The Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves appeared on the BBC’s ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ today. Her handling of the interview by Laura Kuenssberg clearly demonstrated that she and the Labour Party are likely to have a more effective economic policy than our current Tory government if they form the government after the next election, which must take place at some time by the end of 2024.
Rachel Reeves stressed two things:
- She said that Labour’s plans will be built on a ‘rock of financial stability’ and that a Labour government would never play ‘fast and loose’ with the public finances.
- She also said that we need to unblock the UK’s planning system, to enable more housebuilding and development generally.
Given the UK’s serious economic predicament and the almost certain inability of our next government to borrow substantial extra sums of money, Rachel Reeves was right to focus on the need to unblock the UK’s planning system. Laura Kuenssberg asked her why Labour would not be prepared to spend money to build more social housing. Rachel Reeves rightly replied that the focus should be on building more houses generally and that it would not be necessary to spend government money to achieve this end. Developers will provide the funds if they are given the ability to build where people want to live.
It is hard to overstate how revolutionary Rachel Reeves’ proposal is. For decades housing and industrial development in the UK has been throttled by unnecessarily strict planning requirements, including the designation of vast amounts of land as ‘greenbelt’ (around 13% of the total land area in the UK). These factors have enabled existing property owners, many of whom are Tory and Liberal Democrat voters, to put a block on new housebuilding around London, Cambridge and Oxford, the three areas of the UK which are most in need of new housing to meet the needs of expanding service and high tech industries.
The majority of the British public have come to have an almost religious commitment to protecting our ‘greenbelt’ areas, but they have outlived their usefulness and are in desperate need of reform.
It appears very likely that Labour will indeed form the next government. They will have great difficulty in providing more funding for the NHS, key social programs and green energy development. They will, however, have the ability to reform our planning laws. This would ultimately lead to declines in property values that would make if far easier for younger people to purchase or rent housing. The key problem for Labour in implementing such a policy would be the time it could take to effect a substantial decline in property values. That time is likely to stretch beyond one Parliament. However, if the policy is effectively communicated to the public it could attract support from a broad swathe of young voters who could keep a Labour government in power through a number of Parliamentary terms.
Some people will say that a Labour government should focus on improving our trade relations with the EU and otherwise reducing the barriers that have been thrown up by Brexit. I abhor Brexit and fully agree that such steps will have to be taken at some time in the future. However, this is likely to be at least a decade away, as all of our political parties appear unwilling to suggest to Leave voters (or at least those of them who have not passed away since the Referendum) that they may have been mistaken in voting for Brexit.
Planning reform in the UK is likely to be fiercely resisted by the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green parties. They will do their best to defeat Labour candidates by appealing to the interests of existing property owners and our millions of ‘Nimbys’. Labour will have to face them down, however, so that younger people can again look forward to either buying or renting reasonably priced flats and houses (as I and other people of my generation were able to do in the 1970s and 1980s).
Michael Ingle – michaelingle01@gmail.com
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