As I See It…

Politics

Labour created the Green Belt…now they’re going to build on it.

Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government introduced the Green Belt as a national policy in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. 

Now his successor, Keir Starmer, and Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, are going to build on it.

The Green Belt was created as a buffer – between towns and the countryside – and as a planning tool to prevent urban sprawl by restricting development to built-up areas.

However, in her new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), Ms Rayner is taking off the brakes and allowing developers to bulldoze our green spaces to build more new homes, mainly in the South-East, where demand is the greatest.

The revised NPPF will include a new concept of Grey Belt land, which Rayner defines as sites in the Green Belt, on the fringe of existing settlements, that may have been previously developed – eg the sites of deserted petrol stations, or hard-standings where agricultural buildings may have once stood – and could also include virgin farmland and other undeveloped open spaces.

Clearly, having a roof over one’s head is a basic human right, and there is, it is argued, a need for more house-building to provide homes for a growing population. But let us take a look at the population statistics.

In the year to mid-2023, according to government figures, there were 16,300 more deaths than births across the UK. On that basis, the population should be falling. However, the same set of statistics show that overall, the population increased by 1 per cent over the same period. If there were more deaths than births, what could be driving the increase? The answer, according to the Office for National Statistics, is net international migration.

As TV presenter, Trevor Philips, pointed out to Rayner recently, five out of seven of the 1.5m new homes to be built by Labour will go to immigrants. Many will feel the correct policy response is to get a grip on uncontrolled, illegal immigration rather than concreting over the countryside.

In her interview with Philips, Rayner first claimed that more housebuilding was necessary to meet the country’s housing shortage. In the same interview, when challenged with the statistic about the proportion of new houses that would go to immigrants, she said there was no shortage of houses. She cannot have it both ways.

But here’s an interesting fact about housing supply.

Rayner’s own department’s English Housing Survey, estimated that in 2022 there were 1.139m vacant dwellings in England. Other statistics from her department show thousands of long-term vacant homes across the country. Many of these – 38,000 – were in London, with a further 36,000 in the South East and 38,000 in the North West, 29,000 in Yorkshire and Humberside, 28,000 each in the West Midlands and Eastern England.

So, before she unleashes the bulldozers, perhaps Rayner should work with her cabinet colleagues to see that the current stock is filled ahead of embarking on the destruction of swathes of England’s green and pleasant land.

That might mean persuading Chancellor Rachael Reeves to provide the money necessary to bring run-down housing stock back into occupancy, or getting Jonathan Reynolds (Business and Trade) to develop incentives to create jobs where there is existing housing. Or a bit of both.

Perhaps in Rayner’s vision of housing utopia, it is just less hassle to resort to new bricks and mortar rather than ensuring that existing empty homes are brought back into use?

In the meantime, Labour’s new planning framework is set to drive an earth-mover through local democracy.

In his recent “reset” speech, Keir Starmer threw a punch at what he called “nimbys, naysayers and blockers” who he accused to holding up development.

But, here’s the thing. People don’t just object to housebuilding because it might spoil the view from their rear gardens. Locals often wave a red card at planning applications because they fear these developments will damage the environment and wildlife and put additional pressure on already-overwhelmed local services. More houses mean a requirement for more GP surgeries, school and pre-school places, dentists, hospital beds, road space, flood-prevention measures, public transport, leisure facilities, parks. These demands are rarely met in full.

One answer would be to adjust the existing “planning obligations” regulations to ensure that developers, who make significant financial gains from the increased land values that follow the granting of planning permission, are forced to contribute more to the cost of providing additional local services and infrastructure.

However, this is unlikely to happen. If the government was to enforce this requirement rigorously, and demand that the contribution meets a larger proportion of the costs, the house-builders would use it as an excuse to push up unit prices, thus impacting negatively on Labour’s affordability policy.

Instead, Rayner has introduced what she calls her “golden rules” which require developers to “contribute to necessary improvements to local and national infrastructure”, but only for major developments (more than 10 houses or sites of greater than 0.5ha in the Green Belt.

Governments of all political shades have for decades been grappling with the problem of how to ensure developers make a proper contribution to the critical infrastructure necessary to sustain new developments.

