US Edition
Labour would order councils to offer green-belt land for development as part of a plan to solve the housing crisis within 10 years, Lisa Nandy has said.
Pledging to take on the “taboo” of developing the green belt, Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, blamed a lack of homes on the Tories’ political “cowardice” and said the issue was symbolic of a “broken” system.
In an interview with The Telegraph, she said that Labour would use development corporations to develop green-belt land, while also siting homes alongside new railways and partnering with pension funds to create extra social housing.
Last month, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he would be on the side of the “builders not the blockers” by developing certain areas of the green belt where it would not affect the beauty of the countryside.
Ms Nandy said that Labour would “take on the taboo around the green belt and declassify the poor-quality parts… which currently aren’t very lucrative for developers but provide good sites for new housing”.
She insisted that Labour would not compromise “green open spaces” or allow communities to be “sucked into the urban sprawl”.
Instead, she said that combined authorities – local bodies that bring councils together to share responsibilities and get extra powers – would be asked “to identify the areas to declassify”.
At present there are 10 combined authorities across England, including Greater Manchester, the Liverpool City Region and South and West Yorkshire, with the bodies tending to align with areas of green belt clustered around the country’s urban cores.
Ms Nandy said: “We’re asking combined authorities to identify sites where homes can be built.
“They tend to know already, so a lot of them are brownfield sites that need some investment in order to decontaminate them and bring them back into use.”
Pioneered by Michael Heseltine
In order to achieve this, she said Labour would “set up development corporations who are able to take on the land”.
Pioneered in the 1980s by Michael Heseltine, development corporations were created to bring business leaders and councils together to regenerate areas such as London’s Canary Wharf.
They currently exist in the form of mayoral development corporations – bodies chaired by directly elected mayors with powers to buy and develop land and infrastructure.
Ms Nandy said that the development corporations would be helped by land value reform cutting the cost of home-building. This would involve an overhaul of rules relating to compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) to remove the “hope value” – an added value factored into purchases based on the expectation of future planning permission being granted
In a sign of her party’s ambitions, she wanted to “send a strong signal” to the construction industry “that they should ramp up capacity now”, with Labour plotting a course to fix the housing crisis over a decade. “What we’re able to do in year one will be drastically different to what we’re able to do in year 10. But that’s the sort of timescale that we’re thinking to be able to solve this,” she said.
Conservative ambivalence
Last week, the Conservatives’ ambivalence about building new homes was on display, with the party launching attack adverts against Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the issue, including one appearing to criticise the latter for wanting to build 300,000 houses a year – the Government’s own target.
Attacking the tendency to give way to the nimby – not in my back yard – tendency, Ms Nandy said that it had been “too easy for politicians of all parties to duck the big choices”.
“It’s cowardice that’s got us here,” said Ms Nandy.
The failure to deliver new houses in sufficient quantities was the “biggest indicator of how badly politics has failed” and the “most visible symbol” of a “broken political system”.
“That’s one of the reasons why we’ve been very clear about what we want to do ahead of the election so that we have a mandate to do it afterwards,” she added.
Calling out the Left
Ms Nandy said Labour had also “taken on and called out” those on the Left who argue that “homeownership is not a Labour thing to do”, which was “completely wrong”.
Ownership of assets was the “biggest and most consequential divide” in the country, she said, with the recognition of that fact marking a “fundamental break” with “where Labour has been in recent times”.
As well as reforming the green belt, Ms Nandy said Labour would learn from the example of Germany and Scandinavia to “ally housing with major infrastructure projects”, suggesting it could be used to help fund such schemes.
“If you want to get Northern Powerhouse Rail built, which we do, then one of the ways that you can unlock the funding to do so is to build housing around the areas of the stations and along the route,” she said.
Ms Nandy also revealed that Labour was looking at enlisting the help of pension schemes to create new social housing.
“We’ve been really interested in the work that some of the pension funds have been doing, as buy-to-let landlords have got out of the market, [funds have] been partnering with councils to buy up some of those properties and return them to social use on 100-year leases.”
And she pledged to move from “benefits to bricks” by reducing the amount of money spent on housing benefit, while spending more on house-building.