Angela Rayner has ruined Labour’s last remaining good policy
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
More power for the trade unions. Extra windfall taxes. And a big increase in the levels of regulation. There has not been much about the Labour Party’s economic programme to inspire any confidence that a government led by Sir Keir Starmer will do anything to improve the dismal prospects of the British economy.
There was, however, this. The party had committed itself to finally facing down the Nimbys and building the new homes the country desperately needs. Amid all the guff about “securonomics”, “stability”, and “green investment”, Labour would at least build more houses.
In his conference speech last year, Starmer promised to “bulldoze through” the restrictive planning system, to build “the next generation of Labour new towns”, ushering in a “decade of national renewal”.
With few votes to worry about in the leafy suburbs, and without any troublesome backbenchers trying to protect the green belts in their constituencies, Labour would finally be able to swat away all the obstacles put in the way of house builders over the last 14 years of Conservative rule.
In fairness, amid the rhetorical hype, there was even an element of truth to it. Labour might have been able to achieve something that no party of the centre-Right reliant on elderly property-owners ever could.
And yet, in what may soon become a depressingly familiar pattern, as soon as Labour comes close to anything resembling a good idea, Angela Rayner comes along to kill it off.
In a speech to developers and investors on Monday, the party’s deputy leader set out a series of conditions for the new towns it aims to build.
They will include “buildings with character”, “guaranteed public transport and public services”, and “green spaces”, while every third street will include a statue of Nye Bevan to celebrate the NHS (okay, okay I might have made that one up, but you get the general idea).
But Rayner also threw in a killer twist. Apparently, every new town under an incoming Labour government will also have to include a 40pc target for affordable housing.
Seriously? Of course, we don’t yet know exactly what the party means by “affordable”. But we can guess. “Affordable” presumably means that close on half the new homes will have to be sold at below their market value. Otherwise, you could simply leave it to the developer to sell each house for whatever the price happened to be. In effect, it means that homes will be sold for less than the price they would otherwise fetch.
There are two big problems with this. Firstly, it will mean that no sane company will want to build any of the “new towns” Labour has promised. They will bear all the costs of acquiring the land, hiring the architects, bringing in the brick-layers, roofers and electricians needed to get them all up, and then Rayner will come along and tell them what price they can charge for many of the finished homes.
In the unlikely event that they make a profit, there will inevitably be accusations of “profiteering”, possibly at the expense of “key workers” in the public sector. It is hard to see that it will be worth the hassle.
Next, it reveals that the party, even under its reformed leadership, still has no idea of how the economy actually works. The way that any product becomes more “affordable” is by producing more of it, usually more efficiently.
That’s why we have “affordable” smartphones, and “affordable” TV sets, and lots of “affordable” ready-meals in the local supermarket. Indeed, we used to have “affordable” cars as well, until the green ideologues came along with targets, quotas, and rules stipulating what we can and cannot drive, and how the vehicle should be powered.
As so often, Rayner has got this completely upside down. Homes will become more “affordable” once we have more of them, not when the government simply sets a price.
If anyone wants any proof of that, they have to look to the other side of the Channel. France, a country with a similar population, builds almost twice as many new homes every year as we do in the UK. And – quelle surprise! – prices are far more affordable. Heck, who knows, perhaps that would work in this country as well.
The “new towns” policy is now surely dead in the water. Nothing will get built. At the same time, we can be sure that Labour will ramp up immigration at least to the same extraordinarily high levels witnessed under the Conservatives and perhaps even higher.
Its “safe and legal” routes for asylum seekers, while arguably “kinder”, will clearly increase the number of applicants; it will cave into the demands from its backers in higher education to keep the numbers of foreign students at record levels; and it will allow employers, especially in the health service and care homes, to keep bringing in all the foreign workers they argue they need.
Add it all up, and the population will soar, while there will be no obvious increase in the supply of new homes.
The result? As even Angela Rayner should be able to work out, the housing crisis will get worse and worse – and the Labour government will only have itself to blame.
