The Prime Minister has stood by his government’s pledge to protect the green belt against new homes following calls by Labour leader Keir Starmer, for these sites to be built on “where appropriate” to make housing more affordable.  

Rishi Sunak insists that local councils should not have to use the green belt for development, adding that it was right to move away from national housebuilding targets, according to a report in the Guardian.  

“On the green belt, I was very clear over the summer what I was going to do, which was move away from a system of nationally imposed top-down housing targets on local areas,” says Sunak, speaking on a plane during a trip to Japan.  

He adds: “In government, as Prime Minister, that is what I have delivered relatively shortly after taking office.   

“I was very clear over the summer I wanted to make sure our green spaces are protected. I think that is what local communities want.”  

The Prime Minister’s comments come after Labour’s Starmer said, interview with The Times and later in a speech to the British Chamber of Commerce, that housebuilding was on course to fall to its lowest level since the Second World War.  

He said he wanted to see a reform to planning rules that would relax restrictions on the green belt and make it easier to build infrastructure for new housing developments.  

The opposition leader said: “We need to have that discussion [about building on the green belt]. But it cannot be reduced to a simple discussion of will you, or will you not, build on the green belt.   

“This is why it’s important for local areas to have the power to decide where housing is going to be.”  

He added: “Very often the objections that people have to housebuilding on the green belt are valid because the control by landowners and developers mean that the houses are proposed in areas where it’s quite obvious that there’s going to be a local concern.   

“Give local authorities and local areas more power to decide where it will be and you alleviate the problem.”  

The government has come under fire on housing after Housing Secretary Michael Gove was forced to water down his ‘mandatory’ target to build 300,000 homes a year to an ‘advisory’ aim after a threatened Conservative backbench rebellion last November.  

In December, it emerged that Gove had written to the Competition and Markets Authority urging the body to investigate the housebuilding sector to make sure the market was “working in the interests of consumers”.  

In February, the CMA confirmed it would begin the first probe into the industry in 14 years amid “concerns that builders are not delivering the homes people need at sufficient scale or speed”.