Keir Starmer says Labour would give local authorities power to allow more building on green belt – UK politics live
Keir Starmer says Labour would give local authorities power to allow more building on green belt – UK politics live –
Starmer says Labour would give local authorities power to allow more building on green belt
In his Times interview Keir Starmer said that Labour would give councils and residents more power to approve housebuilding on green belt land. He suggested this would lead to more homes being built (even though it is often local objections that halt development).
Starmer told the Times that one problem is that often the housing that does get approved under the current system is “expensive executive housing” that might not suit local needs. He said restoring the housebuilding targets abandoned by the government would not, on its own, be enough. More building on the green belt should be allowed too, he said.
But he stressed the importance of consulting communities. He said:
We need to have that discussion [about building on the green belt] . But it cannot be reduced to a simple discussion of will you or will you not build on the green belt. This is why it’s important for local areas to have the power to decide where housing is going to be.
Very often the objections that people have to housebuilding on the green belt are valid because the control by landowners and developers mean that the houses are proposed in areas where it’s quite obvious that there’s going to be a local concern.
Give local authorities, local areas more power to decide where it will be and you alleviate that problem. So it’s not as binary or straightforward as ‘green belt, not green belt’. It’s how you direct where the housing will be.
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As PA Media reports, a report in the i newspaper quoted an anonymous source saying that there had been “a very firm instruction [to the police] not to damage the reputation of the UK” by allowing disruptive protests. The Met was criticised in particular for using new powers in the Public Order Act to arrest and detain six activists from the group Republic who had been liasing with police for weeks in advance about what protest activity would be allowed.
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Giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee, Matt Twist, the temporary assistant commissioner for Met operations, said:
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n
I felt under no pressure politically, I felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation, but that was because of the fact that it was a once in a lifetime event for so many people and there would be hundreds of thousands of people in London to celebrate it and also and importantly, this was the biggest protection operation we have ever run.
n
There were 312 protected people that we managed to get in and out of the Abbey and across the footprint in about 90 minutes. So the stakes were enormously high, so I absolutely felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation. but that wasn’t political pressure.
n
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Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has said that the government will prioritise bringing down inflation over cutting taxes. In his speech to the British Chambers of Commerce conference, he said:
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n
What I would say to people worried about levels of taxation is: I agree with that, we have to get our taxes down, particularly our business taxes down.
n
But the worst tax of all is inflation, because inflation is tax which you get nothing back for in return.
n
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On inflation, Hunt said that although it was for the Bank of England to control it through interest rates, the government had a role to play too. He said:
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n
There’s nothing automatic about bringing down inflation. There’s a plan, we are going to stick to it.
n
The Bank of England has a role through monetary policy and interest rates, we support them 150% with that.
n
But we have our role in government, what I do on the fiscal side in terms of tax and spend has an influence and if markets judge that we are not getting our borrowing under control they will punish us with higher interest rates.
n
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In his Times interview Keir Starmer said that Labour would give councils and residents more power to approve housebuilding on green belt land. He suggested this would lead to more homes being built (even though it is often local objections that halt development).
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Starmer told the Times that one problem is that often the housing that does get approved under the current system is “expensive executive housing” that might not suit local needs. He said restoring the housebuilding targets abandoned by the government would not, on its own, be enough. More building on the green belt should be allowed too, he said.
“,”elementId”:”5cf958c2-ca95-4fdf-85b2-10fb61adb940″},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”
But he stressed the importance of consulting communities. He said:
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n
We need to have that discussion [about building on the green belt] . But it cannot be reduced to a simple discussion of will you or will you not build on the green belt. This is why it’s important for local areas to have the power to decide where housing is going to be.
n
Very often the objections that people have to housebuilding on the green belt are valid because the control by landowners and developers mean that the houses are proposed in areas where it’s quite obvious that there’s going to be a local concern.
n
Give local authorities, local areas more power to decide where it will be and you alleviate that problem. So it’s not as binary or straightforward as ‘green belt, not green belt’. It’s how you direct where the housing will be.
n
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Richard Holden, the transport minister, was on the broadcast interview round this morning on behalf of the government. Asked to respond to what Keir Starmer is saying about building houses, he told Talk Radio that the Tories had a record of building homes, because 2.2m houses had been built since 2010.
