Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me, Alan Tollast.

This week, after the housing secretary Steve Reid announced plans for the creation of seven

new towns in England, we're looking at how the government is tackling this country's housing

crisis and how it's getting on on meeting its supremely ambitious target of building 1.5 million

new homes in this parliament. I caught up with Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook to discuss

how important new towns are to his department's aims and their wider economic benefits

and the creation of a new sense of place or if they're a distraction in trying to hit the numbers

of houses that communities are crying out for.

And later in the episode, we've got a fantastic panel to discuss a whole host of issues around these proposed settlements, featuring the Labour MP, Sean Woodcock, who sits on the

Housing Select Committee, alongside Vicki Spratt, Housing and Society correspondent at the I newspaper,

Professor Susan Parram, head of urbanism and planning and director of the University of Hartford's

Urbanism Unit, and Rico Vojtylevich, head of policy and market insight at the National

Federation of Builders. But I begin here by asking Minister Pennycook why new towns are so

important. So, Matthew, just talk us through initially kind of why new towns are kind of so important to this government's vision of housing in the future.

Well, we've always been clear that we can't meet housing need across England on just a local scale.

We need to go larger than local.

We know we've got an acute and entrenched housing crisis.

We also know that lots of our towns or cities are constrained.

They're unable to realize their full economic potential, their full productivity potential.

So the New Towns Program is a way at getting of all those challenges delivering large-scale new communities across the country.

Your boss, Steve Reed, his mantra is build, baby build. I was surprised

you weren't wearing the red bucket hat when you, when you joined this call. How useful are new towns

...