Boles in housebuilding call
Large areas of land need to be put aside for new housing, a junior minister will say today.
In an interview with Newsnight due to be broadcast tonight, Planning Minister Nick Boles says over 1,500 square miles of land need to be reserved for building on to solve the country's housing crisis.
"If people want to have housing for their kids they have got to accept we need to build more on some open land," he told the programme.
The National Trust's director of public affairs was dismissive of Mr Boles' words. "I think these figures sound very much like back of the fag packet calculations to me," he said.
"He’s talking here about increasing by a third the amount of developed land. Three per cent of the country is an area about the size of Cornwall and we don’t think that you need to build on Greenfield to quite this extent."