It would appear there’s a constant sense of tension between the need for new housing and the desire not to have that housing built anywhere near where you happen to live.

The received wisdom is that we need to build 300,000 new homes a year in an attempt to solve the housing crisis.

This was official government policy once upon a time although the house building targets once imposed on local councils have since been removed.

And building new homes was a key promise in Labour leader Keir Starmer’s recent keynote conference speech.

In fact, he went further. He announced plans for new developments – including the biggest expansion of ‘new towns’ since the aftermath of the Second World War as well as a massive expansion of affordable housing.

Starmer vowed to ‘bulldoze through’ nimby opposition to new developments and get Britain building again, saying he would ‘fight the blockers’ and restore the lost dream of home ownership by ordering the construction of 1.5 million houses.

He used his party conference speech to warn that the growth of nimbyism – the ‘not in my back yard’ ideology – meant an ever smaller number of people ‘hold a veto over British aspiration’.

And in a message that will send shivers of fear down the spines of those who live in the leafy suburbs of Warrington, he pledged to rip up ‘restrictive’ planning laws to allow construction on low-quality green belt land.

It’s true to say I don’t agree with a significant number of Labour policies but this one I can get behind.

I live in a part of Warrington that has changed beyond all recognition given the amount of house building that has taken place over the years – and there’s no sign of it stopping any time soon – but it’s about time other areas of the town shouldered their fair share of the burden.

So if your opposition to a new housing scheme is that it will block your view of the Cheshire countryside, be warned – Keir Starmer is coming for you.

But I do have a word of caution here. The need for housing isn’t uniform. We certainly don’t need more detached ‘executive’ five-bedroom homes.

As Tejvan Pettinger, writes on the website economicshelp.org: “Arbitrary national targets are slightly misleading as a lot of the worst shortages are located in certain areas.

“But more than anything there is a need to build affordable social housing and housing for rent, something ignored in recent decades.

“Also, with a rapidly ageing population, we need to create more housing based on the needs of the elderly, which can free space for bigger, young families. Britain does need to keep building housing, but not necessarily 300,000 a year, to fix Britain’s housing crisis there need to be other solutions such as making better use of existing stock and using land with existing planning permission.”

n On another topic, I was appalled but not surprised to see the ‘smart motorway’ roadworks on the M6 are months behind schedule with no end in sight.

Fortunately, the government has had the good sense to put a temporary stop to the building of new smart motorways but is still allowing those already under construction to be completed.

I was thinking about this at the weekend when I drove into Manchester on the M62. Several years ago, I was involved in a pretty nasty collision on the stretch just after the Birchwood junction when a woman lost control of her car in the fast lane and hit my car at high speed.

My car – which was a write-off – was sent spinning across the carriageway and ended up on the hard shoulder after crashing into the safety barrier. There is no hard shoulder there now with all four lanes ‘live’.

How much more dangerous would that have been for me, I wonder.

It really is time to stop the madness of ‘all-lane running’ and bring back the hard shoulder everywhere.