Planning hard choices

Co-authored by Chris White and David Scane

Being in Opposition is easy. Easy to criticise the incumbent government, easy to say what is going wrong, and easy to make promises to do things better. Government is the hard part, with hard choices – and those realities are fast hitting home in a week where the battle lines have been drawn starkly between town and country. 

The day after farmers blockaded Westminster in protest at inheritance tax rises, the Housing Minister published the government’s new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which aims to deliver on the ambitious plan to build 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament. 

Action to boost housing supply is desperately needed. The government estimates that at least 300,000 net additional dwellings are needed each year – over the last decade, the figure has never exceeded 250,000 per annum, and has been below 150,000.  

As noted by the Minister in the House of Commons, this leads to “people languishing on social housing waiting lists; millions of low-income households forced into insecure, unaffordable and far too often substandard private rented housing; and…just shy of 160,000 homeless children living in temporary accommodation.” 

The NPPF provides ambitious housing targets. Councils must meet a new combined target of 370,000 homes a year, with the government setting individual mandatory targets for councils to ramp up housebuilding, tackling the housing crisis and ensuring hard work is rewarded with security at home.  

The government also aims to address social housing needs, with new rules aiming to provide more affordable homes. Councils and developers must consider social rent in new builds, with local leaders having greater powers to build genuinely affordable homes for those in need. 
 
A “common-sense” approach to the greenbelt will prioritise lower quality ‘grey belt’ land for development, while ensuring necessary infrastructure and premium social housing are provided. 
 
The plans will lead to an increase in housebuilding as more land becomes available, but they have faced opposition from councils – including Labour ones, as well as from the Conservatives and rural groups. Today’s headline in the Telegraph “Labour bid to bulldoze the Home Counties” shows how this is landing with certain sectors of the press.  

Councils are concerned that the higher housing targets will be almost impossible to achieve, pointing to constraints such as poor local infrastructure, land shortages and a lack of capacity in the construction industry. Labour-run Broxtowe council in Nottinghamshire described the proposed changes as “very challenging, if not impossible to achieve”. The Government has already demonstrated it is willing to step in to override local concerns, with Angela Rayner last month calling in an 8,400 development in Labour-led Swale Borough, which was earmarked for refusal. 

South Tyneside, another Labour-run council, said the plans were “wholly unrealistic”. 

In some cases, the housing targets are radically different to those set by the previous government, with rural areas expected to shoulder more of the burden than inner city authorities. 

It is this latter point that has been latched to by the Conservatives, who point to the “war on rural England” that the government is pursuing, “following on from the family farm tax and the withdrawal of the rural services delivery grant.”  

Labour is also being forced to make difficult choices as part of the NPPF in relation to environment and habitat rules, which will be changed to allow the government to meet its housing targets. In an interview launching the NPPF and asked about changing these rules, the Prime Minister said that “if it comes to a human being wanting to have a house with them and their family, that has to be the top priority.”  Already there are suggestions that this would mean that it could breach the Labour party manifesto pledge to meet Environment Act targets to protect the natural world.  

The Prime Minister is clear that he wants to “back the builders not the blockers”. Yet as dozens of newly elected rural Labour MPs are finding, these choices mean difficult meetings with new constituents, when many have marginal seats that need to be nursed through the Parliament.  Those hard choices – from the Budget to getting housing built – proves that being in government is not as easy as it looks from the opposition benches.