Across the UK councils have lashed back against Labour’s housing target of 1.5 million new privately-built homes over the next five years.

According to the BBC,

Many fear the algorithm used to calculate the targets has not taken into account strains on local infrastructure, land shortages, and a lack of capacity in the planning system and construction industry.

There are questions about whether the targets even match housing need in particular areas. Come to that, what about employment?

It seems housing targets have been largely based on projections about how many people will live in a local area in the coming years, but the Tories chose to ‘lock in’ housing targets based on projections made in 2014 – presumably in one of the many cost-saving (ha ha!) austerity measures they were imposing at the time.

Now Labour wants targets for new homes to be based on the current number of houses in an area and how affordable those properties are, rather than the number of people expected to be living there in years to come.

This Writer can’t see that either method is practical. The question is, how many people will want to live in a particular area? That will be based on the number of employment opportunities available, and on the availability of infrastructure like schools, NHS medical centres, parks and shops. Oh – it seems nobody in Labour has thought about that either.

This is looking like an utter mess – and while the Tories might be responsible for causing it, it seems Labour has done nothing to correct the inaccurate predictions on which housing targets are based. If those targets aren’t corrected, we could be looking at huge problems for decades to come.

What’s the betting that Starmer and his team of top minds will ignore it?