Tag: General Election 2024

Get Britain Building Again…again

The 2024 Labour manifesto stands in curious contrast to the Conservatives’. Rather than wacky suggestions for turning inner London into Paris, we have a document with more than 130 mentions of “change” but tantalisingly few specifics about how this change will be realised. A Labour government “will introduce effective new mechanisms”, “will strengthen”, “will take steps to ensure”, “will review”, “will work with partners to drive”.

You have to think/hope that the Labour front bench has some idea how they will actually achieve these aims, but they are certainly not telling us what they are – understandably so when they are riding so high in the polls and staring down queasily at the rocks below.

On housing, the target of 1.5 million new homes over the next Parliament is 100,000 less than the Conservatives have pledged to “deliver”, but still way ahead of build rates in the past 25 years. With the exception of a crowd-pleasing stamp duty surcharge for foreign buyers there is not much detail, but the manifesto does sketch out some of the bottom-up carrots and top-down sticks that will “get Britain building again”.

These carrots and sticks are presented as working together in single-minded pursuit of Labour’s mission to “kickstart economic growth”, but you can see some internal tensions. There will be more money for planners, but also tougher sanctions where local plans are absent or outdated. Communities will shape housebuilding, but a Labour government will intervene where necessary. Development will be “brownfield first”, but there will also be a “strategic approach” to Green Belt designation and release. There will be new towns, but planned and built in partnership with local communities.

There is a commitment to “exemplary development” and a careful pledge that, in some cases, compulsory purchase prices will be based on “fair compensation” rather than on the values that could be achieved once planning permission is granted. The Levelling Up and Regeneration Act introduced limited provision for this at the discretion of the Secretary of State, so Labour would presumably extend this. A wider application will be particularly important for new towns or planned urban extensions in the Green Belt, where unknown speculators are rumoured to buy up options on “strategic land” in the hope of untold rewards if planning permission should ever be granted.

Metro Mayors and combined authorities will be given a role in planning for housing growth, perhaps modelled on the powers that the Mayor of London has today. This looks like a good way of bridging between the central and local priorities, but could also create clashes between elected Labour Mayors and an elected Labour government. Sadiq Khan has already taken a stronger line against Green Belt development than the Labour leadership does, and the London Plan has been criticised by Michael Gove’s department for overloading developers with planning obligations. There are good reasons to be optimistic about what Khan can achieve with a Labour government, but there may still be storms ahead.

Renters will get protection from unfair Section 21 eviction and arbitrary rent rises (as promised but not delivered by the Conservatives). In addition, the manifesto pledges “the biggest boost in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation” – somehow achieved with existing Affordable Homes Programme funding – and to reduce the scope of Right-to-Buy.

The flagship policy to help first-time homebuyers – a mortgage guarantee scheme to reduce the deposits needed – is not described in any detail. However, if it is anything like the one introduced by the current government in 2021, it will have limited impact in London: buyers still need to put down a minimum five per cent, which can easily be £20,000 or more in the capital. Recent government statistics show that the scheme was only used by around 1,500 London first-time buyers (with an average household income of £95,000) between April 2021 and September 2023, fewer than any other English region. The deposit gap will remain a huge challenge for many Londoners.

This general election campaign has been odd in many ways, and the main parties’ manifestos underline this. The Conservatives’ document reads like a challenger’s – full of shiny, eye-catching initiatives gleaned from think tanks and special advisors. By contrast, for all its change-y vibes, Labour’s is cautious, sensible and careful not to leave a flank exposed to enemy fire, but with some inherent tensions half-glimpsed beneath the surface.

Serious discussion of London and its problems is absent from either manifesto (Labour only mention the capital twice: once as a case study voter’s workplace and once as the party’s postal address), but this may not be a bad thing after a decade when the capital has been used as a general purpose scapegoat for everything from regional inequality, to Brexit division, to populist discontent. Maybe that type of debate feels a bit beside the point given the challenges the whole country faces today. It would be good if we could use this election to move beyond it.

