Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, whether his Department has set any target for the number of homes in the North Hertfordshire Local Plan.

No. We have abolished Labour’s top-down targets and Regional Strategies which built nothing but resentment.

Our new locally-led approach is working; in the last 12 months, a total of 230,000 homes received planning permission across England.

The Coalition Government is determined to protect our countryside and the Green Belt, as stated in the Coalition Agreement. I refer my hon and learned Friend to the new planning guidance issued by my Department on 6 October, reaffirming how councils should use their Local Plan to safeguard their local area against urban sprawl, drawing on protections in the National Planning Policy Framework. We have been very clear that there is no central diktat demanding that councils rip up the Green Belt to meet housing need.