Steve Reed is on a journey. In 2021, he was the shadow housing secretary and was busy denouncing proposals from his opposite number, Robert Jenrick, to liberalise the planning system. Reed warned the Conservative government would ‘reap a political whirlwind if they went ahead with their plans to silence communities and hand control over planning to developers’. He was cynical about the motivation. ‘Donations to the Conservative Party from major developers have increased by nearly 400%, according to analysis by openDemocracy,’ he said. ‘That money was an investment in expectation of a return, and here it is. The Prime Minister is paying back developers by selling out communities.’
Reed trotted out the ‘land banking’ myth that the planning system was not to blame. ‘Nine in 10 planning applications get approval, but according to the Conservative-led Local Government Association, over 1.1 million homes that received consent in the past decade have still not been built, which is over half of all homes approved by council planning departments,’ he said.
It misses the point that although the ‘major decision’ to grant planning permission might have been approved, it is subject to a long and onerous list of ‘conditions’ which the Planning Inspectorate also needs to approve. A requirement for a strategy for this, an assessment of that, a scheme for something else. Once submitted, the planner will sit on each of these for a few months – then perhaps reply that it is not quite right and the developer had better try again.
Jenrick’s proposals were radical. A zoning system with a design code to ensure beauty. For most land there would have been a presumption to allow development with a much faster and simpler process. Alas and alack, the Conservative defeat in the Chesham and Amersham by-election prompted Boris Johnson to go wobbly on the proposals and they were ditched. Reed was jubilant. ‘Their rotten developers’ charter is well and truly dead,’ he thundered.
Reed now has the post he used to shadow and his message is rather different. He goes around wearing a ‘build, baby build’ baseball cap in the manner of Donald Trump.
The Times reports:
Ministers have proposed a slew of extra pro-developer reforms in an effort to boost headroom in next month’s budget, promising to stop councils and campaigners blocking building.
Steve Reed, the housing secretary, has pledged to ‘bulldoze through the barriers that have strangled growth for decades’ as he prepares to set out changes to flagship planning legislation that will make it easier to press ahead with housing and infrastructure projects.
Reed said that:
When councils block developments that their own communities desperately need, I will step in. When bureaucrats duplicate processes and create endless delays, we’ll tear down the barriers stopping growth.
Hallelujah! But will the policy match the rhetoric? The Chancellor of the Exchequer will be hoping the Office for Budget Responsibility is convinced – that would mean they would project higher tax receipts and help her figures to add up in the Budget. Yet so far, Labour’s record has been dire. If developers thought they faced a hostile environment under Michael Gove, it has got even worse since.
London has been especially serious – with central Government indulging the poor performance of the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. ‘A mere 5,000 private homes are forecast to be built across the whole of London this year, against a target of 88,000 homes,’ the Shadow Housing Secretary James Cleverly points out.
The problem has been that Khan has demanded that at least 35% of each development must be for ‘affordable housing’. That means that development is not financially viable and so nothing gets built. According to the Financial Times, Reed is putting Khan ‘under pressure’ to ease that requirement. Even Ken Livingstone, hardly a fan of capitalism, showed flexibility as Mayor of London by accepting the reality that if developers couldn’t make a profit in London, they would invest elsewhere.
It is welcome that the Government has restored mandatory housing targets to local authorities – which makes it harder for them to simply cave into the Nimbys every time. It is also right to accept that much of the supposed ‘Green Belt’ is grey and that prohibiting new housing on it makes no sense.
But far bolder changes are required. Last year, the Daily Telegraph reported that ‘a project to build a road tunnel under the Thames Estuary recently became the UK’s biggest planning application at 359,000 pages long – 250 times longer than War and Peace’.
Labour promised in their manifesto that 1.5 million new homes would be built in England over the course of this five-year Parliament. That would be 300,000 a year. The Government’s own figures estimate that completions have fallen, not risen and ‘that 231,300 net additional homes have been delivered in England between the start of Parliament, on 9 July 2024, and 14 September 2025’.
So is it too late for Labour to reach the 1.5m target? Not at all. The target is rather low given the severe shortage. If they really took a chainsaw to the prohibitions on building – starting with the repeal of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 – the impact could be dramatic. Selling a few hundred thousand acres of surplus public sector land for development would help speed things along.
But don’t hold your breath. Despite its large Commons majority, the Government has proved utterly feeble thus far. I hope Reed resists the Nimby lobby, the green lobby, the local government lobby and the lobbying from many of his own backbenchers. Yet I fear the signs are not at all good.
This week, Nimby Watch is in Winstanley, in the historical county of Lancashire. But, like certain other people in Winstanley right now, we’ve got our eyes on Westminster… Okay then, why are we in Winstanley. Where exactly is Winstanley, anyway? Well, if you’re part of the southern Westminster elite, you might say that Winstanley is […]
The scale of the housing crisis is sobering. Britain has the worst housing shortage of any major developed nation. Decades of undersupply have contributed to house prices and rents skyrocketing out of reach. In 1997, the average home cost about 3.5 times the average income. As of 2024, an aspiring buyer must devote nearly eight years’ worth of […]
According to reports over the weekend, Rachel Reeves is considering whether a new generation of public-private partnerships (PPPs), the modern successor to the old Private Finance Initiative (PFI), could help Labour’s ambitious plans for a new generation of towns. With borrowing constrained by Labour’s own fiscal rules, debt interest costs elevated and public finances under […]
