Starmer joins the ‘blockers’

Keir Starmer might have offered voters a notoriously hollow plan for government at the last election, but there was one pledge that left no room for fudging: Labour, if elected, would build 1.5million homes over the next parliament. To do so, it would need to radically reform Britain’s arcane planning rules, in favour of ‘builders’ instead of ‘blockers’. Now, in what is becoming a hallmark of his premiership, Starmer looks set to do the precise opposite of what he promised.

Changes to the government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill, confirmed late last week, have all but ensured that Labour will fail dismally to reach its housing targets. Anyone who has followed the recent, tortured history of British governments’ attempts to get things built will probably guess why: once again, the demands of the environmental ‘blob’ have been prioritised over the social and economic interests of the country as a whole.

One aspect of the new bill in particular spells doom for Labour’s housebuilding targets: the introduction of what is called the ‘overall improvement test’ for new developments. The test is supposed to ensure that the environmental benefits of a new home, apartment block or town ‘materially outweigh the negative effect of development’. If this sounds like an impossible standard to meet, then that is surely because it is supposed to be. As one anonymous planning expert told The Times, ‘I bet £1,000-to-one [planning approval] never happens’.

In recent years, Britain’s already onerous planning rules have led major projects to be stalled, balloon in cost and even cancelled on the most dubious, indeed laughable, environmental pretexts. Who could forget the £100million Hertfordshire ‘bat shed’ that HS2 was ordered to build to get planning permission? Or Hinkley Point C’s ‘fish disco’? Here, tens of millions of pounds were earmarked for underwater speakers, designed to prevent a negligible number of fish from getting sucked into nuclear reactors. Potentially transformative, nationally critical infrastructure projects are continually being held up on behalf of Bechstein bats and Bristol Channel kippers.

The cost of the planning application alone for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel connecting Essex and Kent, is more than £300million. Predictably, most of the 360,000-page application is devoted to the possible environmental impacts. Although the tunnel was announced by the Conservative government in 2017, it is not expected to be finished until 2032 at the earliest.

HS2 is now less than half its planned size, and Hinkley is more than a decade behind schedule, yet it is still a minor miracle neither of these projects were derailed entirely. Many smaller developments have either been trapped in planning purgatory, or abandoned altogether. Recently, a private development in Ebbsfleet, Kent that would have built 15,000 homes was cancelled because of the discovery of ‘distinguished jumping spiders’.

Starmer has repeatedly promised to ‘smash the NIMBYs’ holding back development. These comments were echoed recently by planning minister Matthew Pennycock. ‘I don’t think that local opposition that says, “We don’t want it here” can be the test’, he said last week. But rather than smash the NIMBYs, the government has simply saved them the trouble of having to protest. Labour’s planning bill will give NIMBYs and green activists even more power to skewer projects before their plans appear in the local newspaper. A founding member of Labour YIMBY, a pro-development lobby group, was so incensed by Starmer’s capitulation to the ‘vegetable lobby’ that he defected this week to the Conservatives.

Allowing anti-development environmentalists to hold the balance of power over planning has long been economically and socially disastrous. Large infrastructure projects are desperately needed to revive Britain’s sluggish growth. Our railways and roads – the arteries of a healthy economy – are getting clogged up and falling into disrepair. And in a country whose population has increased by 10million people in 20 years, there is a desperate need to accelerate housebuilding. In that same period, house prices have doubled, while the waiting list for social housing has ballooned to 1.3million. Even adults on a decent wage are forced to live in crowded and expensive shared housing.

For much of the past year, Starmer and his frontbench have talked a good game on housebuilding and infrastructure. They’ve been at pains to show they understand the depths of the crisis – and understand that the main solution is bold and radical planning reform. How galling it is then, that Labour’s planning bill looks set to take Britain backwards. The ‘blob’ has won again – and ordinary Britons have lost.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.