When Keir Starmer promises that his new government will “bulldoze” through the planning system as “the builders not the blockers”, there is bound to be opposition from noisy nimbys – but not from planners keen for “change”.
By nature idealists, planners talk of improving lives and environments, enthused by Labour’s promised new towns. Conservatives traditionally view them with loathing, seeing them as anti-free-market, socialist control demons. The very concept of planning sends shivers down their spines – until they want them to oppose development in their nimby shires. Ordinary citizens resent them either for stopping something – juliet balconies are a current vogue – or for permitting something, like the next-door juliet balcony overlooking their garden. People want housing and green electricity, but over there, not here. “Bulldozing” the system will clash with Labour’s devolution pledge: “change” rightly means removing some decisions from England’s 370-odd planning authorities.
“You don’t become a planner to make friends,” says Steve Birkinshaw, head of planning and regeneration in Erewash borough council, Derbyshire. The Royal Town Planning Institute reports that planners are often targeted by online trolls, with “insults, harassment and violent threats”. Birkinshaw says his job is “to make the world a better place”, with embarrassment at his own sincerity. I have been talking to him over the years as he struggles against multitudinous obstacles to get urgently needed new homes built. Here’s his HS2 experience: he spent years planning the leg to Leeds along an old freight line, with a monster 12-metre-high flyover taking it over the heads of Long Eaton: “Well, that’s 10 years’ work I’ll never get back.” Streets on that HS2 route are still blighted by its overarching compulsory purchase powers.
Erewash, whose planning fortunes I picked at random to follow a decade ago, has every planning dilemma and every planning opportunity facing the country. A mighty array of pylons will come striding across Birkinshaw’s borough carrying electricity from the Lincolnshire coast, with residents consulted only on “the how not the if”. Councils along the route kick up a stink demanding compensation, but secretly they and planners are quite relieved it’s not their decision, meaning they are freed to protest without taking blame for the “great grid upgrade” imposed by the last government and to be extended now. Burying the cables would cost up to 10 times more.
We stand in a summer field looking towards Stanton ironworks where once 7,000 people worked: its last “melt” was in 2006. This vast 190-hectare site is not green belt, but for years developing it for housing and industry has confronted multiple obstacles. Birkinshaw has talked enthusiastically in the past of needing a new 2,500-home community there, with work, shops and a primary school. “We had a foreign investor on the very point of signing the contract in 2022, but when interest rates shot up under Liz Truss, they fled. That’s a real-world Truss government impact.”
Development for industry is starting, but development of the south side of the site for housing is stuck. “The owners ask too high a price. They won’t decontaminate the land or take a lower price for a buyer to do it.” Erewash doesn’t have powers or money to compulsorily purchase. There will be very little affordable or social housing here, as the land is too expensive to make safe. Other times Birkinshaw complains of developers sitting on land banks: “We can’t force them to build.” On another site a few vocal protesters stop development, ignoring those needing homes who are never consulted. He expects Labour to fix these blockages.
We pass a field over which there has been a ferocious dispute, where he refused planning permission for an executive housing estate dumped in the middle of nowhere. “We won, so far.” But venture capitalist owners have brought in expensive barristers to challenge the decision, upping what it will cost the council to resist. In Long Eaton, we see a totem of one of the last government’s bad policies, when Michael Gove freed developers from planning permission for office and shop conversions. A small office block is converted into poky flats backing straight on to the railway, with no area at the front. “We’d never have allowed this. We’d have made it better.”
From the borough’s edge we look at Ratcliffe-on-Soar’s defunct coal-fired power station, with its eight gigantic cooling towers. “Ideal!” he says, for a Labour new town, on a main road, beside a mainline station and near East Midlands airport. Technically green belt, it’s as “grey” as it gets. Birkinshaw’s eyes gleam at the prospect of building a whole new community here that urgently needs housing. A new town needs 10,000 homes to support community services, jobs, shops and public transport. A development corporation would buy land at agricultural prices and retrieve the cost by selling it later at urban prices – postwar new towns were financed this way, creating council homes by the thousands. But it’s inside the Tory Rushcliffe borough, a council Birkinshaw says resists housing here, especially social housing: they want industry. We shall see what happens.
Planners, abused and despised in Tory years, hope political enthusiasm entices a new generation to join the profession. Labour’s promised 300 new planning officers are a fraction of those already lost to austerity: 25% left the public sector between 2013 and 2020. Birkinshaw has powers he can’t use: with two posts left unfilled for three years, he has no staff to chase after squalid shop frontages or hundreds of empty properties.
Growth lies here, Labour believes: £70bn waits to be unlocked by capturing the value that planning permission adds to land. And Labour will enforce developers’ section 106 duties to provide social housing and amenities, after the Tories, funded by property interests, let them wriggle out. Labour needs developers to build, but the right homes at the right price. No government since 1977 has achieved Labour’s target of building 300,000 homes a year, but growing the economy depends on it now.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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