The era of the Nimby is over

This is Home Front with Vicky Spratt, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s Home Front. You’re forgiven if your attention has been monopolised by the apparent crumbling of the established global political order. But, now, it is time to focus on something more local: Labour’s planning reforms.  

Today, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will be presented to Parliament. The changes this new legislation brings will affect you and they could significantly change where and, even, how you live.

Under this new legislation, the Government has made it clear that in 2025, in Labour’s Britain, there is no space for Nimbyism.

As a result, you may well be seeing more new towns, housing, roads and electricity pylons near you in the coming years. Perhaps you will even end up living in a newly built home in a new town that doesn’t exist yet.

Councillors stripped of blocking powers

One of the most significant changes is perhaps plans to give expert local planning inspectors far more jurisdiction, giving them the final say on approving certain smaller developments, stripping local councillors of their ability to block all but the biggest developments.

This, housing minister Matthew Pennycook believes, can speed up progress towards Labour’s ambitious target of building 1.5 million new homes over the next five years.

If it works, it will take the politics and emotion out of certain developments and prevent them from being held up by costly back and forths.

However, as Labour itself has already acknowledged, if planning officers are to take on a greater workload then we will need to hire more of them. This is why Labour pledged to hire 300 new planning officers if elected.

However, across the country, councils face a shortage of these workers. There has been a brain drain to the private sector in recent decades and Labour will need to reverse that.

The bill will also limit which types of planning decisions go to committees, as opposed to being determined by expert officers. Moving forward, Labour says there will be “controls over the size of planning committees to ensure good debate is encouraged, and it has made it clear that “large and unwieldy committees” will be “banned”.

More than that, the bill says that planning committee members will have to undergo “mandatory training”.

I’d like to know exactly what that training entails but its sounds like a huge step towards professionalising Britain’s planning processes and preventing vital projects from being held up without good reason.

New roads and rail links will be forced through

Another component of the changes proposed by the bill is the confirmation (first trailed in Pennycook’s exclusive interview with me last summer) that Labour will establish a new generation of government-backed development corporations to build new infrastructure and new towns.

What’s even more interesting, as I reported exclusively yesterday, is that Labour will legislate to give these development corporations the power to take over local transport planning if required to make sure new towns have the infrastructure they need.

This, combined with the amped-up compulsory purchase powers delivered in the bill (which I also exclusively reported last year), will mean public bodies such as these new development corporations or Homes England are not only able to speed up the planning process for new development but force the faster acquisition of the land they need to build on.

This worked in the 1940s when Britain went on a post-war building drive, it also worked when we needed to build housing and venues for the London 2012 Olympics. There’s only one reason it wouldn’t work now (more on that shortly).

The bill also proposes a planning overhaul which sees different local authorities working together to build housing and infrastructure – known as “strategic planning”. This makes sense because some developments will sit across local boundaries, again it’s a wonder it hasn’t happened already.

And, finally, the planning processes NSIPs – that’s National Significant Infrastructure Projects – such as windfarms, roads or railways will be streamlined. These major projects will only be allowed one attempt at a legal planning challenge, previously it was three. Labour say this will speed things up and cite the example of the windfarms in East Anglia which were delayed by over two years due to unsuccessful challenges under the previous Conservative government.

The end of the Nimby era, but are we ready to build?

Combined, these changes have one intention: turning Britain into a place where so-called Nimbys can’t operate.

In Labour’s pro-building planning reforms, you will find a government that is doing exactly what they promised to do in their manifesto, and in record time.

So, where’s the catch?

As I mentioned above, there is a fly in the ointment Labour believes can heal Britain’s housing crisis.

The last time we built housing and infrastructure at scale during the post-war period, it was largely funded by the state.

We know that Labour wants 40 per cent of homes in new towns to be affordable, but, beyond that, it seems as though they’re relying on private housebuilders to do the heavy lifting.

Right now, those builders face severe headwinds: higher building costs because of inflation, a worker shortage because of Brexit and an ageing construction workforce.