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He also implied Starmer was being hypocritical. He said:
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n
I’m always interested to hear what the Labour leader has to say because it usually changes on a daily basis. You’ve got to keep following him closely …
n
Like any good barrister, what we see is Keir Starmer attempting to make a different case to a different audience every time he’s got a different case in front of him.
n
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Holden did not flesh out this claim in the interview, but in their Times story Steven Swinford and Henry Zeffman quote a government source giving an example of Labour opposing housebuilding. They report:
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n
A government source highlighted the fact that Lisa Nandy, the shadow secretary for levelling up, housing and communities, recently opposed the building of homes on green belt land in her Wigan constituency. “You can’t trust a word that Starmer says on housing,” the source said. “These are more empty promises from Labour.”
n
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In her London Playbook briefing for Politco, Rosa Prince also points out that in 2021 Labour opposed the planning changes being proposed at the time by the then housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, on the grounds that they were a “developers’ charter”. Jenrick was later sacked and those changes, which would have liberalised planning rules, were abandoned because Tory backbenchers opposed them.
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The Vauxhall and Fiat manufacturer Stellantis has urged the government to renegotiate rules in the Brexit deal that it says could force it to shut some of its UK operations, putting thousands of jobs at risk. Mark Sweney has the story here.
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Good morning. Keir Starmer has given an interview to the Times published this morning, he is doing a media round, and he is giving a speech to the British Chambers of Commerce this afternoon. And he has got a big message to publicise: Labour will go on a building spree, and it is willing to relax planning restrictions to do so.
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This is what he will tell the BCC:
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n
You can’t be serious about raising productivity, about improving the supply-side capacity of our economy and about arresting our economic decline, without a plan for the windfarms, the laboratories, the warehouses and the homes this country so desperately needs.
n
Mark my words: we will take on planning reform. We’ll bring back local housing targets. We’ll streamline the process for national infrastructure projects and commercial development and we’ll remove the veto used by big landowners to stop shovels hitting the ground.
n
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This is what he told the Times:
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n
[The Conservatives] have killed the dream, the aspiration of homeowning for a whole generation. It will fall to us to deal with that.n
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And he has summed it up with a slogan that he has pinched wholesale from a Bagehot column in the Economist last week: Labour is on the side of the builders, not the blockers. He will tell the BCC:
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n
We choose the builders, not the blockers; the future, not the past; renewal not decline. We choose growth.
n
“,”elementId”:”9df6d1d5-f0d6-4a98-b4f4-7463366e5775″},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”
In policy terms, this is not new. Starmer has been talking about the need to build more homes, and the need for planning reform, for ages. But this has become a better issue for Labour since the government abandoned plans at the end of last year to impose mandatory housebuilding targets on councils. And Rishi Sunak’s admission, in an interview last month, that he had to abandon the targets because they were too unpopular with Conservative party members, has made it easy for Labour to depict the Tories as “blockers”.
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I will post more from the Times interview, and the speech preview, shortly.
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And the Tories are accusing Labour of hypocrisy. I will post on that shortly too.
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Here is the agenda for the day.
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9.40am: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, speaks at the British Chambers of Commerce conference.
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10am: Matt Twist, the Metropolitan police’s temporary assistant commissioner, and Chris Noble, the chief constable of Staffordshire police and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s protest lead, give evidence to the Commons home affairs committee about policing protests. At 10.45am Graham Smith, the chief executive of Republic, gives evidence.
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11am: MPs start voting in the election for a new chair of the Commons culture committee. The three candidates are Damian Collins, Damian Green and Dame Caroline Dinenage.
