Media speculation about Labour’s housing priorities is helpful. If as suggested in The Sunday Times this morning they will make three housing policy announcements the first two I endorse. . Asking local authorities to review green belt land allocations to identify grey land is sound if the policy criteria they adopt in the review are also sensible. For example will local authorities be asked in the green belt review to consider to what extent there is scope for opening up public access to green belt and grey belt land, in return for deals with the land owners? Perhaps even along the lines ‘yours might become building land but their’s won’t unless you agree X and Y’ ?
Reimposing house building targets I also endorse but with reluctance. Targets are invariably wrong. Target numbers should be a temporary fix until local plans are replaced. A planning officer recruitment drive alongside some form of prioritising local residents for new homes I do not endorse. This sort of well-intentioned but imposed policy making is gesture politics and will not reassure cynics. Opponents will start their clock for the inevitable policy U-turn in a few years time.
There are two additional early start first policy steps which would, if announced in the honeymoon period pay handsomely in the long term. One is that no land owner whose land is bought by compulsion with be paid a penny less that open market value prevailing on 4 July 2024. If the value that day includes a thick wedge of hope value that too will be paid in full. Indeed additionally I would endorse a deliberate 10% additional sweetener to kill stone dead accusations of sequestration. With it you buy landowner neutrality and this matters. But funding this extra needs more thought. Land value capture may suffice.
But above all these steps I fervently hope to see an early commitment to cross-party dialogue in Westminster which will pave the way to the introduction of a two generations long national spatial plan. Designed with a timetable that a cross-party Westminster led alliance agrees to meet and hear local council concerns and hopes in first, identified growth locations, and second in identified slow growth locations to spot who will faced with the prospect of paying to export their share of housing need to the host locations.Politically I know this is the big ask. But now, and for the next few months is the moment. What’s in it for a dispirited Conservative party and a resurgent Liberal Democrat party.? Do Labour have the foresight and the oompah to do it? I do hope so, but have doubts. Such a long term, consensual commitment to build over several Parliaments the homes and the infrastructure we need in England would be a massive, unexpected and thought provoking revelation. Investors will love it: seeing policy certainty, political cohesion, national versus local spatial cohesion and long term economic logic. In a word, we would return to the grown up world. The deadly toxicity of Brexit might stop spreading its malign effect.
Fingers crossed!
Ian Campbell
Ps Housing Manifesto 2024 was published on this blog site on 29 April 2024. It explains all the steps.
30 June 2024
