Former housing minister John Healey has written to the government admitting that the existing planning system, introduced under Labour, is too centralised.

In an open letter to work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, sent this week, Labour MP Healey said new housing was essential to the jobs market and warned that affordable housing would “fall off a cliff” under the new government. However, he conceded that the planning system was too “top down” under Labour.

The new coalition is planning a new Localism and Decentralisation Bill that it says will contain sweeping reforms to the planning system, including giving local planning authorities more autonomy.

In his letter, Healey said: “Ours was too top-down but theirs is a charter for local NIMBYs. Professional bodies, house builders and housing groups are united in fearing affordable house building ‘will fall off a cliff’.”

“We have to see more affordable rented homes built – not only in – but especially in areas where the demand for jobs and the pressure on existing housing is greatest.”

Yesterday, decentralisation minister Greg Clark gave a speech at the Royal Town Planning Institute’s Planning Convention, where he slammed the housing targets set by the government’s Regional Spatial Strategies.

He said: “Decisions should be taken at the most local level possible, and by people who are accountable to the public.

“That is why we have moved quickly to return to local planning authorities the ability to make a free choice of whether garden land should be developed or not. And of what densities housing should be built at.

“It is not for central government to mandate a requirement to progressively eradicate the character of our towns and suburbs when this is a matter in which local people, rightly, have an informed view.

“It is why we will end regional spatial strategies which embodied the worst type of imposition by bodies with no democratic credibility and accountability, alienating people from a sense of control over their own environment.

“And that is why local planning remains important, with local councils and communities collaborating and setting out their visions and plans.”

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