First published by OnLondon.

How do they expect to be taken seriously?

The 2024 Conservative Manifesto, like the RMS Titanic’s Spring 1913 entertainment programme, should probably be seen as “aspirational” at best. There’s an insouciance in the way it raises the quota for annual housing delivery in England to 320,000 from the 300,000 promised in 2019 – a target that has been undershot by at least 50,000 in each of the past five years – which suggests they are not really engaged.

The manifesto is not all bad. There are glimmers of light in the housing section. Leasehold reform and the abolition of Section 21 evictions are good ideas, just as they were in 2019, though the fact that the pledges need to be repeated does not reflect well on the government’s record in office.

The manifesto also proposes temporary Capital Gains Tax relief for landlords who sell to their tenants – a good incentive for those who want to quit the sector, though some mechanism for sharing the benefit with tenants would help bridge the huge deposit gap that renters face, in London above all.

The document’s references to London are sparse and generally weird. They largely focus on attacking Sadiq Khan (recently re-elected with an increased majority) and his deputies: Night Czar Amy Lamé is held culpable for the closure of 3,000 pubs bars and nightclubs since March 2020, as if nothing else of note has happened since then.

But on housing the manifesto’s grasp of reality becomes shakier still. To achieve its super-Stakhanovite target for housebuilding, it promises “gentle densification” of urban areas – apart from inner London, where densities will be raised to “those of European cities like Paris and Barcelona”.

I’m a big fan of density, and of Paris and of Barcelona, but this is loopy. Comparative density is tricky to measure, but a rough read-across is possible using Tom Forth’s Circle Populations website, which calculates populations around particular points. The 5km radius around London’s centre, traditionally the statue of King Charles I at Charing Cross, has around 1.1 million residents.

The equivalent area in Paris, drawn from outside Notre Dame, has around 2.1 million. Barcelona is harder to compare because of its position on a strip between mountains and sea, but scaling up a 3km-radius circle around Eixample, which includes most of the city centre, yields a population of around 2.4 million.

The idea of doubling the number of people living in central London within five years seems even more of a stretch than the national housing target, and the manifesto contains no clues about how this would be achieved.

The population of the capital’s Central Activities Zone (an area slightly smaller than a 5km-radius circle) only increased by a quarter between 2010 and 2020. Even looking at a wider, 10km-radius, circle would require population growth of around 30 per cent to match Paris compared to ten per cent population growth in inner London between 2011 and 2022.

Central London could certainly be denser. Delivery on some opportunity areas has been slow – though in the case of Euston the government is hardly clean-handed – and as working patterns change there are opportunities to re-allocate some lower-grade commercial space. But short of razing the City of London – which the manifesto pledges to “support as the leading global market” – and other business districts, or lifting conservation area restrictions from the capital’s historic core, it is hard to see how these uplifts are achievable in the next decade, let alone the next Parliament.

In any case, who will be able to afford to live, or at least to buy their own home, in the capital? The manifesto also pledges to relaunch the Help to Buy scheme, which offered government loans to help first-time buyers of new builds to afford their deposit. The scheme’s subsidies have been much derided for boosting house prices and/or being scooped up by developers.

Personally, I think the scheme could be refocused to help those without family wealth, rather than to boost new build, but that’s another issue. The previous scheme allowed a maximum loan for 20 per cent of value across England. This was raised to 40 per cent in London from 2016, following very low take-up. The new version makes no such special provision, so it is hard to see who will be able to use it to buy property in any newly tower-lined streets of the city centre.

Perhaps the plan is for a cataclysmic property price collapse so that London’s house prices are levelled down to those beyond the capital? Perhaps all the buyers would be those few lucky foreigners who the new “legally binding” cap on immigration allows in? Yes, we know the Conservatives will struggle to win seats in inner London, but treating the capital and its housing crisis so casually seems irresponsible. If this is all they can come up with, how on earth can they expect to be taken seriously?

First published by OnLondon