Outside Glastonbury last month, festivalgoers might have caught sight of David Cameron’s- policy of planning de-regulation in action, sprawling across Somerset. Acres of identikit houses, mini-Tudor and mini-Georgian, seemingly flown in and dumped from somewhere off London’s North Circular Road. Hundreds of other similar estates appeared across Gloucestershire, Berkshire, Suffolk, Essex and anywhere a Whitehall inspector thought to plant a housing statistic. Local context was disregarded, electors revolted and the policy was eventually reversed.
Keir Starmer wants to bring the policy back. He has identified the nation’s economic problems with a lack of growth and lack of growth with housebuilding. This, he believes, is being impeded by local planners and despised nimbys. He showed his machismo towards them by getting his energy secretary, Ed Miliband, immediately to inflict two giant solar panel arrays on to a furious East Anglia, with a promise of onshore wind turbines and pylons to come.
New houses are nothing to do with growth. They are consumption, and a diversion of resources from productive investment. Labour’s leader had merely been arm-twisted by Britain’s most powerful lobby, the construction industry, which argued that new houses hold the key to political popularity. The same lobby persuaded Cameron to let them create “executive estates” across meadows in the home counties and Midlands, with the bonus of a few luxury towers in central London and Manchester. It is what the lobby meant by “meeting housing need”.
The consequence of Cameron excluding........