The Office for Place was formed to develop planning codes that could speed up housebuilding by providing developers with guidelines that can fast track millions of new homes.
Codes have been set up in 25 towns and cities, with one being used to push through 900 homes in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, where the Conservatives lost a byelection in 2021 amid criticism that they were encouraging too much building.
The planning guidelines are intended to foster greater beauty in the construction of new-build housing.
Mr Boys Smith, a veteran Whitehall advisor who has previously worked on policy with George Osborne and social security secretary Peter Lilley, said that the codes should be written by local bodies, saying “it’s up to them to set what can be built”.
He said that new-build houses often “look as if they are imposed from elsewhere” and that complaints from locals that new houses “don’t look as if they are from Yorkshire or Buckinghamshire” were “ubiquitous”.
“There have been real issues of build quality and snagging,” he said, adding that some new developments had a “lack of place design” and too often involved “chucking four or five cul de sacs and squashed houses into a field”.
Last month a dossier from think tank Policy Exchange proposed redesignating land on the green belt around major train stations to allow for new housing to be built and included a foreword from Ms Badenoch that said “by expanding the circle of ownership that we will make our society wealthier, fairer and more inclusive”.
