The incredible spat between two of the Tories’ most prolific tweeters broke out when Treasury Secretary Liz Truss took a cheap shot at a housing policy being considered by Labour.

Under the plan, which is revealed on the front page of today’s Guardian, landowners would no longer be allowed to inflate the price of land sold for property development:

[There then follows a nasty Twitter spat between Tories Liz Truss and Nick Boles where Bowles sticks up for Corbyn!!!]

Truss responded by trying to tar the attempt to get more council homes built as some kind of Stalinist land grab.

But Nick Boles, himself a former planning minister, was having none of it.

The pair continued to spar until Truss brought the embarrassing blue-on-blue battle to a curt conclusion.

The clash comes after Boles made clear his dissatisfaction with abject lack of policy ideas coming from the Government and his party. …

The Conservative family is not a happy one.

As for Truss’ objections to Labour’s policy, we were reminded of a policy included in the last budget by her boss, Chancellor Philip Hammond.

Hammond announced an anti-land banking policy which the Tories had described as “Mugabe-style expropriation” when Labour floated the idea.

Labour believes this is slowing down housebuilding by dramatically increasing costs. It is planning a new English Sovereign Land Trust with powers to buy sites at closer to the lower price.

This would be enabled by a change in the 1961 Land Compensation Act so the state could compulsorily purchase land at a price that excluded the potential for future planning consent.

Healey’s analysis suggests that it would cut the cost of building 100,000 council houses a year by almost £10bn to around £16bn.

… With the “hope value” removed from the price of land, the cost of building a two-bed flat in Wandsworth, south-west London, would be cut from £380,000 to £250,000, in Chelmsford it would fall from £210,000 to £130,000 and in Tamworth in the West Midlands, where land values are lower, it would drop from £150,000 to £130,000.

“Rather than letting private landowners benefit from this windfall gain – and making everyone else pay for it – enabling public acquisition of land at nearer pre-planning-permission value would mean cheaper land which could help fund cheaper housing,” said Healey.

The proposal is expected to face strong opposition from landowners, including many pension fund investors, who would risk losing considerable sums on what they expected to receive. Savills, the property consultancy, warned that owners might launch legal challenges claiming the move infringed their property rights.

Companies known as strategic landowners make money for investors by buying agricultural land that may be needed for future housing at low prices, securing planning consent and selling it on for significant profits. They include Legal & General, which boasts “a strategic land portfolio of 3,550 acres stretching from Luton to Cardiff”.

… A similar policy has been advocated by some leading Conservatives, including the former planning minister Nick Boles. In a sign of growing political consensus, he said the huge windfalls gained by some landowners were inequitable and that the current system of capturing the uplift in land value through section 106 agreements was “incredibly inefficient”, because private developers could afford to outwit planners with expensive lawyers and consultants.

“There will be mass opposition, but there aren’t that many landowners and they are not a huge voting block,” Boles said. “Not all Conservatives would naturally feel comfortable with this but I have been struck by the positive reaction.”