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11am: Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister, gives a speech to the final day of the National Conservatism conference. At 5.45pm Lee Anderson, the Conservative party’s deputy chair, is speaking.
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12pm: Oliver Dowden, the deputy PM, faces Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, at PMQs. Sunak is flying to Japan for the G7 summit.
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3.20pm: Starmer speaks at the BCC conference.
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Also, at some point today Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, is publishing the renters (reform) bill.
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If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a PC or a laptop. (It is not available on the app yet.) This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
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Key events
Met was not under ‘political pressure’ over coronation policing, senior offficer tells MPs
A senior officer in the Metropolitan police has rejected claims that the force come under political pressure to ensure protests did not disrupt the coronation.
As PA Media reports, a report in the i newspaper quoted an anonymous source saying that there had been “a very firm instruction [to the police] not to damage the reputation of the UK” by allowing disruptive protests. The Met was criticised in particular for using new powers in the Public Order Act to arrest and detain six activists from the group Republic who had been liasing with police for weeks in advance about what protest activity would be allowed.
Giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee, Matt Twist, the temporary assistant commissioner for Met operations, said:
I felt under no pressure politically, I felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation, but that was because of the fact that it was a once in a lifetime event for so many people and there would be hundreds of thousands of people in London to celebrate it and also and importantly, this was the biggest protection operation we have ever run.
There were 312 protected people that we managed to get in and out of the Abbey and across the footprint in about 90 minutes. So the stakes were enormously high, so I absolutely felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation. but that wasn’t political pressure.
Hunt tells BCC that bringing down inflation will take priority over cutting taxes
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has said that the government will prioritise bringing down inflation over cutting taxes. In his speech to the British Chambers of Commerce conference, he said:
What I would say to people worried about levels of taxation is: I agree with that, we have to get our taxes down, particularly our business taxes down.
But the worst tax of all is inflation, because inflation is tax which you get nothing back for in return.
On inflation, Hunt said that although it was for the Bank of England to control it through interest rates, the government had a role to play too. He said:
There’s nothing automatic about bringing down inflation. There’s a plan, we are going to stick to it.
The Bank of England has a role through monetary policy and interest rates, we support them 150% with that.
But we have our role in government, what I do on the fiscal side in terms of tax and spend has an influence and if markets judge that we are not getting our borrowing under control they will punish us with higher interest rates.
Starmer says Labour would give local authorities power to allow more building on green belt
In his Times interview Keir Starmer said that Labour would give councils and residents more power to approve housebuilding on green belt land. He suggested this would lead to more homes being built (even though it is often local objections that halt development).
Starmer told the Times that one problem is that often the housing that does get approved under the current system is “expensive executive housing” that might not suit local needs. He said restoring the housebuilding targets abandoned by the government would not, on its own, be enough. More building on the green belt should be allowed too, he said.
But he stressed the importance of consulting communities. He said:
We need to have that discussion [about building on the green belt] . But it cannot be reduced to a simple discussion of will you or will you not build on the green belt. This is why it’s important for local areas to have the power to decide where housing is going to be.
Very often the objections that people have to housebuilding on the green belt are valid because the control by landowners and developers mean that the houses are proposed in areas where it’s quite obvious that there’s going to be a local concern.
Give local authorities, local areas more power to decide where it will be and you alleviate that problem. So it’s not as binary or straightforward as ‘green belt, not green belt’. It’s how you direct where the housing will be.
Minister defends Tories’ record on housebuilding in face of criticism from Starmer
Richard Holden, the transport minister, was on the broadcast interview round this morning on behalf of the government. Asked to respond to what Keir Starmer is saying about building houses, he told Talk Radio that the Tories had a record of building homes, because 2.2m houses had been built since 2010.
