National Leader Christopher Luxon has defended new housing intensification rules, saying councils have a huge amount of discretion on what can be built.

It follows Christchurch City Council’s decision to vote against a government directive to introduce new housing intensification standards.

Luxon told Chris Lynch he would encourage people “to take a step back a little bit.”

“We did work with the government on this and we did have several concerns and issues, which led to a much stronger, better set of legislation at the end than what was originally planned.

What I’d say to you and that is in this country, we do have a housing crisis, and we haven’t been able to intensify our cities and also expand them sufficiently and free up land for development.”

Luxon said “that is the number one problem that we have, why we have a housing crisis.

The legislation does have huge amounts of discretion for councils to apply their own thinking around what we call qualifying measures.

So if there are areas of historical or cultural or heritage significance, if there’s ecological reasons or environmental reasons, there’s a lot of flexibility within that legislation for the council to do it.”

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