The Conservatives are having yet another one of their Green Belt rows. Over the weekend, it was reported that Philip Hammond wants to relax restrictions on the Green Belt in order to get more homes built, but the Prime Minister isn’t very keen on the political implications of a liberalisation of planning laws. She remembers the bruising political rows that David Cameron’s government had with the National Trust, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and the Telegraph, and feels that this is a battle she could ill-afford.
When I interviewed Conservative policy chief George Freeman last week, one of the striking observations he made was that while he wanted to empower party members to have more of a say on policy, he also didn’t think that the current membership would do what it did in the 1950s and vote in favour of a mass housebuilding programme.
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