Labour will tell councils to offer up green belt land for homes
Nandy blames ‘taboo’ for lack of house building as party reveals plan to solve crisis within 10 years
LABOUR would order councils to offer green belt land for development as part of a plan to solve the housing crisis within 10 years, Lisa Nandy has said.
Pledging to take on the “taboo” of developing the green belt, the shadow levelling up secretary blamed a lack of homes on the Tories’ political “cowardice” and said the issue was symbolic of a “broken” system.
Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, she said Labour would use development corporations to develop green belt land, while also siting homes alongside new railways and partnering with pension funds to create extra social housing.
Last month, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he would be on the side of the “builders not the blockers” by developing certain areas of the green belt where it would not affect the beauty of the countryside.
Ms Nandy said that Labour would “take on the taboo around the green belt and declassify the poor-quality parts … which currently aren’t very lucrative for developers but provide good sites for new housing”.
Ms Nandy insisted that Labour would not compromise “green open spaces” or allow communities to be “sucked into the urban sprawl”.
Instead, she said combined authorities – local bodies including Greater Manchester, the Liverpool City Region and South and West Yorkshire, which bring councils together to share responsibilities – would be asked “to identify the areas to declassify”.
“They tend to know already, so a lot of them are brownfield sites that need some investment in order to decontaminate them and bring them back into use,” she said. In order to achieve this, she said Labour would “set up development corporations who are able to take on the land”.
Pioneered in the 1980s by Michael Heseltine, development corporations were created to bring business leaders and councils together to regenerate areas such as London’s Canary Wharf.
They currently exist in the form of “mayoral development corporations” – bodies led by directly elected mayors with powers to buy and develop land and infrastructure.
Ms Nandy said development corporations would be helped by land value reform cutting the cost of home-building. This would involve an overhaul of rules relating to compulsory purchase orders to remove the “hope value” – an added value factored into purchases based on the expectation of future planning permission being granted.
She wanted to “send a strong signal” to the construction industry to “ramp up capacity now”, as Labour plots a course to fix the housing crisis over a decade. “What we’re able to do in year one will be drastically different to what we’re able to do in year 10,” she said.
Last week, the Conservatives’ ambivalence about building new homes was on display as the party launched attack adverts against Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the issue, including one appearing to criticise the latter for wanting to build 300,000 houses a year – the Government’s own target.
Attacking the inclination to give way to the nimby (“not in my back yard”) tendency, Ms Nandy said it had been “too easy for politicians of all parties to duck the big choices”. “It’s cowardice that’s got us here,” she said.
The failure to deliver new houses in sufficient quantities was the “biggest indicator of how badly politics has failed” and the “most visible symbol” of a “broken political system”.
As well as reforming the green belt, Ms Nandy said Labour would learn from the example of Germany and Scandinavia to “ally housing with major infrastructure projects”, suggesting it could be used to help fund such schemes.