‘Labour is being badly misled on housing’

Our entire political system is discredited by the abject failure to provide a decent genuinely affordable home for so many people across the UK.

If Labour does not meaningfully break with decades of disappointment and deliver an effective remedy to the housing crisis, millions across the country will lose faith in the ability of our movement to change their lives for the better.

But despite good intentions, a combination of status quo thinking and bad economics is leading Labour’s leadership down a cul-de-sac on housing policy, which voters will not be quick to forgive or forget.

In recent years, Labour politicians have too often adopted the flawed argument peddled by right-wing think tanks and developer lobbyists that the housing crisis has been caused primarily by a lack of overall supply. As a result, we have stopped thinking seriously about the issues of ownership, inequality, and a financialised economic model creating money on a vast scale to pursue asset-price inflation.

‘We are at risk of reaching next election with homes still wildly unaffordable’

When it comes to delivering genuinely affordable homes for all, the facts never supported the simplistic supply side case. In the decade from 2013 to 2023, the total housing stock in England increased by 2.1 million dwellings, growing at a faster rate than the population. If aggregate supply was the primary issue in the housing crisis, this period should have seen improving affordability. The reality was precisely the opposite.

Some argue that we must ram through as many speculative planning permissions as possible to increase market supply. But even if we ignore the huge backlog of unbuilt permissions and profit-maximising build out rates, the truth is that this will have negligible benefits for housing affordability. Trickle down housing economics is a con and Labour never should have bought into it.

Where supply did fall between 2013 and 2023 was amongst the very homes most needed by those failed by private markets – homes for social rent. Depressingly, whatever might be written on certain headwear, this trend is so far continuing under the Labour Government. Last year, the number of social rent council homes fell below 1.5 million for the first time since records began – awful news for the hundreds of thousands stuck on waiting lists in often unsanitary and overcrowded conditions. Meanwhile, the extra funding announced for social housing to date is projected to deliver just 18,000 homes a year, far short of what we need. 

Without a major change in trajectory, we are at serious risk of reaching the next election with homes still wildly unaffordable and waiting lists barely dented.

‘NPFF raises likelihood of families trapped in uninsurable un-mortgageable properties’

The new draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is the government’s latest effort to address this challenge. But in reality, the new NPPF simply doubles down on decades of failed deregulatory dogma and has a jarring resonance with much of the thinking behind Trussonomics – nature is the enemy and the voices of local community must be silenced in favour of strengthening corporate power over our lives.

Rather than giving councils the power to assemble the right sites for development and capture land value uplifts, with clear funding and targets for the hundreds of thousands of well-designed, high-quality thousands of council houses we desperately need, the new NPPF has the fingerprints of profiteering developers and their lobbyists all over it.

In pursuit of ever easier planning permissions for developers, the new NPPF rolls back requirements to avoid building on land at risk from surface water flooding. This will no doubt be great for speculative land promoters who otherwise would have found themselves with stranded assets but will do nothing to get children out of temporary accommodation and only raises the likelihood of more families trapped in uninsurable, un-mortgageable properties.

The proposed policies also directly contradict Labour’s positive work on devolution by blocking progressive councils from setting higher standards for net-zero housing and biodiversity recovery, stymying the hopes of Labour-run local authorities that have declared climate emergencies.

‘Government should aspire to more than houses built to serve as commuter dormitories’

Worse still, the new NPPF strengthens and widens the application of the euphemistically named ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ a policy which is already responsible for the imposition of poorly designed, car-dominated, environmentally damaging and unaffordable developments across the country. Given the fear of expensive legal challenges in cash-strapped councils, this will effectively hand developers a carte-blanche to ignore hard won Local Plans and build almost whatever and wherever they like.

Taken alongside a ‘grey belt’ policy, which is doing the opposite of what it says on the tin and overwhelmingly leading to development on previously protected countryside, the NPPF weights the scales so overwhelmingly in favour of corporate interests that it effectively heralds the end of Attlee’s democratic planning system. This will only serve to deepen cynicism about politics, intensify public opposition to building new homes, and push voters towards Reform in frustration at the lack of agency over their own lives and communities.

Even the superficially positive proposal for more development around rural train stations reveals a fundamentally dispiriting vision for the future of our country. A socialist government should aspire to more than houses built to serve as commuter dormitories. Our towns and villages are crying out to be treated as genuine communities in their own right. Places with everything you need for a fulfilling life, not just somewhere you have to get out of to get on. 

‘Put local authorities back in the driving seat’

With three years left to meaningfully address the housing crisis, it is time to put local authorities back in the driving seat with the substantially increased powers and funding they need to deliver the council housing revolution we promised. 

This Labour government can still secure a positive record on housing but only if we once again put social justice at the heart of our policies. We need to marry Bevan’s relentless focus on delivery for those left behind by the free market, which secured 800,000 council houses from 1946-51, with the idealism of the Garden City movement and its vision of beautiful, affordable homes in harmony with nature, and within walking distance of meaningful work and joyful leisure for all. 

It has been done before, and we can do the same now. We just need the political realism to accept that only public funding can provide the patient capital necessary, and the political will to mobilise it on a scale transformative enough to truly end the housing crisis.

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