Labour's housing policy is a con (but better than anything offered by Conservatives, Greens or Lib Dems)

A serious policy intended to meet housing needs would begin with tearing up the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and its replacement with a law that is pro-housing and pro-development.

Labour’s policies on housing have, for YIMBYs and assorted housing campaigners, come as a breath of fresh air in a debate that had been stymied by the continuing success of anti-housing campaigns from the likes of CPRE. The argument about the need for housing supply has largely been won and Labour voices are no longer parroting the bizarre economics of Ian Mulheirn and Simon Wren-Lewis with their idea that house prices and rents are somehow unconnected to the supply of housing. Journalist Jonn Elledge was moved to proclaim victory on Twitter as Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves announced the intention of reforming the “antiquated planning system”, proposals for four new towns and a much repeated pledge to build 1.5m new homes over the life of a parliament.

As you know I have been vociferous in calling for major changes to planning so as to get the homes we need. I’m here now to tell you that Labour’s proposals, as far as they are at all clear, are a complete con. The loud promises and talk of reform conceal a policy that is only rhetorically different from the current government’s policy. The promise of 1.5m homes is simply the current 300,000 per year target (that has never been met) made to look like a big number. Unless the “up to four” new towns are absolutely enormous they will act only to present the illusion of fixing the problem rather than an actual strategy that can close the existing gap between supply and need let alone one that can meet the aspirations of future generations.

Starmer’s conference speech presented a rhetorical attack on all the usual culprits:

“Today we launch a new plan to get Britain building again. No more land-bankers sitting comfortably on brownfield sites while rents in their community rise. No more councils refusing to develop a local plan because they prefer the back-door deals.”

The Labour leader, after this specious statement, went on to talk about how his new towns would be mock-Georgian wonderlands and coined a new term ‘grey belt’ to describe previously developed land in the green belt. But nowhere in all this did Starmer or his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, say how they propose to reform the green belt or where these four new towns might be built. And remember that these proposals don’t even deliver half of the new homes we need right now to meet identified needs.

“Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built.

This housing deficit would take at least half a century to fill even if the Government’s current target to build 300,000 homes a year is reached. Tackling the problem sooner would require 442,000 homes per year over the next 25 years or 654,000 per year over the next decade in England alone.”

Labour’s approach to this crisis is to talk grandly about backing the ‘builders not the blockers’ without setting out any substantive plans to deliver. I think this will work - the enthusiasm of housing campaigners for Labour’s proposals demonstrates how - but we will find ourselves, in three or four years, with the same problems. Planning reform, even with a big Labour majority, will prove elusive, local councils and councillors will lobby hard to stop any reform that reduces their control over who can build and where building can take place. What reforms we do get will track the safe route of backing the ideas of Shelter and the professional housing groups like the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation: increasing government grants for affordable homes and tightening regulations on planning gain, reducing viability tests and mandating higher levels of affordable homes within new private developments.

Labour’s green belt proposals are also, it seems, imaginary - Starmer may coin the term ‘grey belt’ to describe brownfield land in the greenbelt but his proposals would not be a significant change to planning policy unless the core principle of the green belt, ‘openness’, is changed. Existing policy allows previously developed land in the green belt to be developed and also encourages local authorities to remove such land from the green belt where it doesn’t compromise the wider purpose of that green belt. My house, and the 30 other homes on our development, are all new-ish housing built in the green belt. Nobody objected to the development (I would know as I was the local councillor).

On top of unspecified planning reforms, unlocated new towns and specious attacks on housebuilders, Labour has swallowed the Local Government Association line that the reason for us not developing houses isn’t councils’ fault and it would all be fine if those councils had the money to employ lots more planners. It is true that stalled local plans are a consequence of the current government’s failure to give a clear direction on housing development and planning but this isn’t best solved by trying to accelerate the process when councils, especially those where the majority of the land is green belt, have no interest in doing anything to make building new houses easier.

While Labour’s rhetoric is welcome and their plans are an improvement on anything from the Conservatives (and let’s not mention the Liberal Democrats and Greens who remain unrelentingly NIMBY), much of what we see really fails to address the central problem of housing supply and especially housing supply in London and the South East. Indeed some of Labour’s ideas around affordable homes and the environment will act to make new development less viable and therefore less likely to happen. Worse labour remains trapped in the view that the shortfall of homes is a shortfall of social homes for rent, not a shortfall of market housing affordable to people who are currently renters. Plus Labour persists in attacking the people who are going to build the houses and demonstrate persistent ignorance about the reasons for slow build out of development and the existence of land banks.

The essential problem for our housing system is a problem of land supply. Everything else is detail. If you want to resolve the housing crisis the best way to do this is to massively increase the amount of land available for development. Not by forcing councils into unpopular partnerships with their neighbours or by giving elected mayors more powers - all this will do is continue the current system where local planning authorities release the least amount of land needed to meet a housing target (or ‘objective assessment of housing need’ as the planners call them). This plan-led approach results in a preference for large sites and a continued dependence on volume housebuilders rather than, as we see in much of Europe, a housing market dominated by small scale builders and self-build.

There is still time for Labour to put flesh on their planning reform proposals especially since the shadow chancellor tells us they will be an urgent priority for a Labour government. But right now the policy combines smoke and mirrors with proposals designed to make matters worse not better. We won’t meet housing needs by appointing more planners, we need less planning, not more of it. We won’t meet housing needs by adding more costs onto developers, we need to reduce their costs not increase them. We won’t meet housing needs by insisting on more ‘green’ measures, we need fewer restrictions on development not more barriers. And we won’t meet housing needs by relying on a long, contested and difficult process of building new towns, especially when there is not even a hint as to where these pastiches of Bath are going to be built.

Rachel Reeves is right when she calls the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act ‘antiquated’. Governments have known it was making matters worse since at least 1973 when Peter Hall and others wrote about how the system was compromising affordability. But Labour don’t propose any reform to the substance of the 1947 Act, the de facto state control of land use and the inconsistent and often arbitrary discretion over that land use exercised by local planning authorities and local councillors. What we get is a promise of more say over development for ‘communities’ (without setting out what this means or how it would work) and some tinkering with core policies such as the local plan process and maybe the green belt. Above all Labour seem fixated by the belief that developers are the barrier to development which, as well as being stupid, results in policies that make development less, not more, likely.

Labour’s rhetoric is welcome but the substance of policy suggests to me that after five years of a Labour government they’ll not only have failed to deliver on their promise of 1.5m homes but their big ideas will be mired in the tortuous bureaucracy that typifies development in the UK. A tortuous bureaucracy that Labour’s planning reforms will have made worse not better. I’d be delighted if I am wrong but I don’t expect that a single brick of neo-georgian new town will have been laid in the five years of a Labour government.

If we want to meet housing needs, we need to start with increasing the supply of land available for development. And we need to understand that most of our planning law was introduced with the express purpose of making less land available and making development more difficult. Without substantial changes to green belt, s106, the local plan system and the incentives for people to build, there is not a hope in hell that we will get anywhere close to building the 4.3 million homes we need right now let alone the homes we might need building in the future. A serious policy intended to meet housing needs would begin with tearing up the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and its replacement with a law that is  pro-housing and pro-development.