By a UNISON member and local government worker
One of the first policy announcements made by the new Labour Government and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was in relation to their proposals for the planning system. Whilst many of the proposals aren’t much of a surprise – they were trumpeted by Reeves during the election campaign – they are indicative of the pro-capitalist nature of Starmer’s Labour. Reforming the planning system has been marked out as an area that the government is counting on to deliver economic growth. However, given the state of British capitalism, it is difficult to see where this growth is going to come from.
Underinvestment and Victorian conditions
In 2023, the Institute for Public Policy Research published a report, which found that public sector investment in this country trailed the G7 median by £208.4 billion between 2006 and 2021. Additionally, private sector investment since 2005 in Britain was £354.3 billion below the G7 average. Taken together, that is £562.7 billion that the capitalists and their political representatives have refused to reinvest. To put that into context, this is the equivalent of the 73-mile Crossrail Elizabeth line repeated thirty times over. It is this lack of investment that has played a large role in Britain’s no-growth economy.
The huge omni-crisis of capitalism is laid bare by the lack of access to decent and affordable housing. The housing crisis that working class people are facing is Victorian-esque. This is particularly the case amongst young people, who are bearing the brunt of the prolonged capitalist crisis more than anyone. In 1980, almost half of all 18 to 34-year-olds lived in their own homes. Today, only 20% do.
The most common arrangement for young people today is to still be living with their parents. That’s in large part down to the fact that the last time housing was so unaffordable (i.e. prices compared to average earnings) was 1876, when cars had not yet been invented, Queen Victoria was on the throne and home ownership was the preserve of a wealthy minority.
And it’s not getting better anytime soon, with a recent National Housing Federation report predicting that on the current trajectory:
The number of children living in temporary accommodation will rise from 131,000 to 310,000 by 2045.
Social housing waiting lists will grow to 1.8 million households by 2045 – an increase of more than 50%.
By 2045, 5.7 million households will be paying a third of their income on housing costs.
The number of people experiencing homelessness could more than double, reaching 620,000 by 2045.
Profit is the real barrier
It is in this context that the unveiling of Labour’s planning reforms need to be seen. But it is the Tory-esque attack on town planners and local council planning departments that is particularly telling as to their approach. Town planners and planning more generally are, according to this government, a barrier and block on development, and particularly house building. As such, housing targets are to be reinstated immediately and the ban on offshore wind farms – one of the stranger Tory planning policies – has been lifted. Labour has said that it will ensure that 1.5m new homes are built in the next five years.
It is true that there has been a desperate shortfall in house building for decades, but it isn’t town planners that are to blame. Instead, the real reasons are speculation, profiteering and land banking, whereby developers and landowners wait until market conditions become more favourable (i.e. profitable) for them to build. There are thousands of houses that have planning permission on paper, but they will not be brought forward for development because it’s not currently profitable for the developers’ cartel to build them.
There are also thousands of houses that are currently partially built on stalled developments. The government is proposing a taskforce to target these sites, and have initially identified 14,000 houses in Liverpool Central Docks, Worcester Parkway, Northstowe and Langley Sutton Coldfield.
It is entirely unclear, however, as to what powers this task force will have and how it hopes to achieve the completion of all these developments. Socialists would instead argue for a democratically-controlled ‘task force’, accountable to tenant organisations, trade unions and wider working class communities rather than to a government serving the interests of the developers and landlords. This task force would need to have the powers to effectively nationalise stalled developments and complete them. This would allow the resulting houses to be put under the control of local councils and sold at a truly affordable price.
Of course, it is almost certain that the taskforce would never be granted such power because, ultimately, Labour has no plans to take on the market and tackle the developers that are a huge part of the housing crisis. It is not by accident that on the day after the election, the Financial Times reported that amongst the post-election stock market bounce, in which shares in housing developers performed best of all.
Another huge issue is the lack of affordable housing that gets built as part of any development. There is a simple solution to this, which would be to remove the national planning policies that guarantee a 12% minimum profit margin on all new housing developments. Currently, all that a billionaire developer needs to do is prove that the provision of affordable housing on any given development would reduce their profits below 12%, meaning that the scheme won’t be ‘viable’. This is simply crass profiteering and Labour has no plans to tackle it. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
Crisis in the public sector
Having worked for more than 20 years in town planning in the public sector, I have never known workloads to be so high and morale to be so low. Staffing levels are around 50% of what they were when I first started work. The government plans to recruit an additional 300 planning officers, which is a damning indictment on their poverty of ambition and will not make a difference, given the thousands of planning officers that have been made redundant or retired over the last 15 years of austerity and council cuts.
The lack of trained planners isn’t particularly the problem, as there are plenty coming through the universities. However, many of those new planners now go straight into the private sector because the pay gap is so huge. As our wages have failed to keep up with soaring inflation and cost of living (council workers have lost 25% from the value of our pay since 2010) the recruitment and retention of planners in the public sector is a chronic problem.
In a recent interview, Starmer told public sector workers that we should “prepare for disappointment” when it comes to the next pay negotiations. That will anger millions of workers, many of whom might have expected more from a Labour government, and that’s why we must fight for above-inflation pay rises for council staff and everyone in the public sector.
It isn’t just low pay that is the problem, however. All council cuts over the last 15 years must be reversed and services restored. We also cannot rely on the private sector and profiteering housing developers to deliver the houses that we so desperately need. The only solution is for mass council house building to provide high quality housing that is genuinely affordable for working class people.
Ultimately, a socialist planning system would deliver homes and development based on the needs of the working class majority in society, whilst also working to address the climate crisis and removing the profit motive.
