Stuart Jeffery, from Maidstone council leader, speaks about mandatory housing targets
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00:00The bringing back of mandatory targets is a bit of a joke because they never actually went.
00:06If you speak to any councillor across the country, the rhetoric from the last government was
00:13simply a lie. I mean, those targets were mandatory. Nobody got away with reducing them.
00:19What I'm more worried about in many respects is the kind of approach that it heralds. We've
00:26already had a really top-down approach over the last however many years it is in terms of
00:32house building and targets and where things go, how they progress and so forth. What we're seeing is
00:43the new government is kind of doubling down on that and that doesn't spell a great deal of
00:49promise for local democracy, for local people. So it means that we are going to have to shout
00:55louder and harder and fight our corner even more. Rachel Reeves was talking about where,
01:03not how many. That's always been the case as far as I can see. But she's also talking about
01:13overturning previous planning applications that were declined. So that kind of contradicts that
01:19where, because if we said not there, somewhere else, then why is she talking about enforcing
01:27that first place? There was one good bit of it, which I must point out, the lifting of the
01:33onshore wind ban. That's clearly a positive, but that was the only real
01:39glimmer of light within that speech that I could see.