Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a weekly podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and with me to discuss the vexed issue of housing policy

is Bob Seeley, the Conservative MP for the Isle of White, John Myers, co-founder of the London Yimbie,

the Housing Campaign Group, as well as Dan Tomlinson, Labour's Parliamentary candidate in Chip McBarner and a former Treasury official.

So this kind of episode came out of last week's episode really where we discussed the local

elections and kind of always came back to housing, people on one side saying the government's

failure to build houses was blamed why they lost and on the side why failure to block

developments was also blamed.

So Bob's starting with you, which side of your own? Did you lose a thousand council seats by

building too many or too few homes, do you think? I don't necessarily think that is a critical reason

why the elections happened as they did and we lost those seats. I think the reason we lost

those seats is that we're being judged on the last year of government, which frankly wasn't good enough. And I'm the first to admit it. We need to, we should have been better last year. We had a six months, which was very difficult. We weren't focused enough on what we should have been doing. And I think we're being judged on that. Are we losing votes because of housing? It's difficult to say we're

using young votes because of housing, but we're certainly losing older votes because people feel

their communities are under siege. So there's a way that we need to do housing better, frankly,

and that means not being dependent on low density car dependent out of town greenfield development

but prioritising to a much greater extent that we do brownfield and also if need be having a new

of council house and local housing association building because we're not going to hit those numbers

unless we do that but to be more creative and more original about how we do

that. And that's really what the rebellion that Theresa Villiers and I led. That's what it was about.

It wasn't just saying no. It was just saying they're coming up with frankly better answers.

So that, yeah, we'll come on to that the rebellion that was last year to knock down that,

that target to build 300,000 homes a year. So you don't think those kind of... It wasn't to knock it down. No, it wasn't to knock it down. It was to change the emphasis.

...