Reset, revamp, or repetition? Call the prime minister’s “Plan for Change” what you like, but it clearly puts planning front and centre.
The core pledge was one we first heard 14 months ago: 1.5 million homes built in England during this parliament.
The government admits it’s a tough ask. It’s not been met since 1972, when Keir Starmer was aged just 10.
But will it ease demand for housing? The Office for National Statistics projects England’s population will grow some 2.1 million by 2029, largely through immigration. Those people will need houses.
So we crunched the numbers. Even if Labour meets their target, there would only be an extra nine houses per 1,000 people.
It would leave 2029’s housing pressures nearly identical to today’s.
Yet the prime minister’s biggest challenge could lurk in his surprise commitment on infrastructure.
He promised to “fast-track planning decisions on at least 150 major economic infrastructure projects”.
Re-read that carefully. The promise is not to deliver or approve 150 projects, but simply decide them.
And after all, “no” is still a decision. “150 decisions” does not guarantee 150 projects are coming soon to an area near you.
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Approval could end up being the easy part.
The National Infrastructure Commission chair Sir John Armitt says signing off and delivering 150 would be a “huge undertaking”. That may be an understatement.
At the last count in March 2023, the government worked on 76 major infrastructure projects: everything from Sizewell C and HS2, to a polar research vessel, the refurbishment of the UK’s Washington embassy and the Holocaust Memorial Centre.
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Sir Keir’s commitment could mean tripling that.
The first issue is cost. The existing portfolio of 76 has a combined lifetime cost of… £403bn. That’s over £5bn per project.
We have no idea how much an extra 150 would cost, not least where public or private cash would be found.
Second is capacity. Could the public and private sectors physically cope with triple the burden? And what productivity reforms would be needed?
And third: time. Our analysis of ongoing major infrastructure projects found they are expected to take, on average, 11.5 years to complete. Notre-Dame was rebuilt in half that time.
With this parliament running until 2029, it could feasibly be the 2040s before the commitment bears fruit.
As Labour sinks further in the polls, voters appear hungry for the promised “change”.
The 2040s, if that’s how long it takes, may be too long to wait.
Rayner puts people before poultry, but her housing targets may be for the birds
Angela Rayner came on my programme this morning ready to trumpet her plan to deliver 1.5 million homes in this parliamentary term.
It takes confidence to start an interview by promising to achieve what no housing minister – and there have been more than 30 – has done since the 1950s.
And the omens aren’t that great, either for her housing target or her wider infrastructure ambitions.
Still, they’ll be trembling in the town halls.
She sent a warning to local councillors who might be suffering the delusion that they are in charge of their own building programmes, that she would sweep aside blockages to development – including them.
However, she wouldn’t be drawn on what sanctions recalcitrant local authorities might face. Instead, she offered what she called “clarity”.
In other words, whatever the detail, don’t mess with Big Ange.
And as for those newts, bats, and birds who often stand in the way of development, they had better start packing their bags.
To paraphrase her boss’s pledge to put party before country, this secretary of state plans to put people before poultry.
Where she wasn’t quite as clear was on the question of how she’d get all of this done.
The stickiest moment came when asked if she would be content that most of the extra homes would provide homes for the more than 2.5 million immigrants needed to fuel Rachel Reeves’s growth plans – not least the construction workers vital to building her new homes.
The Constriction Industry Training Board reckons we’d need an extra quarter of a million new staff even before the ambitious housing target was revealed.
Having started our conversation with the assertion the country faced a major shortage of homes, she ended with the claim “there’s plenty of housing already, but not enough for people who desperately need it”.
I might even be convinced there’s deep philosophical meaning to her statement – but to my ears, it sounds like nobody’s quite thought this one through.
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