Bollocks! It looks like Reform have taken a fifth seat in Essex. That means they’ll qualify for extra funding IIRC.
They like it when we join in if they are bombing the fuck out of someone, even if our contribution is miniscule. 
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Never makes any news coverage though.
Owned and funded by Aaron Banks, with Putin as a minor shareholder.
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There were quite a few articles in the NYT
I was thinking more locally.
Over the last few years, plans to biuld literally thousands of homes in Sussex have been denied by Tory councils and then appeals denied again by Tory MPs
Yes, agreed, that is clever thinking.
Well, all the developers, having been refused where you are must have moved up here. Driving around Norfolk you’ll see fucking loads of construction sites and recently completed housing developments. Everywhere!
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I suppose retirement villages have to go somewhere 
Yes. Norfuk seems to be a very popular retirement destination, especially with folk coming from the east side of London.
Yer dosh will go far further than Sussex too 
Seriously though it has to be joined up.
There has to be employment in the area, doctors schools etc.
That’s the problem. Getting house developers to actually deliver the accompanying infrastructure they promised in return for the right to undertake the development. Councils don’t have the money to get legal with the likes of Bovis etc.
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I actually thought that comment was tongue in cheek. Do you seriously think that building more houses will affect the affordability crisis? As if builders will just keep spaffing houses across fields as average prices decline? We’ve another 3,000 due to go up along our £multi-million road-to-nowhere, on Grade 1 prime ag land, and have been for the last four years, but no-one actually wants them all (or those that do can’t afford them), but the builders sure as fuck ain’t taking offers! They just leave the unsold stuff part-finished and boarded. They only overbuild still because it’s a perpetually rising market AND it allows them to plead poverty and weasel out of their infrastruture commitments (and round here they’re even leaving some of the fucking roads unsurfaced in places!), but then if you stop all that, the building stops.
Every town and village around here is the same, only the scale varies. Central government give local govt quotas, planning objections are swept aside, and GRUNT! another 50, 100, 1000, 3000 crowded, cheap, badly finished Barrat-boxes are wanked out. Then they take 5 years to fill - and every time the builders plead poverty and are allowed to drop infrastructure commitments. There’s not a thing Dsitrict and Parish councils can do to influence any of it. It all comes from central government.
If Labour wants to make a difference to the bit that actually matters, they won’t pick up the tory square-peg hammer, they’ll compulsorily purchase the unsold housing stock and turn them into council houses. Home ownership is bullshit anyway - just another self-deluding lie we’ve been sold. Trouble is, they have a hundred other calls on a shrinking budget, so it can’t happen…
You just can’t have it all - the housing price bubble to be burst, cheap housing, proper infrastructure investment, a heavily pro-tenant regulated rental market, and lots of new houses constantly being built - that’s Magic Money Tree stuff.
I don’t know what the answer is in a nation heavily entangled in a culture of overpriced, poor quality housing, where everyone plans their life trajectory predicated on eternally rising house prices.
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Stop the boats 
Without 'em our population goes into decline - which would certainly drop house prices, and also one or two other trivial things, like standards of living, pensions, christ … everything ultimately. Capitalism - our flavour at least - needs growth or it stops working.
Suffolk is exactly the same, seemingly uncontrolled development in every town and village. 
Conversely, nothing that gets built here remains unsold for any length of time. As ever, the plural of anecdote is not data. You live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, surrounded by racists. I too would not be swimming rivers and climbing mountains to live there but this is not applicable to every square inch of the UK. I also didn’t specify whether houses were for ownership or retention by the state; frankly at this point, I don’t care. We have a measurable phenomenon of young people trapped at home, people unable to move to larger houses and older people unable to easily downsize.* You’re also simultaneously making the argument for more people to come. Unless you want a commensurate explosion in the number of Lee Andersons, they will need somewhere to go.
Also- just to be crystal clear, this is not just houses, it’s everything; onshore wind, solar, the sheer tortuous insanity of HS2 needing to be recessed into the ground and every, fucking inch of route needing to be contested. This country is en thrall to a older, property owning class who currently block everything. Fuck 'em, it is time to build stuff. If your response on day bloody one of a government you campaigned to get into power with this as a key manifesto pledge, is to say it’s a bit hard and there might be issues on the way, I’m not sure what to say but I’m sure as hell not going to agree with it.
*this one could probably be solved with a stamp duty tweak in fairness.
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If this happened, I for one, would be far more likely to downsize.