Up until now there have never been many votes in pro-development planning policies. In fact, pro-development planning policies have generally been vote losers. This is because much of public perception is that developers are just greedy, build substandard housing, concrete over the countryside and make easy fortunes.

Whilst there are of course some bad developers, the majority are not like this, and SME developers in particular create some of the very best housing. I’m particularly interested in supporting and encouraging more good SME developers, who I believe need to be a major part of solving the housing crisis.

Nevertheless, the media does little to correct the narrative. It’s very similar to the story around landlords. The emotive subject of Green Belts is the most obvious example of policy kept firmly in place to appease the anti-development lobby, who incorrectly assume that Green Belt means beautiful green countryside.

The current Conservative Government has been the most anti-development I’ve ever known and they’ve focused very much on the NIMBY vote (largely older people) to the exclusion of younger people and the population that are most affected by the lack of housing.

Currently, and for many years previous, planning policy has therefore focused on ‘Brownfield first’ - that is, existing built-up land, buildings and sites in places that are likely to elicit the least amount of local objection and negative opinion from the electorate.

So, the people making the policies (and their advisors) have generally not listened to the people actually at the coal face trying to get homes built or understood the complexities of exactly what it takes. As a result, successive governments from all parties have only been rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic for the last 40+ years to the point where we have now pretty much hit the iceberg and have very few SME developers or smaller housebuilders left to save us.