Labour stands to win a whole host of rural and suburban seats and Starmer could face a battle with his own MPs to meet his housing targets. Yet the muddled thinking on display in his manifesto does not offer much reassurance that he’s prepared for the fight, says Will Cooling
It is striking that as we end this period of Tory-led governments, we are still no closer to solving the problem that destroyed New Labour: namely that the British public like high-quality public services and proactive poverty reducing measures but they dislike the high-taxes and borrowing necessary to pay for them. Indeed, this dilemma has gotten worse as Tory cuts have left the social fabric in a state of advanced disrepair while the legacy of coronavirus and the spike in energy prices have left taxes and borrowing at record highs.
Theresa May tried to break the impasse with targeted tax increases and a new industrial strategy. Boris Johnson hoped his usual supply of boosterish platitudes would distract everyone, which it did, until the joke stopped being funny. Liz Truss famously thought tens of billions of tax cuts could kickstart growth, only to discover it merely began the countdown to her premiership’s self-destruction. And Rishi Sunak held a two-day summit about Artificial Intelligence at Bletchley Park.
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour believes it has the answer to the problem, which is to remove planning laws to get Britain building again. Such construction projects will not only spur short-term economic activity, but also reduce cost pressures elsewhere in the economy by making housing and energy more affordable. To achieve this he has promised to restore the national building targets that Rishi Sunak scrapped due to a revolt from backbench Nimbys and provided additional funding for planning officers, so councils can get applications processed quickly.
Labour has a good record on building infrastructure, having seen the creation of several new towns under the Attlee Government, an ambitious prison and university building programme under Wilson and a mixture of housebuilding and infrastructure improvements under Blair and Brown. But the hole that Britain has dug for itself these past fourteen years is so much bigger than anything we have encountered before.
It is therefore alarming that Labour’s target of building 1.5m homes over the next parliament only meets the government’s estimate for how many houses we need to meet current demand. In short, Labour is promising not to make things worse, rather than make a decisive break to improve the situation. Likewise, the party’s manifesto seems to be at crossed purposes, with promises to build more sharing space with pledges to maintain affordable housing quotas and ensure that development is always “exemplary”. The fear is that Labour will get caught in the same trap that Michael Gove has repeatedly found himself in, with a desire to build more homes being subordinated to a determination to micromanage which type ultimately get built.
Labour seems similarly unsure about how radical its approach to planning reform will be, with the promise of a new planning framework sitting uneasily alongside assurances that local communities will still get a say in future development. Likewise, Starmer criticises the green belt only to double down on a promise to protect most of it. And there doesn’t seem to be any willingness to consider radical reform of planning laws, such as establishing blanket rights to develop certain types of land, like inner-city locations near train or metro stations, or certain types of projects, like much-needed reservoirs.
This muddled thinking must be seen in the context of a party that was overwhelmingly urban in its parliamentary makeup. If, as expected, Labour secures scores of new MPs in the suburbs and rural areas, these tensions will only become more acute, especially if Nimby warriors from the Liberal Democrats and Greens also do well on 4 July. That Labour is not yet talking the talk on radical planning reform, must make us worry that they won’t walk the walk when they become the government.
Will Cooling writes about politics and pop culture at It Could Be Said substack