HOUSING

As the government conjures up plans for a new town of some 300,000 people near Cambridge, it must resist the narrowest definition of what makes for good architecture

by Deyan Sudjic

© PAUL GROVER/SHUTTERSTOCK

Keir Starmer’s promise that Labour will build 300,000 homes in each of the next five years has been met with some scepticism. The last time the United Kingdom managed to build more than that number of homes in the course of a single year was half a lifetime ago, in 1977. In 2023, the number was less than 200,000.

Starmer suggests that he will reprise the achievements of Clement Attlee’s postwar government and its work to build the welfare state: new schools, new hospitals, new towns and, above all, new houses. The problem is that the administrative infrastructure necessary to do all this no longer exists. Attlee and his Conservative successors, who were just as keen to build more council houses in the 1950s and 1960s, could rely on dedicated and talented local authority surveyors, solicitors and architects who knew how to get things done and who took the idea of public service seriously. They were done away with in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher, who excoriated their achievements as a failed utopia. Even if there are new pockets of competence—such as Sadiq Khan’s London, which has built twice as much social housing in the past year as all other cities in England and Wales combined—local expertise cannot be rebuilt all at once.

Angela Rayner, who is charged with delivering Labour’s housing programme, is relying on the market to do most of the job. She wants private-sector housebuilders to develop new large-scale developments in which 40 per cent of homes will be affordable. Rachel Reeves’s initial budget in October put an extra £500m into subsidies for affordable housing, bringing Rayner’s total Treasury allocation for 2024 to 2025 to £5bn.

That new money will at best add 5,000 homes to the annual total. To encourage local authorities to build them she suggested that the Right to Buy scheme will no longer apply to new council houses, ensuring that they will remain in the public sector. She will also make use of legislation, passed by the Conservatives last year, to end the obligation of local authorities to pay for the so-called hope value—the premium based on the expectation that land will get future permission for development—when using compulsory purchase powers to buy it. The extra value of land zoned for housing will be retained by the community, a change that will come in handy for funding the new towns Rayner is planning. She will set mandatory targets for how many new homes local authorities must plan in their areas. She will be expecting them to build on the “grey belt”, as Labour is now proposing to call the less attractive parts of the green belt. And she is planning to share the burden of finding space for new homes more equitably between big cities, towns, suburbs and rural areas.