Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has pledged to reform planning rules to ‘back builders’ if his party wins next year’s election.
In an interview with The Times, Starmer outlined that part of this reform would be to allow more homes to be built on the Green Belt, giving councils the choice to build on it if necessary.
He went on to accuse the Conservatives of ‘backing the blockers’ following Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak’s decision to give in to backbench pressure and scrap mandatory local housing targets. The housing secretary also strengthened Green Belt land protections during the controversial planning reform.
Speaking to Sky News, Starmer said: “[The Conservatives] have killed the dream, the aspiration of homeowning for a whole generation. It will fall to us to deal with that.”
He continued to say: “We’ve got to drive housebuilding at pace. We need to put local areas in charge of that so change the planning rules, have development corporations as vehicles on the ground to drive building, and make sure that the dream, the aspiration of owning your own home is realised for so many people who at the moment have had their dreams shattered.”
The Labour leader addressed the British Chamber of Commerce this afternoon, outlining his party’s plans to deal with the housing crisis.
He said: “Mark my words: we will take on planning reform. We’ll bring back local housing targets. We’ll streamline the process for national infrastructure projects and commercial development and we’ll remove the veto used by big landowners to stop shovels hitting the ground.”
“We choose the builders, not the blockers; the future, not the past; renewal not decline. We choose growth.”
Keir Starmer went into more detail about the changes he would implement in his Time interview, telling the paper that he intends to go further than just reinstating housing targets and instead aims to fix what he called “essentially a broken system.”
In response to Keir Starmer’s statement, Rico Wojtulewicz, head of housing and planning policy for the National Federation of Builders House Builders Association, said: “Finally, we are getting some nuanced conversation on housing and planning policy. While we disagree that builders decide supply, because this is the role of local plan making and allocations, the green belt is in place to stop urban sprawl, not hinder good placemaking.”
“The government’s brownfield-first strategy is a good example of hindering good placemaking. It seeks to avoid using greenbelt by increasing urban populations on land set aside for non-housing needs. Yet with higher populations, where does non-housing infrastructure now go? Or do they just not get built, as is often the case today? Labour appear to have accepted that city boundaries must play a part in good placemaking and may be hinting at a greenbelt review, something the government turned down when Conservative backbenchers requested it.”
“After an awful two years regarding housing and planning debate, we might be entering a period where the torch of ambition that existed under former housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, is being relit by the Labour party.”