He also implied Starmer was being hypocritical. He said:
I’m always interested to hear what the Labour leader has to say because it usually changes on a daily basis. You’ve got to keep following him closely …
Like any good barrister, what we see is Keir Starmer attempting to make a different case to a different audience every time he’s got a different case in front of him.
Holden did not flesh out this claim in the interview, but in their Times story Steven Swinford and Henry Zeffman quote a government source giving an example of Labour opposing housebuilding. They report:
A government source highlighted the fact that Lisa Nandy, the shadow secretary for levelling up, housing and communities, recently opposed the building of homes on green belt land in her Wigan constituency. “You can’t trust a word that Starmer says on housing,” the source said. “These are more empty promises from Labour.”
In her London Playbook briefing for Politco, Rosa Prince also points out that in 2021 Labour opposed the planning changes being proposed at the time by the then housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, on the grounds that they were a “developers’ charter”. Jenrick was later sacked and those changes, which would have liberalised planning rules, were abandoned because Tory backbenchers opposed them.
Vauxhall maker says Brexit deal must be renegotiated or it could shut UK plant
The Vauxhall and Fiat manufacturer Stellantis has urged the government to renegotiate rules in the Brexit deal that it says could force it to shut some of its UK operations, putting thousands of jobs at risk. Mark Sweney has the story here.
Labour are ‘builders’, Tories are ‘blockers’, says Starmer as he promises planning reform to boost housebuilding
Good morning. Keir Starmer has given an interview to the Times published this morning, he is doing a media round, and he is giving a speech to the British Chambers of Commerce this afternoon. And he has got a big message to publicise: Labour will go on a building spree, and it is willing to relax planning restrictions to do so.
This is what he will tell the BCC:
You can’t be serious about raising productivity, about improving the supply-side capacity of our economy and about arresting our economic decline, without a plan for the windfarms, the laboratories, the warehouses and the homes this country so desperately needs.
Mark my words: we will take on planning reform. We’ll bring back local housing targets. We’ll streamline the process for national infrastructure projects and commercial development and we’ll remove the veto used by big landowners to stop shovels hitting the ground.
This is what he told the Times:
[The Conservatives] have killed the dream, the aspiration of homeowning for a whole generation. It will fall to us to deal with that.
And he has summed it up with a slogan that he has pinched wholesale from a Bagehot column in the Economist last week: Labour is on the side of the builders, not the blockers. He will tell the BCC:
We choose the builders, not the blockers; the future, not the past; renewal not decline. We choose growth.
In policy terms, this is not new. Starmer has been talking about the need to build more homes, and the need for planning reform, for ages. But this has become a better issue for Labour since the government abandoned plans at the end of last year to impose mandatory housebuilding targets on councils. And Rishi Sunak’s admission, in an interview last month, that he had to abandon the targets because they were too unpopular with Conservative party members, has made it easy for Labour to depict the Tories as “blockers”.
I will post more from the Times interview, and the speech preview, shortly.
And the Tories are accusing Labour of hypocrisy. I will post on that shortly too.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.40am: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, speaks at the British Chambers of Commerce conference.
10am: Matt Twist, the Metropolitan police’s temporary assistant commissioner, and Chris Noble, the chief constable of Staffordshire police and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s protest lead, give evidence to the Commons home affairs committee about policing protests. At 10.45am Graham Smith, the chief executive of Republic, gives evidence.
11am: MPs start voting in the election for a new chair of the Commons culture committee. The three candidates are Damian Collins, Damian Green and Dame Caroline Dinenage.
11am: Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister, gives a speech to the final day of the National Conservatism conference. At 5.45pm Lee Anderson, the Conservative party’s deputy chair, is speaking.
12pm: Oliver Dowden, the deputy PM, faces Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, at PMQs. Sunak is flying to Japan for the G7 summit.
3.20pm: Starmer speaks at the BCC conference.
Also, at some point today Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, is publishing the renters (reform) bill.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a PC or a laptop. (It is not available on the app yet.) This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
