Look closely... Starmer's plans don't live up to his bold rhetoric - analysis by Tom Harwood
Starmer gave a speech on the main stage of the Labour Conference yesterday
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Urban intensification. Development corporations to build new communities. Building more where demand is highest. A piecemeal approach to target hundreds of thousands of new homes in specific areas.
That was of course the announcement made by Michael Gove back in July, as he revealed plans for an eye catching new town attached to Cambridge, a big expansion to Leeds, and huge urban regeneration and intensification in places like East London.
What strikes me is just how similar it is to the Labour Party’s new approach to housing. Like Gove, the party is backing specific development in specific areas. Not wholesale planning reform.
A series of new towns and urban intensification.
WATCH: Keir Starmer addresses the Labour Party Conference
Yes, far from the rhetoric that “we must bulldoze through our restrictive planning system”, it now appears that this "bulldozing" will be delicately performed in a limited and specific way.
Labour sources have confirmed to me that the idea of wholesale replacement of our discretionary planning system is off the table.
I am told that speculation the party may replace the Town and Country Planning Act with a system of rules based flexible zoning is wrong, and that the announcements this week are as far as the party will go.
This is the very definition of a piecemeal approach. A senior Labour source told me policy the policy “tweaks the system”, rather than revolutionising it, while describing it as “realistic” not radical.
While this is a far cry from the leadership’s rhetoric, it is in fitting with the overwhelming caution of the Labour Party’s operation.
Limited promises on tax and spend, a retreat from former promises in areas like gender recognition reform, and commitments to “iron” fiscal rules.
Peculiarly, unlike these other areas where Labour tones down its rhetoric and signals moderation, with planning the rhetoric is overwhelmingly radical.
Yet it is hard to describe the package announced this week as radical policy to match.
As the Centre for Cities’ Ant Breach wrote yesterday, Labour is pursuing “reforms 'within' the current planning system (building on the green belt, using development corporations etc), but not quite reform 'of' the planning system”.
The Labour Party says these “tweaks” are important to deliver a “realistic” level of extra housing, delivering strategic planning that creates communities and services to match, not isolated estates but GP surgeries, schools, and joined up thinking on vital infrastructure.
It is also undoubtedly the case that rhetorically the Labour Party has been bold on green belt reform – highlighting much of the green belt is ‘grey’ not green.
Yet in both these cases the difference between the Labour Party and the Tories is not as wide as the rhetoric would suggest.
Despite Sunak’s promises on freezing the green belt in aspic, this year more green belt land was released and reallocated than in the last year of the last Labour government.
It is also impossible to see how projects like the new quarter attached to Cambridge could be delivered without building on some green belt land that completely encircles the city.
Again the comms have been far apart, and yet the policy is surprisingly similar.
Labour announced with fanfare they will fund an extra 300 extra planning officers across the country. Not 30,000. Not 3,000. 300. That’s fewer than one extra officer per local authority.
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'Perhaps the Labour Party is as scared as the Tories became after their loss in the Chesham and Amersham by election'
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What neither party is proposing now is the scale and ambition of planning reform that was contained within the Planning For the Future white paper in 2020 – Robert Jenrick’s transformative set of reforms to bring the UK more in like with other advanced democracies.
Perhaps the Labour Party is as scared as the Tories became after their loss in the Chesham and Amersham by election, partly blamed on those planning reform proposals.
And as a result, both parties are now backing iterative, piecemeal approaches.
The differences between the major parties on planning are far fewer than it would first appear.