“We’ve been looking forward to this fight since the morning after the election,” said a senior government source, almost with glee, about the government’s changes to planning.
Ministers are prepared to take on political rivals who don’t want to accept the governments new housing targets; to prove to the country that Labour really does want more people to own a home, for more voters to have access to a safe, warm, permanent house within this parliament.
A blizzard of statistics show just how tough it is to buy a home if you can theoretically afford it, or how hard it can be to find decent accommodation if you struggle to make ends meet.
Just this week, house prices hit a record high, according to the Halifax, one of the biggest mortgage lenders. Twenty years ago a family might have expected to buy a house worth roughly four times their annual income – now it might be eight times what they earn, which means the proportion of the population that rents rather than owns has nearly doubled in two decades.
The numbers of families struggling to find a stable home has gone up massively too. More than 159,000 children in England alone are homeless without a permanent address – a record high. The housing benefit bill to support those who can’t completely pay their own way is about £20bn and rising, a massive price tag for the taxpayer.
In other words, this affects us all.
Sir Keir Starmer has shouted about building homes since his opposition days, trying out the line “we are the builders” at his party’s conference in 2023 and repeating it since. Sources in the sector welcome Labour’s concentration and ambition on housing and contrast it with the “negative” relationship with the previous government. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who will be on our show tomorrow, is praised for properly talking to, and listening to, the industry.
“It’s brilliant to have a government that wants to fix the market – it’s pretty broken,” a housing leader said. Even a senior Conservative applauded Sir Keir and Rayner’s focus on housing and the return of targets for local councils to build: “She is right to bring back mandatory targets and we were wrong to get rid of them.”
Some question whether the government’s approach is radical enough, but it is busy introducing measures it hopes will help the sector meet what sources describe as a “stretching” target to build 1.5 million new homes by the end of their term in office, in 2029.
Ministers are trying to change the planning rules in a planning bill coming next month, bring back targets for councils, speed up building of big housing developments, and a new taskforce hopes to create new towns. The political message you’ll hear regularly not just from Rayner on housing, but from the prime minister on nuclear reactors and the Chancellor Rachel Reeves on Heathrow is: “The answer can’t always be no.”
This intention – to build, not block – is one thing. Making it real is different altogether.
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Countless ministers have told us they are changing the planning rules and nobody in the industry, or indeed in the opposition, would tell you that planning isn’t a big part of the problem.
But look at what’s actually happened in recent times – in the run-up to the election, when Labour seemed on their way back to power, the number of planning approvals hit the lowest level in a decade. Since Labour moved into No 10 the number of sites approved for development has continued to fall.
And while banging the drum for building, the government has also put up stamp duty for first-time buyers, and tightened rules for private landlords to improve the quality of homes for renters. Whether you approve of those changes or not, ministers are trying to encourage builders in one direction, yet increasing the costs for buyers and builders in the other. Whatever Labour say about planning “in other parts of the universe they are making it really expensive for builders to build”, another housing source says.
And changing planning has its limitations. If councils can’t make up the acute shortages of planning officers to process applications, then tweaking the rules will have a limited effect. Housing associations who are charged with building social housing are also stretched for cash.
They have been given, perhaps rightly, new demands to improve the standard of homes they provide, but that doesn’t come cheap. If they aren’t feeling flush enough to sign up to affordable homes in new developments, builders who are required to build affordable homes as part of their projects can’t go ahead.
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“Thousands of affordable homes are on hold,” an industry source tells me, “and that means tens of thousands of new homes are on hold too.”
And even if everything else was fixed, are there enough builders to lay the bricks or enough plumbers to lay the pipes?
An industry insider told me: “There was a big belief in govt that if you pulled the planning lever, everything would flow, but you can’t just pull one lever and expect everything to work,” while another said: “Labour has got fixated thinking planning is the answer to all.”
Listen to Sir Keir, and in a weird echo of Boris Johnson, he is saying enough of the naysaying, this is a priority and his government will do everything to make it happen. Perhaps. Yet bear in mind two inescapable truths.
Source: BBC
