Michael Gove: ‘I love Sadiq Khan and am here to help’, but London mayor may lose planning powers
Michael Gove has said “I love Sadiq Khan” and “here to help” – but he warned City Hall risked losing planning powers for London.
The levelling up, housing and communities secretary said “what I want to do is to help him to deliver” during a Q&A following a major speech on planning reform in central London today.
Speaking to an audience at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Gove announced a series of measures to boost planning performance across the UK, including naming and shaming local planning authorities who are too slow to respond to applications.
Focusing development on cities, Gove said, were crucial to his aim for Britain to “fall back in love with the future”, while London is set to be a key area of focus.
“Radical action”, the minister said, was needed, as London has only built an average of 38,000 net additional homes a year “in the last few years”.
Changes to the London Plan were required, he said, and a team would review the document and identify changes to speed up delivery, reporting to Gove in early 2024.
“I’ll reserve the right to intervene,” he added, if Khan rejected the recommendations.
But a source close to Sadiq Khan hit back, insisting: “Londoners will not be fooled by desperate distraction tactics from a Tory government which crashed the economy and condemned millions to mortgage misery and rocketing rents.”
And asked by Morning Wire for his response to the mayor’s argument that London had built more than 20 per cent faster than the rest of the UK since 2016, Gove said: “I love Sadiq Khan.”
“He’s a great politician but what I want to do is to help him to deliver. I think that the London plan that he’s got is not the right plan for London. It’s dramatically under delivering.”
He added: “I’m here to help and the team… I’ve outlined today will report quickly, we will give Sadiq the chance to fulfil the ambitions that I knew he has for building homes in London
“If for any reason he feels that he can’t accept those recommendations then I’ll help him out even further by intervening to make sure that the London Plan works.”
It comes after Rishi Sunak last year dropped compulsory housing targets to avoid a potential backbench Tory rebellion, choosing instead to make the 300,000 target in England advisory.