Housing secretary Michael Gove has said the government is not bound by its 300,000-homes-a-year target alone, in the clearest indication yet the Conservative Party’s manifesto pledge has been dropped.

Gove said: “It’s no kind of success simply to hit a target if the homes that are built are shoddy, in the wrong place, don’t have the infrastructure required, and are not contributing to beautiful communities.”

He said the government is “not bound by one criterion alone” on development, adding that while arithmetic is important, “so is beauty and belonging to a democracy”. He said aiming for one target “risks making someone’s perfect arithmetic the enemy of the common good”.

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