Boris Johnson’s ‘planning revolution’ is just recycled gimmicks

Once upon a time I compiled a Top 10 list of recurring news headlines, including “Fifty-five-year library loan returned: library staff amused and no fine levied”, “Ed Miliband calls for full independent public inquiry” and “World’s oldest person dies.” I could have added: “Government announces overhaul of planning system.”

The reason this story comes round again and again is that the housing problem in Britain is complicated and the law on planning permission particularly so. There are no easy answers, or governments would have acted on them by now, yet new prime ministers feel that they have to be seen to be doing something. Every time, it is the “biggest shakeup of the planning system for decades” as the government promises to “cut red tape” and “unlock” land that has been “hoarded”.

The promise to slash red tape is a reliable indicator of a non-policy. I am reminded of a Conservative publicity stunt when they were in opposition in the 1990s: they wanted to stage a real bonfire of regulations on the beach at their annual conference in Bournemouth – but they were stopped because it was against the regulations.

Cutting red tape is like cracking down on tax avoidance and tax evasion: often the source of large sums of revenue to fill the holes in any party’s fiscal plans, but equally notional.

Most of what passes for political debate about housing policy and planning reform ignores the central problem, which is that there isn’t much space in the south and east of England, where most people want to live. Everyone wants more houses, but no one wants them in the green spaces near where they are. If you want to sound radical, you talk about low-quality agricultural land in the green belt, but no one will ever vote for it, so governments are reduced to gimmicks.

They are all here in Robert Jenrick’s white paper. Gimmicky discounts for first-time buyers and key workers, which will subsidise the few at the expense of the many. Simplifying planning rules to create three zones, for “growth”, “renewal” and “protection” (and then in two and a half years, which is how long local councils have to draw the maps, we discover that everything anyone actually wants to build on is “protected”). Something something brownfield sites. All new homes to be “zero carbon ready”, a lovely new bit of jargon, which means “not actually zero carbon until 2050”. And some public relations fluff about “tree-lined streets” as if no one had ever thought of them before.

The white paper will follow the usual path into legislation, which means it will be watered down to make sure that it can get through parliament. Boris Johnson’s majority of 78 would disappear if 40 Conservative MPs for rural seats opposed to “overdevelopment” think it really is a “developers’ charter”, which is what Mike Amesbury, Labour’s shadow housing minister called it.

And all this is to be overseen by Jenrick, a cabinet minister known to the public for giving the go-ahead to a plan to build tower blocks south of Canary Wharf that he accepted was unlawful, and for owning so many houses himself he couldn’t decide which one to lock down in. He is by some accounts a decent and effective minister, who is overseeing good work on rough sleeping, but it is not obvious that he enjoys the public’s confidence on planning rules.

In sum, then, nothing much will change. Houses will continue to be built, but not enough to make a dent in prices. The most green aspect of government policy will be the number of gimmicks that are recycled. And no one has said anything about the step change in office space driven by coronavirus.

Johnson says many of the right things about the deeper causes of our housing problems, in particular wanting to boost productivity and jobs outside the south and east of England, so that people want to live there. But no one knows how to achieve it.

The market left to itself seems to be building quite a lot of high-rise flats in urban areas, some of which do not actually hurt the eyes. But a Conservative government, even one in hock to former Labour voters in the north and Midlands, is never going to tax property wealth proportionately – and no government can do much about low interest rates that push up prices and provide an incentive to existing property owners to borrow more to buy to let.

This time next year, when the legislation is finally published, expect to read those headlines, “Government announces overhaul of planning system,” all over again.