With the Tories having failed to grasp the nettle, Labour too is showing little sign of taking on the enormously powerful housing lobby.
The Tory manifesto gives a cast-iron guarantee to preserve the green belt. The party is still traumatised after losing the Chesham and Amersham byelection to the Liberal Democrats in 2021, with many older residents in the leafy Buckinghamshire constituency determined to stop all development.
But much of the green belt – which has expanded hugely over recent decades and now covers 13pc of this country’s landmass, compared to just 2pc taken up with residential property including gardens – is urban scrub of no aesthetic value. Labour wants such “grey belt” land to be developed on a selected basis.
The party’s manifesto also pledges a “new generation of new towns and large-scale new communities across England”.
Since creating post-war settlements such as Stevenage, Harlow and Milton Keynes, the UK hasn’t built a sizeable new town since the late 1960s – since when the population has expanded by 15 million, driving up housing costs.
But to secure the necessary land, Labour wants to return to the post-war compulsory purchase order (CPO) mechanism, transferring all “planning uplift” – the huge increase in land values when residential permissions are granted – to the state rather than to landowners as now. That value can then be used to build schools, hospitals and other infrastructure new dwellings need.
In my book Home Truths, I proposed a more moderate mechanism, not reliant on CPO, with planning gain split evenly between local authorities and landowners. Labour’s plans are unduly confiscatory and would spark countless lawsuits –doing nothing to get new homes built any time soon.
The party should instead look to use state-owned land – which amounts to 6pc of all freehold acreage across the country, including countless urban sites prime for development.
If the state released just 5pc of its land, that is room for over two million homes – far more in cities, where building densities are higher.
This Great British sell-off would be a market-friendly intervention that helps the less well-off – the sweet spot that Labour should be aiming for. But Starmer’s team has instead gone full-fat statist, adopting a punitive plan with ideological appeal to the Left, but doomed to fail.
