UK

Opinion
Labour’s war on Nimbys should terrify the Tories

Kate Andrews

TELEGRAPH
Wed, October 11, 2023 

The Tories should be afraid. There is a political party in town that finally seems to understand the magnitude of the UK’s housing crisis and wants to do something about it. And it’s not the Conservatives.

Labour’s conference was full of old policy ideas they need to retire: bans on zero-hours contracts, higher taxes and more borrowing. But those plans took a back seat once Keir Starmer took to the stage. The Labour leader promised to reinstate the target, scrapped by the Tories last December, to build 300,000 new homes a year. But, even more importantly, he acknowledged what delivering this promise would require: building on the not-so-green parts of Britain’s green belt.

It’s the argument people serious about building have been making for years: the classification of green belt has lost its way, dragging in ruined pieces of land that no one is frolicking through, but also that no one can build on. At long last, those examples have made their way into a leader’s speech, as Starmer rattled off the “clearly ridiculous uses” of green belt designation, including “disused car parks [and] dreary wasteland”.

“Not a green belt,” he said. “A grey belt.” It was the perfect description of what’s gone wrong: gloomy landscapes being “protected” at the expense of young people’s prospects of one day owning a home.

But paying lip service to housebuilding will not be enough. While the Labour top team may subscribe to Starmer’s “big build” agenda, getting the wider party on board will be a harder sell.

It was only last month that Labour peers voted down an amendment to change nutrient neutrality rules, which would have paved the way for tens of thousands more homes to be built. Starmer may have mastered the language for building a brighter future, but when members of his party are asked to cast a vote, recent evidence would suggest Labour is stocked with more Not-In-My-Back-Yard (Nimby) types than he might like to admit.

Starmer may also struggle in the run-up to an election to balance his building ambitions with his green agenda, especially if the Green Party sees even a small uptick in the polls as they try to attract Left-wing voters who fear Labour has lurched to the Right.

Still, the Labour leader could surprise us. He has not confined his housing plans to his conference speech; instead he seems to be running with them, emphasising his plans to “bulldoze” his way to a housing revolution, getting “tough” with the Nimbys in his own party, including MPs and local councils that try to block new developments. He’s become so enthusiastic since his speech, he’s now calling himself a Yimby: Yes-In-My-Back-Yard.

Chances are the Labour leader has clocked that this isn’t just the right thing to do: it has the potential to be politically popular, too. There is a strong consensus that Britain needs more homes. New polling from the Land, Planning and Development Federation (LPDF) reveals that 69 per cent of voters are worried about the availability of housing in Britain. It’s not a concern that splits the haves and the have-nots: homeowners and non-owners are equally worried about how few homes are being built.

Even debates as controversial as those about building on the green belt can be won: when presented with arguments around affordability, economic growth and the potential to enhance biodiversity, there were double digit percentage point gains for voters in favour of building on parts of the green belt.

Starmer is in a unique position to capitalise on housing – not only because 39 per cent of voters say they trust Labour to manage housing policy compared with 20 per cent for the Tories, according to the LPDF polling – but because Sunak ruled himself out of competing on the green belt during the leadership election. What seemed at the time to be an out-of-character promise to protect the green belt last summer has tied the Prime Minister’s hands on housing policy.

So we find ourselves in the strangest of circumstances, where Sunak’s conference speech last week pledged policies for the young that no one was asking for, while Starmer’s speech tapped into one of the biggest policy challenges the country is crying out to see fixed.

What’s more, the Labour leader does not need to overhaul the planning system. Just meeting the housing target for a few years in a row would be a huge upgrade from where we are now. That’s how low the “party of homeownership” has set the bar.