HOUSING

Labour has promised to deliver a housing revolution by tearing up planning laws. That won’t be enough

by Tom Clark

Some reduce the UK’s appalling housing crisis to a three-word joke: “Demand? Meet supply.” Keir Starmer certainly sounds like he’s taken its logic to heart. With a bluntness that he avoids in discussing tax or anything else, he backs “the builders” over “the blockers”, and hails construction as the way to get a stagnant economy moving. Historically, housebuilding did pull the UK out of the Depression, generating roughly a fifth of all growth and a third of new jobs in the early 1930s.

With planning approvals at their lowest on record, the PM vows to “bulldoze through the planning laws” to unleash a new building boom of 1.5m homes in five years. His most trumpeted proposals are, first, designating unlovely parts of the protected green belt as “grey belt” with a presumption for development, and, second, imposing stiff targets on townhalls and ultimately requiring them to offer up green belt land for new homes if they fall short. Photos of an ugly, disused garage in Tottenham, which can’t be cleared for housing because it sits on protected land, get repeatedly recycled to illustrate his promise of a clear, common sense solution: liberalise and build.

Probe a little deeper, however, and nothing seems clear at all. Councillors grumble that they already review green belt boundaries. Hardened housing lawyers warn that the government’s proposed definition of the grey belt—as land whose development would “not fundamentally undermine” the local green belt—is precisely the sort of, well, legal grey area that leads to more planning inquiries. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that England’s housing stock has grown slightly faster than its adult population over the past generation, suggesting much of the problem may be about location rather than quantity. The economist Tim Leunig—who admits he finds it “hard to look at a green field without thinking about how many families it could support if it were built into housing”—fears the government is targeting most homebuilding in the wrong places while reducing ambitions in costly London, ignoring prices and what they reveal about where people want to live. A brief boom in the value of stocks of the UK’s builders around Labour’s election soon petered out. This autumn, Barratt, the biggest of these companies by volume, reported a sharp reduction in the number of homes it had built over the past year, and signalled further reductions for the next.