Letter: What Can We Expect From Labour’s New Planning Policy?

Published on: 13 Jul, 2024
Updated on: 15 Jul, 2024

Rachel Reeves MP

From David Roberts

Who’d have thought? The very first question to the new Chancellor at her first press conference on  July 8 was about the proposed Wisley airfield development. Less surprisingly, Rachel Reeves ducked it. But she spent much of this 40 minute event talking about planning reform.

Am I alone in finding this depressing? Her speech was about the dire need for economic growth. Energy and infrastructure investment were mentioned. Yet half of it was taken up with declarations of determination to “get Britain building again”, simply in order to boost the most overheated and unproductive sector of the economy: real estate.

We were promised a more “interventionist” policy – in other words, an even more centralised one than we have already – with top-down housebuilding targets restored. With “seriousness of intent”, the new Labour government would “grasp the nettle” and not “duck difficult decisions” or “succumb to vested interests”.

By “vested interests”, the Chancellor seemed to mean local authorities and residents, saying nothing about key distortions in the UK housing market: over-crowding in London and the South East, the obscene power of a few big housebuilding companies, land-banking, labour and materials shortages, vacant housing, unused planning permissions, council-tax bands that are thirty years out of date, rent-seeking, speculation and money-laundering by overseas investors and the ruthless financialisaton of assets – our homes – that are a basic human need.

The Chancellor repeatedly asserted that increasing housing supply would “increase home ownership” and help people “get on the housing ladder”. But in a dysfunctional property market, prices will always continue to rise faster than people’s means. In a country of 29 million homes, it is facile to think that building 1.5 million new homes over five years, Labour’s target, would noticeably reduce housing demand or curb rising prices.

To make matters worse, the Chancellor said that the government were not going to build any social housing and made only one, grudging reference to environmental issues, which should surely be front and central to any planning reform.

Should Guildford be worried? Labour’s instinct might be to dump unwanted housing on Lib Dem and Tory areas. The market will always push to build where prices are highest. Guildford, now with both a LibDem council and MP, could be a double target, especially as local Lib Dems have no defence in the form of any known planning policy.

On the other hand, the 2019 Tory Local Plan has already saddled the borough with 14,000 new homes by 2035, far more than are objectively needed for its static population, and many other councils have no plan in place at all.

If all 337 local planning authorities in England followed Guildford, Labour’s already implausible goal of 300,000 per year would be met three times over. It’s also likely that the government will want Labour metro-mayors to take the credit for the five new towns they have promised to build, seeing these also as a tool for levelling-up. None would therefore be in Surrey.

Specific proposals for planning reforms are expected from the new Deputy Prime Minister. But the Chancellor’s speech suggests these will be limited by stale old nostrums firmly in the Nimby bashing tradition of the previous government. Three hundred new planning officers are promised (less than one per English authority) and there will be a consultation (don’t get too excited) on yet another revision of the non-statutory National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

When is the green belt not the green belt? When it’s the “grey belt”, says the Chancellor inventing a catchy new term for bits of already developed land in the countryside. But whereas the green belt is enshrined in primary legislation as a cross-party, inter-generational covenant to limit urban sprawl, the “grey” version is just a sound-bite.

The standard example is a disused petrol station in the green belt in Tottenham. In fact, redeveloping sites like this requires no new revision of the NPPF, since planning constraints can already be overridden in “exceptional circumstances” and often are.

Whatever Labour’s planning reform amounts to, it is unlikely to be a simplification. Restoring mandatory housing targets means either micro-managing hundreds of local plans or else setting up new regional structures for councils to fight among themselves over the figures. Either way, the prospect is of yet more layers of bureaucracy added to a sclerotic planning system that has become steadily more gummed up with rules since the 1940s.

Britain is already the most centralised developed country of its size. While new powers might be devolved to metro-mayors, what will happen to residual areas like Surrey? My best guess is that they will be left to randomly capricious planning interventions by a Deputy Prime Minister whose mind will be largely elsewhere.

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