There are no silver bullets to Britain’s housing crisis, or to painfully low growth. However, short of injecting loads of cash into government-backed housebuilding or mortgages, this latest piece of legislation is as much as any government could do.

There’s a reason why many of Labour’s reforms are similar to those originally favoured by Conservative housing secretary Michael Gove before he backed down in the face of backbench opposition.

In the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, Pennycook and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner have answered the difficult questions about how they plan to stop new developments from falling at the first hurdle. However, two key questions remain.

One, how do they plan to reassure private builders that first-time buyers will be able to afford the thousands of new homes the government wants them to build in a challenging market (Help to Buy 2.0, anyone)?

Two, how much money is Rachel Reeves prepared to put behind local councils and housing associations so they can build the affordable housing they’re desperate to get off the ground?

Perhaps some of the answers lie in the Spring Statement? Time will tell.

Key housing

Speaking of the headwinds, some stark figures have been released that show that the UK is experiencing the sharpest downturn in construction since May 2020.

Yes, you read that right. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic when the country was in a lockdown.

The S&P Global UK Construction Purchasing Managers’ Index has totted up the state of British construction businesses. They do this by assessing key economic indicators in the sector such as how many workers are being hired, how many new contracts they have or how much builders are spending.

The fact that there is a downturn in private construction should worry Labour. S&P Global said it is being caused by “significant reductions in residential building” and “a lack of new work in the house building segment”.

Private housebuilders constantly shout about how much they want to build homes. That’s their business, after all. So, if they’re not doing that, something is wrong. It’s impossible to overstate how much higher building material costs and higher wages have hit housebuilders. Similarly, the fact that higher interest rates have slowed down the housing market in recent years, causing demand to dampen at a time of great economic uncertainty, means that builders can’t be sure the buyers will exist for homes even if they build them.

Don’t be fooled by data showing that house prices are rising but, as I wrote in my column, that’s likely because of the stamp duty deadline and what happens after that is anyone’s guess.

If Labour wants to stimulate housebuilding, planning reform is merely the groundwork. Next, it will either have to invest in council or social housebuilding or find a way to plump up the mortgage market, particularly for first-time buyers.

Ask me anything

This week’s question comes from X (Twitter). A reader has asked, “why Labour want to bulldoze through everything to build more homes?”

I’m not sure that’s what they want to do at all, frankly. I’d recommend reading my report about how compulsory purchase of land for building will work, it includes a rundown of the safeguards and conditions put in place to protect nature and make sure new developments are “in the public interest”.

Send in your questions to: @Victoria_Spratt, on X, formerly Twitter, @vicky.spratt on Instagram or via email [email protected]

Vicky’s pick

Ok, reader, I went there. I wanted to understand why everyone was so incensed about the new Meghan Markle (sorry, Sussex) lifestyle show over on Netflix: With Love, Meghan. And, then, one thing led to another.

Regardless of whether you’re a royalist or not, of whether you’re a Meghan fan, or not, it’s hard to get particularly worked up about this innocuous filler. Not quite a cooking show (apart from the semi-serious episode with legendary farm-to-table LA restaurant pioneer Alice Waters) and lacking the humour of Martha Stewart, this is just a woman talking about how she likes to make nice things for her friends.

At best, this is Pippa Middleton’s ill-fated party book writ large. At worst, it’s banal trad-wife core propaganda.

It won’t change the world and I’m sure dozens of more deserving would-be cooks have not been given a prime slot so that Netflix could fund With Love, Meghan. But, at the same time, in a world where dictators exist and influence global defence policy, where AI poses a serious threat to jobs and where two major wars are still raging concurrently, I struggle to understand where so many people found the energy to get so angry about something so mundane.

What started as a plan to “quickly dip into” the show to “see what it was about” turned into me leaving it on in the background for an entire afternoon while I worked on my new book and cooked Sunday dinner with my boyfriend.

In the end, we didn’t even notice another show had started playing.