At least 100,000 new homes could be built in Buckinghamshire over the next 20 years under Labour’s proposed planning reforms, the Conservative leader of Buckinghamshire Council has said.

Martin Tett warned that the new government’s aim to deliver 1.5 million new homes across the country during this parliament would change Buckinghamshire forever.

“This is probably the biggest change in planning legislation since the end of the last war if it goes through as proposed,” said Cllr Tett on Monday morning during a special cabinet meeting.

The council boss attacked Labour’s plans as his cabinet members met to discuss the council’s response to the government’s proposed changes to the national planning policy framework. This document sets out how planning policies are applied and was last changed by the Tories in December 2023 under the former Prime Minster Rishi Sunak.

Cllr Tett said: “This will transform Buckinghamshire from the very beautiful, rural county that we have at the moment into a very, very, very different place, with urban sprawl right across the entire county, so this will have an immediate impact over the next five years that I think will be very undesirable.”

The Bucks Council leader stressed that the unitary authority accepted the need for more homes due to the country’s growing population from immigration, social change and other drivers.

However, he stressed that new homes needed to be built as part of ‘plan-led’, brownfield-first developments ‘in the right place’, with adequate supporting infrastructure.

The new Labour government’s proposed reforms to the planning system include changes to the way the need for new homes is calculated. Under its plans, 4,122 homes would be expected to be built in the Buckinghamshire Council area every year. This is a 42 per cent increase on the current expected annual total of 2,912 under the existing housing need formula.

The council claims the change to the metric means that sites for 86,562 new homes will need to be identified during the period covered by its local plan for 2024 to 2045.

On top of this, Labour has also proposed changes to what is known as the ‘five-year housing land supply’. This term refers to local authorities’ obligations to show that they have enough suitable sites to provide five years’ worth of new homes as per their housing requirement.

Labour plans to re-introduce a five per cent ‘buffer’ on top of authorities’ five-year housing land supply, ‘to account for fluctuations’.

Labour has also set up an ‘independent taskforce’ to build new towns of at least 10,000 homes, the locations of which are set to be announced by the end of the new government’s first year in office.

Cllr Tett said: “You are looking in total at 86,500 under the new metric, plus a 5 per cent uplift, so around 90,000. Plus, on top of that potentially, another 10,000 minimum for a new town.”

He added: “So we are looking at potentially 100,000 new houses coming in, but with no commitment whatsoever to the essential infrastructure that will be required.”

The council leader also hit out at Labour’s plans to build on lower quality Green Belt land, which the new government has dubbed ‘Grey Belt’.

Labour defines Grey Belt as Green Belt that has either been previously developed or ‘makes a limited contribution’ to the principles of the Green Belt, which aims to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas and stop neighbouring towns merging into one another.

Cllr Tett said: “It is a political construct. It does not exist in any other way and the definition used in this document from the government to define Grey Belt is so vague that it is open to massive interpretation.

“My fear is that it will simply be used by unscrupulous developers to bring forward virtually any site in the Green Belt and argue that individually it doesn’t make a sufficient contribution to the Green Belt, but obviously collectively what you end up with is massive damage to the Green Belt in total.”