans and business chiefs while pretending to be her.

In March, the Atlantic reported that the White House had been told Donald Trump’s contact details had been offered for sale to people seeking influence. “It’s honestly just wild,” one of them told the outlet. “I’ve heard of CEOs offering money for his number. I’ve heard of crypto bros offering cryptocurrency for it.”

The new national planning policy framework is aimed at providing clearer national policies for plan-making and decision-making, meaning that conflicting local policies will carry less weight when they are inconsistent with national policies.

Other changes will include:

• Stronger support in principle for development, meaning a more explicit presumption in favour of building in sustainable locations.

• Pubs will get protection from being turned into housing or offices with developers having to prove there is no reasonable prospect of keeping a pub as a going concern, including evidence that it was marketed for sale for at least a year.

• A requirement for at least 40% of homes to be accessible on bigger developments and stronger protections for community facilities.

• Stronger support for growth and infrastructure including support for AI growth zones and datacentres.

You can read more on the planning changes in this story by the Guardian’s Whitehall editor, Rowena Mason, here:

Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of UK politics. Thousands more homes could be built within 10 minutes of transport hubs, including on green belt sites, as part of changes to government planning rules in England.

Under the government’s new National Planning Policy Framework, which you can read in full here, there will be default approval for homes being built around railway stations in a bid to increase housebuilding numbers. There will also be new minimum expectations for how much housing should be built in these areas.

Ministers have pledged to build 1.5m new homes by 2029 – but this target will fall short on the current trajectory, with the government about a quarter of the way to its target, two years into a five-year parliament. We have not been told what areas will be targeted in the new housebuilding drive, but the i reports that one key criteria is that nearby rail stations can run a minimum of four trains per hour into a large urban area.

The plans risk a backlash from campaigners who want to see greenbelt areas protected.

Asked whether the “default yes” approach to planning approval would apply to greenbelt land, the housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, confirmed to Sky News this morning: “For well-connected stations outside of settlements, including the greenbelt, that default policy applies.”

Asked about concerns this may raise, he said:

It may cause some concern, but as I’ve said many, many times, we know there is not enough land on brownfield land registers across the country, so previously developed land, to deliver the volumes of homes our country needs each year, at least those that are viable and in the right location.

So, in exceptional circumstances, greenbelt land should be developed on. We’ve got a sequential approach for how we judge the lower quality land to come forward in the first instance.

Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice said the changes, which come into effect from today, undermine the government’s devolution agenda.

“Far from empowering local councils who actually know their communities, they strip power from the people who live there and hand it to Whitehall so ministers can ram through major housing developments while sidelining residents and ignoring the infrastructure that already can’t cope,” he said.

James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, said: “To try to fix their own mess, Labour are planning a power grab, seizing control from local communities and forcing them to accept development in the wrong areas because Labour won’t build in the right areas. Labour’s planning power grab is exposing our green belt and countryside to unauthorised Traveller sites, and ministers are turning a blind eye.”