by business editor Trevor Sturgess

Petty council bureaucracy has been blamed for the housing shortage.

Planning delays, unnecessary conditions and a tendency to look for reasons to turn applications down rather than look for the good in them are holding up sensible development, according to Colin Creed, managing director of Maidstone-based Hillreed Homes.

Mr Creed said the new coalition government was relying on the private sector to create jobs lost in the public sector.

Recent research showed that housebuilders could create 215,000 new jobs if they were allowed to build the homes the country needed. Last year, the UK built the lowest number of new homes since 1923 and Mr Creed called on politicians to take urgent action to reverse the trend.

But Mr Creed claimed councils turned down planning bids that cost the firm a lot of money often on political grounds. "We do not make frivolous applications," he said. "We are fairly confident that when we make an application, it should get approval."

Five recent planning refusals had been overturned on appeal. "Usually after several more months, the appeal is determined in our favour but with conditions to be agreed by the local authority so yet more time-consuming delay in the provision of new homes and new jobs."

Many of these conditions were unnecessary because as an experienced firm - Mr Creed and Tony Hillier founded Hillreed 35 years ago - it knew what to do.

Mr Creed said councils were not totally to blame for housing shortages, accepting that a lack of mortgage finance was also behind the slump. He hoped the Government's New Homes Bonus would encourage councils to support more local housebuilding.