Keir Starmer has declared himself a “yimby”, as he promises to ensure developers can overcome local planning objections to get more houses built. The Labour leader reiterated his pledge that his party would oversee the building of an extra 300,000 new homes every year if elected to government, as experts warned he would need to face down local opposition to do so. Starmer’s aim to overhaul the planning system to make it easier to override the concerns of residents near new developments formed the core of his pitch to the country on Tuesday as he made what is likely to be his final conference speech before an election. Asked by the BBC on Wednesday whether the plans made him a yimby – “yes in my back yard” – Starmer replied: “I am, yes. I think that it’s very important that we build the homes that we need for the future; hugely, hugely important for the aspiration of young people who desperately want to get on the housing ladder … a massive failure for the last 13 years.”
Asked earlier whether that meant ignoring local opponents of development, he said: “Yes, we are going to have to do that. One of the problems we have is that planning at the moment is very, very localised. There isn’t the ability to look across a wider area and say where would the best place be for this development, where could we have a new town?” Starmer’s plans would involve a new generation of “Labour new towns”, which would involve building on the “grey belt” – areas of disused land within the green belt that include wasteland and unused car parks. Experts said the plan could make the nation a profit but might mean adding billions of pounds to the national debt. Opponents, however, warned it could mean overriding local democratic processes.
Greg Hands, the Conservative chair, tweeted that it would be “bad news for local democracy if Sir Keir Starmer ever won power”. Roger Mortlock, the chief executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said: “We challenge the idea that ‘grey’ belt land should include areas of scrubland that should be restored to enhance nature and support natural solutions to the climate crisis.” Labour has been in talks about its new towns plan with the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), which was founded by Ebenezer Howard, the instigator of the original garden city movement that created Letchworth and Welwyn garden cities in the early 20th century. To avoid a repeat of the failures of new town plans under Gordon Brown and David Cameron, the TCPA is calling for the next government to draw up a national strategy, borrowing to fund key infrastructure and to secure public consent. The post-second worldwar new towns programme, which developed Milton Keynes, Stevenage, Harlow, Telford and other communities that are now home to 2.8 million people, was part-funded by government borrowing that was paid back in 1996, said Lock. Toby Lloyd, a former Downing Street housing adviser, estimates that a new town of 15,000 homes could require at least £375m in state funding to buy land, undertake groundworks and install social infrastructure. If scaled up to tackle the estimated need of more than 300,000 new homes a year in England, the government would need to find billions. This borrowing would not have to count towards the government’s fiscal limits if Labour adopted the standard international measure of public debt that excluded development corporations, Lloyd said. But Lloyd, who drafted a new towns plan in 2014 before becoming Theresa May’s housing adviser, believes new towns could also be self-funding if private landowners agree to invest their land on the basis of long-term returns. Either way, the government should install powerful development corporations to “cut through” planning rows that had bogged down previous projects such as the proposed garden city at Ebbsfleet, he said. “There will need to be upfront investment in the new towns,” said Lock. “The low-cost, long-term borrowing approach is still a good one, but it needs to be complemented by finding a way to capture the increase in land value that results from building a new town and reinvesting that in infrastructure. “Building a new town can be hugely profitable, but it’s a long-term, patient investment and that is hugely different to the development model of most volume housebuilders.”