Labour and house-building: digging for victory?

“There is a political party in town that finally seems to understand the magnitude of the UK’s housing crisis and wants to do something about it,” said Kate Andrews in The Daily Telegraph. “And it’s not the Conservatives” – it’s Labour. 

At last week’s Party Conference in Liverpool, Keir Starmer boldly addressed one of Britain’s main policy challenges, promising to reinstate the recently scrapped Tory target of building 300,000 homes a year. He pledged to “bulldoze” his way to a housing revolution by sidelining “Nimbys” and taking central control of the planning process.

He also made the argument “people serious about building have been making for years”: that we must build on the many “not-so-green” bits of the too-zealously-protected green belt. Disused car parks and dreary wastelands are “not a green belt”, argued Starmer; they’re a “grey belt” ripe for development. He’s quite right. The Tories “should be afraid”.

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'Right a generational wrong'

“Traditionally, Tories were the developers’ friends,” said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. But much of their support is in areas beset by new housing developments, where schools and other infrastructure are already under pressure. For Starmer, though, this policy could be a big vote-winner: most of the adult population is badly affected by sky-high property prices and rising rents.

Labour’s ambitions include building several new towns on land acquired by state-backed companies. Bulldozing the planning rules is good economics, said Emma Duncan in The Times – a classic “supply-side” reform, which should deliver growth without costing the Treasury a penny. “Rather as Margaret Thatcher freed the economy from the unions in the 1980s, so Starmer intends to liberate it from the Nimbys” and right a “generational wrong”.

'The HS2 of housing'

Starmer’s policy is dishonest, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. He talks about the housing crisis without ever alluding to its “major contributory cause”: immigration. Last year net migration exceeded 600,000 – a city nearly the size of Glasgow.

Even if it generally runs at half that rate, Keir’s shovels and cranes will have to be working fast just to keep up. Starmer is aiming for a million-and-a-half homes over the next Parliament, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. He wants to build the equivalent of five Milton Keynes in the South and along the M1 corridor. That sounds “ominously like the HS2 of housing”. We’d be far better off spending money on regenerating and levelling up cities in the North – rather than on costly, carbon-guzzling developments in what is left of the rural South.