Labour appears poised to win a historic election victory on 4 July. In the series Life under Labour, we look at Keir Starmer’s five key political missions, and ask what is at stake and whether he can deliver the change the country is crying out for.
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“We have no space for ourselves, no space to think – and particularly for my children it’s a real struggle.” Before Keir Starmer launched Labour’s manifesto in Manchester this month, Daniel, a father from east London, took to the same stage to share his experiences of bringing up two children in a one-bed flat.
“To say we find it difficult is an understatement,” he said, going on to praise “Keir’s plan to build a lot more homes”.
Rachel Reeves’s fierce caution on tax and spend is perhaps the best known aspect of Labour’s mission to kickstart the economy. But the prominence of Daniel’s story in Labour’s pitch underlines the importance of another key element of the party’s economic plans: unblocking the UK’s notoriously sluggish planning system.
Labour has claimed it will ensure that 1.5m homes are built over the next five years. But how significant are these plans, and what difference could they make to achieving the goal of economic growth – and to improving life for Britons at the sharp end of the housing crisis?
Ant Breach, a housing and planning expert at thinktank the Centre for Cities, says getting housebuilding plans right would be good for growth. “If you’re a government looking to improve economic growth, then changing the planning system is by far the easiest route you can pick.
“Partly, if there’s more housebuilding, there’s more construction jobs, there’s greater ability to absorb investment – but also it’s about increasing disposable income after housing costs; it means there’s more money in people’s pockets.
“If we can help people live closer to city centres in particular – a reasonable commute away, rather than all congested on the roads or on public transport – then that’s a long-term and permanent productivity boost, even beyond the short-term rush of a construction boom.”
The scale of the housing crisis in the UK may be familiar, but that doesn’t make it any less staggering. In its most recent quarterly update on the sector, the Resolution Foundation thinktank pointed out that dwellings in the UK are smaller, older and cost us more of our income than in most comparable countries.
The inveterately careful Starmer has reached for unusually combative language when it comes to tackling the issue, promising in last year’s party conference speech to “bulldoze through” the UK’s “restrictive planning system” and even challenging the taboo of building on the green belt.
Since the mid-1950s, when the Conservative housing minister, Duncan Sandys, issued historic planning guidance aimed at limiting the sprawl of cities, the country’s green belt – or more accurately, green belts – have rarely been questioned by politicians.
But Labour wants to allow local authorities to earmark more green-belt land for homes, beginning with brownfield sites and then a new category of “grey belt” – pockets of green-belt land that are not nature-rich and beautiful, but scrubby and unloved.
“Hopefully, it’s the beginning of a sensible conversation about what’s the purpose of the green belt and how restrictive should it be,” says Breach.
The green-belt plans are part of a battery of Labour planning policies that also include reintroducing mandatory local housing targets scrapped by the Tories, giving planning powers to combined authorities, and publishing new design codes, to try to raise the quality of what gets built.
The party has promised to fund 300 new planning officers to try to beef up councils’ resources – and crucially, review the system of “hope value”, which can mean landowners are paid well above the market rate for a plot, on the basis of what it might one day be worth with planning permission.
The party also says it will quickly establish an independent taskforce to lead the job of identifying the right sites for several new towns, with the ambitious aim of delivering homes on some of these sites by the end of a single five-year parliamentary term.
This is one of many areas where the new government, if Labour gets into power as expected, is likely to draw on an army of broadly progressive policy experts and industry leaders who have sat out the Tory years and are ready to get stuck in.
Freddie Poser, a spokesperson for the campaign group PricedOut, said: “You need to get going very quickly if you want to deliver new towns, but it is definitely possible, especially if you prioritise places where there is existing transport infrastructure which could be upgraded without having to build it from scratch.”
As well as housing, Starmer has talked about his government making it easier to win planning consent for key infrastructure, and for businesses to expand: part of the prospectus for “wealth creation” he repeatedly referred to in Manchester.
As with industrial strategy – another plank of the economic mission – Labour’s approach appears set to be unashamedly interventionist.
On housing, the political calculation is that the crisis has become so severe that the risks of infuriating local opponents of new development are outweighed by the potential gains in being seen to tackle the issue.
Recent YouGov polling pointed to a sharp increase in voter concern about housing. More than a third of 18--24-year-olds, and more than a quarter of 25-49-year-olds identified it as one of the top three issues facing the country.
Poser agrees with the idea that it will be a political benefit if the party gets housebuilding right – but underlines the urgency needed.
“If they are successful, they will be rewarded with dividends from voters who see a party that is finally serious about building homes. But the flipside of that is, five years is obviously not a huge amount of time to get that started.”
Not everyone in Labour, however, is convinced that the politics of housebuilding has swung as far against nimbyism as Starmer and his colleagues clearly hope.
After the leader’s “bulldozing” conference speech, one senior party adviser privately expressed astonishment that this was the particular fight with some voters that Starmer was prepared to pick (and not, say, the argument over a wealth tax).
They recalled knocking on doors in a recently built housing estate where residents were up in arms about the potential for another new development up the road. Such concerns are likely to be amplified if Labour wins a large number of seats in areas earmarked for rapid housing expansion – and hopes to hold on to them.
But given the prominence of housing in the campaign, a Labour government appears unlikely to face backbench opposition of the kind that scuppered Conservative plans to overhaul the planning system three years ago.
Indeed, as the shadow housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, made clear in a round of interviews on Thursday, many of the changes Labour plans to make can be implemented without new legislation.
Labour insiders say that with the groundwork already prepared, this process can begin immediately after the election on 4 July, through a blitz of ministerial statements and statutory instruments.
The mood among longtime housing campaigners is of guarded optimism: they appreciate the gung-ho rhetoric, but as in so many other areas of Labour’s pitch, wonder whether the party will put sufficient resources behind it.
Charles Trew, the head of policy at Shelter, says it is “genuinely affordable” socially rented housing that matters, after a long period in which local authority homes have been sold off through right to buy and not replaced. “We have lost 260,000 social rented homes since 2010,” he says.
Labour has not promised an increase in funding for the Affordable Homes Programme, which backs building projects, instead leaning on the idea that private-sector housebuilders can be pressed into including more affordable property in developments.
As Angela Rayner, the shadow communities secretary, has put it: “Developers have been let off the hook and for too long allowed to wriggle out of their responsibilities to provide new social and affordable homes. Labour will robustly hold them to account.”
Trew welcomed the fact that Rayner had promised “the biggest boost to affordable, social and council housing for a generation”, but pointed out that Labour had given no specific target for social homes. “It would be great to see a number, and the funding to deliver it.”
Without a plan for a significant increase in taxpayer-funded housing, Labour will be reliant on developers, who are in turn subject to the whims of the markets – as with other areas of its programme, such as the “green prosperity plan”, which require a heavy injection of private-sector capital.
Breach suggests reform more radical than anything Labour has yet proposed would be the best way to achieve its goals: a zoning system, in which areas are earmarked as ripe for development, and the presumption is then in favour of permission being granted. This was the approach mooted by Robert Jenrick when he was housing secretary but killed off by Tory MPs.
“Our system is very dysfunctional, very discretionary, relative to that of other countries,” Breach says.
Ryan Shorthouse, chair of the centre-right thinktank Bright Blue, who has previously lamented the Conservatives’ failure to tackle housing affordability, agreed that something akin to zoning may be necessary for Labour to meet its ambitious promises – but confessed himself “excited” about the prospect for change. “At the end of the day, a lot of it is about politics. Everything’s going to change after this election, and the whole tone of the debate will be different,” he says.
