MPA respond to Labour housing statement
Nigel Jackson, Chief Executive of the Mineral Products Association, has responded to today's housing announcement from the Labour party.
The Labour policy statement indicates that housing is becoming an increasingly important political, social and economic issue. All parties agree that we need a significant increase in housing supply, as illustrated by Labour’s commitment to build a million homes over the period of a Parliament. However no-one seems to recognise that in order to build more houses and infrastructure we need to ensure that the UK supply chain has the capacity to support such an increase. Mineral products such as aggregates and cement are essential to the construction and maintenance of housing and infrastructure but unless we implement regulatory and planning policies to enable future supply of such materials Government’s ambitions for more house building will be constrained. MPA has worked with Government’s Cutting Red Tape challenge over the past 2 years to identify systematic regulatory and planning shortcomings and it is critical that such shortcomings are addressed by the new Government to enable housing, infrastructure and related ambitions to be realised.
