A political storm has erupted over plans to build thousands of new homes in Telford & Wrekin over the next decade to help meet a national housing shortage.The ruling Labour group wants to see a total of 30,000 new homes, insisting that most of them will be built on land owned by English Partnerships and already earmarked for development.

But the Tories claim it will mean turning large areas of green fields into housing estates, with an extra 11,000 cars clogging up the borough’s roads.

The row is over a call by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, headed by John Prescott, for more homes to be built to meet national demand.

Telford & Wrekin Council is considering what its share should be of the West Midlands housebuilding programme, on top of 20,000 homes already earmarked under the Local Government Framework.

Three options are on the table – for an extra 4,000, 10,000 or 16,000 homes – and Labour is going for the 10,000 option, which would bring the total housebuilding programme in Telford & Wrekin to 30,000.

Conservatives today claimed the borough was already “saturated” with new homes, sparking widespread opposition in areas such as Newport.

Councillor Ian Fletcher, Tory planning spokesman, said: “The option to build an additional 10,000 houses is clearly unsustainable and will inevitably mean concreting over greenfield sites and dumping houses in our open countryside.”

Councillor Andrew Eade, Tory group leader, said: “The sheer size of these devastating proposals will send our creaking highways infrastructure into meltdown as current trends indicate an additional 11,000 cars would gridlock the system.”

However, Labour’s Councillor Keith Austin, council leader, said the Tories’ claims were “misleading” as most of the development land in the borough was already owned by the Government, in the form of English Partnerships.

“If we don’t have a say on this, they may do what they want because they have planning powers anyway,” he said. “We intend to bring the town forward. Councillor Eade wants to bury his head in the sand.”

By Peter Johnson