Developers are already required to make a contribution to infrastructure under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act, and the Community Infrastructure Levy. However, the amount to be paid is rarely sufficient to cover the full cost, leaving hard-pressed local authorities – in reality local Council Tax payers – to find the difference.

Meanwhile, she will impose draconian housing targets on local authorities, irrespective of the views of the councils or the people they represent.

These targets will be based not on a rational, locally-informed assessment of local need, but a percentage of national housing stock, topped up to take account of relative affordability.

This means affluent areas where houses attract premium prices, will be forced to accept additional numbers in a bid to increase supply and drive down prices. Less desirable areas will have reduced targets, reflecting lower demand. This is likely to mean predominantly Tory-voting regions will be penalised while Labour areas will get off relatively lightly.  

While this is happening, Rayner’s cabinet colleague, the climate-change Czar, Ed Miliband, has hinted that he will declare developments such as windfarms to be “Critical National Infrastructure”, allowing him to overrule local planning decisions.

In both cases, this top-down approach will undermine the concept of localism, and call into question one of the main planks of local government. Will there be any point in councils having planning departments if targets are going to be imposed by the centre and national regulations skew the system even further in favour of the developers?

A free media is fundamental to democracy

23 September, 2024. So, according to The Spectator, the Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill, one Bell Ribeiro-Addy, thinks all her party’s woes could be solved if only the media were properly regulated. Read it for yourself here.

Speaking at a fringe event in Liverpool, she apparently said:

“It’s in the Labour Party’s interest and in the Labour movement’s long-term interest to regulate the media properly instead of making short term pacts and truces – and if it’s done right media reform could actually make Keir Starmer’s job a lot easier, and effective media reforms would make effective government much easier.”

When I first read these words, which could suggest encouragement for a government clamp-down on media freedom, I was inclined to dismiss them as the usual far-left claptrap that is spewed out at Conference fringe meetings: the sort of stuff that raises a cheer from the quasi-communist wing of the Labour Party, but would never make it through the National Policy Forum of any sane, democratic political organisation.   

But then I read the text of Keir Starmer’s conference speech, in which the word ‘control’ appeared 13 times. At last year’s party conference, when he had an election to win and an electorate to hood-wink, Starmer was all about how politics should “tread lightly on people’s lives”. This year, he is asserting that people want “more control…”.

Suddenly, the idea of political restrictions on media output didn’t seem quite so unlikely under a Labour Government. After all, if they are prepared to incur the wrath of the people by cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance to all but a few of the poorest in society, and denying it to millions whose income is just above the cut-off point, why wouldn’t they be up for taking on the media?

Freedom is not free. It comes with responsibilities. And sometimes our media outlets forget that important point. They take sides and play favourites. They often lack objectivity and proportionality. They get things wrong and are reluctant to admit their errors. They distort or block government’s messaging in favour of their own narratives. And they like to think they hold our politicians to account, on behalf of a grateful nation. Perhaps they do.

But on the other hand, they champion important causes and force organisations and governments to change tack, usually for the better. They stand up for the little people against bullying corporate or state giants. They can make us laugh or cry, or do both at the same time, as they expose human weaknesses and strengths, personal tragedies and triumphs. They write the first draft of history, although, like all first drafts, their accounts may be subject to later revision. But at least they were there when history was being made.

Those of us who have had to work with them over the years can testify that the mainstream media can be a right royal pain in the rear. Politicians’ frustrations are understandable.

But the answer is not more regulation. The solution is for governments to raise their communications game. That means developing a better understanding of the beast they are dealing with, what makes it tick, the best way to get it to roll over for a belly-scratch, and how to feed it without losing their fingers. In other words, they need to work out how to work more effectively to achieve mutual benefits, accepting that the beast keeps all its teeth and may still bite from time to time? It is that freedom to gnaw at the hand that feeds it that ensures credibility and makes the media such an important institution and such a powerful communications tool. 

For all their faults and transgressions, it is surely better to live in a society where journalists are free to challenge and criticise those in power, rather than, for example, in Putin’s Russia, where media outlets are obliged to tell only the State’s version of the “truth” and the people are fed a constant diet of propaganda soup?