The Government must build beautiful homes to solve the , a former Labour policy guru has said. Jon Cruddas, the ex-MP who helped write Ed Miliband’s , urged Sir Keir Starmer to put high-quality designs at the heart of his housebuilding revolution if he wants it to be taken seriously. Throwing his support behind a new report warning that “must go hand-in-hand with increasing supply if the housing crisis is to be resolved”, he warned a past tendency to churn out ugly estates has put Britons off building for decades.
Labour controversially dropped a requirement for new homes to be “beautiful” in a major overhaul of last month. The reforms were brought in by the Tories to help overcome local opposition to new developments. the former housing secretary, used them last April to block a 165-home development near in Kent for being too “generic”.
A month later he called in another proposed 200-home development near Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, prompting the builder to withdraw its planning application. But the rules were criticised by some for being too vague and failing to define what constitutes “beauty”, and were quickly scrapped by the new Government. In a foreword to the report by the Policy Exchange think tank, Mr Cruddas warned Sir Keir not to repeat the mistakes of the former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, whom he accused of compromising beauty standards in order to deliver swathes of new properties in the 1960s.
He suggested this “mechanistic prov.