If you switch on the news or open a newspaper right now, you’ll find Sir Keir Starmer, clearly preparing for an election and hammering the Government on any subject he can think of. Tax, spending, immigration, and defence are all sure to come in for criticism at Labour’s Conference in Liverpool next week.
Now, some of these criticisms may be valid. ‘Stopping the boats’ is proving difficult, and the IFS has recently published research showing this to be the biggest tax-raising parliament on record, but there’s one area in which the Opposition has studiously avoided offering solutions: housing.
Political issues simply don’t come more salient than housing. Your home is fundamental to who you are, and mortgages fundamentally affect the cost of living. Housing is an issue which is too important to be used as a political football. With demand showing no sign of abating, simple economics tells us that we need to increase supply.
Mortgage rates are higher than the current crop of first-time buyers could ever have imagined them and, while the Government is starting to control inflation, the effect of the interest rate rises of the last couple of years will linger for a long time.
So, whichever party is in power needs to be able to offer a coherent, credible programme to the electorate.
To many it seems that the Labour Party is trying to have it both ways, criticising the Government without offering any alternative. It was happy to vote down the recent attempts to liberalise building regulations in the Housing Bill amendments in the Lords, but we’ve not seen much from them on how they would solve the crisis.
But the polls are pointing towards a Labour win, so it’s time to take seriously those proposals which the party have made, vague though they may be. The party’s Economy Mission, one of five ‘Missions for a Better Britain’, includes a commitment to “helping first-time buyers onto the housing ladder and building more affordable homes by reforming planning rules and arcane compulsory purchase rules, with new protections for renters.”
I don’t think anybody would disagree with any of those aims. Everybody in the housing industry has been crying out for more liberal planning rules for years. And it’s no secret that rents have been far outstripping wages for years, and the recent rates rises will of course worsen that situation.
But what these proposals are missing is detail. As a housebuilder, I experience the planning system every day, so can offer some advice to Labour, and indeed the Conservatives.
First, we need a shift in directives to planning officers and councils across the country. There is an overwhelming feeling in the industry that planning departments look for reasons why a development should not be built, not why it should be built. On day one of any new government, the Secretary of State for Housing, Levelling Up and Communities should direct councils across the country to be growth-focused, driven by the reasons to build, not the reasons to delay.
Next, while the Help to Buy scheme may not have been perfect, ending it and failing to replace it has left first-time buyers without support at a time when the market is less hospitable for them than it has been in many years. We need a new programme, to help fix the market on both the supply and demand sides.
Finally, uncertainty over housing and building regulations has been endemic in recent years. Theresa May promised to reform the system. So did Michael Gove. All have tried and, to one extent or another, failed, to do so. But doubts about what will happen and when creep into the consciousness of the sector. If I don’t know whether a new regulation on, say, energy requirements, will happen or not, or even what the regulation might be, then I simply don’t know what I can build, so I might put it off until I know for sure.
Multiply this across an industry, and over many years, and you start to see one of the reasons why building has been so slow in this country. Any new government needs to consult with the industry and put forward clear plans, and then actually enact them. Without clarity and action, we’ll stay mired in an impasse which harms voters, politicians and housebuilders.
So, a lack of clarity from Labour may be no bad thing. It seems we’re all in agreement that we need more houses. My offer is simple: let’s work together to make it happen.