Lord Banner KC and Jack Airey: Why Conservatives should back Labour’s planning reforms

Charles, Lord Banner is a practising planning KC as well as a working peer, and Jack Airey is Director of Housing and Infrastructure at Public First having previously been a planning advisor in No 10.

One of the most consequential planning reforms of the past few decades was a Conservative achievement.

In 2012 a Conservative-led government took more than a thousand pages of planning policy and cut them down to barely fifty, with a presumption in favour of sustainable development at its heart. That turbocharged the granting of permissions. Housebuilding climbed to just under 250,000 homes a year before the pandemic, and has steadily declined since.

The new National Planning Policy Framework, brought forward under Labour, continues that work, and it is a strong document. It opens up brownfield land across the country. It takes a sensible view of green belt allowing its less important parts to be considered for development.

Reforms like these take time to bite, but they will eventually support more private enterprise, more homes and more families able to buy, some of the values the Conservative Party exists to defend.

The framework is the bedrock for a large increase in housebuilding next parliament, provided the jobs and wage growth are there to give people the means to buy. Labour will not hit its target of 1.5 million homes. Overzealous tax and regulation have made building unprofitable in too many places, and a stagnant economy means the demand is not yet there.

Yet a big rise in delivery is desperately needed. The average home in England now costs 7.6 times average earnings.

At the turn of the century it was about four.

The planning system now in place could underwrite that rise early next decade, and it may well be a Conservative government that presides over it. Any temptation to commit to scrap the reforms should therefore be resisted.

Opposition of course still has its place. The NPPF can be improved, and the wider system is far too slow. It does too little for the small and medium builders who cannot get a scheme off the ground because the sums do not work, and it burdens some sites with so many requirements that they cannot actually be built. Ministers should also be pressed on Sadiq Khan’s London Plan, which as drafted will do next to nothing for the capital’s housing crisis. All of that can be argued for while still backing the core of the reforms.

It is worth learning from the experience of New Zealand. Facing a housing shortage as bad as ours, Labour and the National Party worked together to deliver major planning reforms, having decided the problem was too serious for the usual point-scoring.

The reforms led to more housebuilding and housing becoming more affordable.

The Conservatives can stand with the millions who want a home of their own, and the many whose livelihoods depend on building them, while still speaking for local people who want development done right. Held together, those are the makings of a winning coalition. A party founded on ownership and enterprise should build it.