Housing and planning minister John Healey says affordable housing development is suffering because councils do not negotiate well enough with the private sector.

Labour MP Healey, talking this morning on PublicPropertyUK.com and Property Week’s online pre-election Property Question Time event, said local authorities needed to be more flexible about how they negotiate with private developers if they want to get affordable housing in their areas.

“If I have a criticism, it’s that too many councils are too weak and unskilled to have those discussions with private developers,” he said. Healey said councils should be doing more to work with housing associations and private developers, as well as developing themselves, to help meet local housing need.

“We should expect our local authorities to accept their duty and accept their responsibility to help meet the housing needs in their area,” said Healey.

He also criticised Conservative Party proposals to give local residents more power to object to developments under its agenda of “localism”.

He said this would mean that more schemes are rejected by local authorities, and that it would be harder for the government to meet its target of building 3 million new homes in the UK by 2020.

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