Tory MP Neil O’Brien has become one of the first to break ranks with the government’s planning reforms by criticising the proposed formula for determining housing need in local authorities.

The backbench Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston told the Times that the “strange” proposal risked seeing the housing requirement for some cities “stagnate” while the volume of new homes in shires and suburbs rose steeply.

His comments refer to the new proposed “standard method” for determining local housing need, laid out by the government at the start of this month alongside its wider reforms to the system, which will limit democratic involvement in individual planning application decisions.

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