Anthony Breach is a Senior Analyst at Centre for Cities, where he leads on housing and planning.
If Labour do form the next government, they will need to avoid the problems that have bedevilled the Conservatives since 2010 across two areas: planning reform and devolution.
Reforming planning and pushing on devolution is politically challenging. But they are worth tackling because they improve outcomes across a range of other policy areas that voters care about. Better national economic growth, local finance, housing, local transport, social care, and others all depend on having a strong state at the local level that benefits from local economic growth and new development.
Conservative reforms since 2010 have made progress on tackling New Labour’s centralisation of England and many of its planning barriers. As of this year, exactly 50 per cent of the population of England can vote for a city region mayor, and further devolution deals will make England majority-mayoral next year. The National Planning Policy Framework and the forthcoming National Development Management Policies are also big improvements on what we had before.
Through experience, Conservatives have learned that taking on your own side in these policy areas is often more difficult than taking on the opposition. Labour will need to avoid complacency and naïvety that their own side will do what a possible national Labour government wants them to do.
Take housing and planning first. Both Labour and the Conservatives have come in recent years to understand that housebuilding in England is too low and too difficult, and that our internationally-unusual discretionary planning system is the principal cause of this problem. Labour has rightly moved from opposition to Boris Johnson’s planning reforms to supporting planning reform with a promise to “back the builders, not the blockers”.
But if backing the builders was easy, then the blockers wouldn’t be able to block very much.
In some cases, there is a shared caution between the Conservatives and Labour at the national level. Despite wanting planning reform to drive a big boost to growth through higher housebuilding, Labour’s target of 1.5 million homes over the course of the Parliament – 300,000 a year – is the same as the current Government’s aspiration.
Both are well below the 442,000 a year we at Centre for Cities have calculated is necessary to make a serious dent in the backlog of 4.3 million homes missing from England.
Yet the real blockers are at the local level. For the Conservatives, the biggest problem has been the green belt district councils in the Tory home-county heartlands next to London. These places will remain a blocker on new homes even if Labour form the next Government.
Awkwardly, Labour has blockers of its own in local government. For instance, Sir Keir Starmer has sensibly said that parts of the green belt around England’s cities need to be released for new homes. But this position is not shared by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, who instead agrees with Michael Gove that London’s green belt must be protected at any cost.
Changing the Mayor’s mind on green belt, and a host of other barriers to new housing in the London Plan and in the local plans of London boroughs, will be essential if housebuilding is to provide the national economic boost that the shadow Treasury team desires, as supplying more homes in the most high-demand and expensive parts of England will do much more for productivity, incomes, and tax revenue than building anywhere else.
A similar party political problem exists in local government funding. A narrow and rigid local tax base, cuts to central government grants, and growing pressure on mushrooming statutory duties have together brought English local government – much of which is now Labour – to the brink of effective bankruptcy. That the weakest councils have already fallen over is beside the point; these issues affect the entire system.
Labour in government would have to deal with this problem, and like the current Government, it would face two options.
One is to increase national taxation to pump more grants into councils. The other is reforming local taxation through fiscal devolution so that councils fund their spending by growing their local (and the national) economy.
The former is less controversial in local government circles, but would squeeze national spending and fiscal headroom for other priorities. The second would cost the Treasury much less, and improve economic growth to boot.
However, it would be much more controversial among Labour councils and mayors because it would transfer accountability for local taxation and local economies out of Whitehall and to them. Many do not want this responsibility, and are more comfortable simply receiving subsidies from central government.
Delivering fiscal devolution and planning reform at a national scale raises the question of geography. For English local government to be strong enough to absorb these new responsibilities, the map of local authorities needs to be consistent and much less fragmented than it is today, and voters need to know they can hold somebody accountable for local taxes.
This rationale is what has driven the patient work of the Government since 2015 in agreeing devolution deals with mayors that align with economic geography. Unfortunately, as the easier deals have been agreed, increasingly the remaining deals to be done have awkward geographies or councils intransigent in their opposition to devolution and mayors.
Again, intra-party disagreements are often a bigger barrier than inter-party disagreements. The Conservatives have found it easier to get devolution done with predominantly Labour metropolitan authorities than with the Tory strongholds in the shires and rural districts. Even those that have recently agreed to ‘county deals’ with the Government have done so with reservations.
For example, Norfolk has insisted on referring to its new mayoral office as a ‘Directly Elected Leader’. Similarly, Cornwall u-turned on a plan to secure a mayoral devolution deal after a majority of people who responded to an opt-in consultation opposed a mayor – even though a representative survey showed a majority of people in Cornwall actually supported a mayor.
If a Labour government continued with a deals-based approach, it will face similar obstacles but in different places. Smaller and less affluent urban councils surrounded by ‘doughnut’ shires will often be reluctant to agree a devolution deal that sees them share power with their more numerous suburban and rural (and often Tory) neighbours. Plymouth’s opposition to a Devon devolution deal is an example of this position.
For a Labour government, or indeed a Conservative one, serious progress over the next parliament will require them to take on their party’s vested interests with a robust framework for reform of the state in England and impose it in the national interest if necessary.
Labour currently talks a big game on devolution and planning reform. But for their actions to meet the scale of the challenge, the prize, and their own rhetoric, they will need a new approach. Learning Tory lessons on the difficulties of persuading allies is the first step towards this. Labour should anticipate that, if they do enter Government, that it will be much harder to secure agreement on what must be done than that something should be done.
The post Anthony Breach: What the Conservatives can teach Labour about planning reform and devolution appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Anthony Breach
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