Irish PM rules out Ireland having specific negotiation with UK over border – Politics live

Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen, including Theresa May’s statement to MPs about her Brexit speech 1.48pm GMT Londoners gave Mrs May an average performance score of 35 out of 100, compared to 47 for Jeremy Corbyn and 53 for Sadiq Khan, who topped our table. Some admired her stoicism, but she tended to arouse sympathy rather than anything more positive (“I’m surprised she hasn’t had a nervous breakdown,” as one of our focus group participants put it). And those were the charitable views.But how much does this matter in a local election? Whatever else is going on, surely Londoners associate the Tories with good services and value for money? 1.08pm GMT Here is some assorted reaction to the Theresa May housing speech.From John Healey, Labour’s housing spokesmanWe’ve heard hand-wringing on housing from Theresa May before, but there’s nothing new here that will make a difference. After eight years of failure, it’s clear this Government has got no plan to fix the housing crisis. Home-ownership has fallen to a thirty-year low, rough sleeping has more than doubled and the number of new homes built for social rent has fallen to the lowest level since records began.The Conservatives cannot rely on the private sector to provide affordable housing. Housing developers will always act in the best interests of their shareholders, which means keeping house prices high. The Liberal Democrats are calling for tens of billions of real investment in new housing.There is very little “new” in the prime minister’s speech for new-home developers. Theresa May has stated that if developers are sitting on planning permission, then councils will be able to penalise developers. It is difficult to see how this will particularly assist new homes being built. Details are subject to the findings of Sir Oliver Letwin’s review and applications may be many months if not years away. There are many reasons why build out rates can be slow and they are often unintentional. As such, a penalty system will not make a marked difference. The detailed changes proposed to viability assessments will be much more interesting.Planning revolutions have often been promised, but usually turn out to be a false dawn, given that businesses report that it never seems to get easier, faster, or cheaper to secure planning permissions and crack on with development.The last time the government upended the planning system six years ago, the framework was slimmed down, but the bureaucracy, delays and cost were not. This time things must be different.The Campaign to Prevent Real Estate may object, but the prime minister is right to take-on nimby councils in high-demand areas. Restrictions on new development push rents up and hold back productivity by pricing workers out of the best jobs. But we must go further and build on the green belt.Building on the Green Belt doesn’t mean ugly sprawl or trashing the environment. If we only freed up intensively farmed land within a ten-minute walking distance of a train station for development, we could build one million new homes. Continue reading…
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