Local - But Not That Local! Labour's Plan to Power Up Britain

Swerving around the obvious sections about how the Tories have ruined the country, I found Labour's plan to get us all building again plausible in principle and, well, exciting, if a little shaky on the delivery. 

One of my greatest bug bears with planning is the lack of regional thinking for large scale planning policy. Cities, such as Oxford and Leicester for example, are in constant negotiation with the surrounding authorities to accommodate their housing needs. And don't get me started on Green Belt, I have other blogs for that.

Zoom in...zoom in...zoom in...too far!

Labour wants to introduce the awfully named 'Take Back Control Act' (MAGA anyone?) providing greater power to 'local' leaders (but how local?) who have "skin in the game". Local Growth Plans will be produced for city regions, based upon "sensible economic geographies" (my new favourite phrase), with the document containing numerous references to the successes of Labour mayors. This, they say, will give them the right balance of scale versus local knowledge, making policy on a scale that is not "so local that it does not reflect people's working, commuting and social patterns". Localism is dead, long live Localishism?

So far so plausible.

So how are they going to do this? Obviously planning reform, the obligatory prospective new Government buzz phrase. In the 'what exciting metaphor is the planning system this year' game, the planning system is now 'sclerotic' and Labour are telling us they are the much needed medicine to fix it all (spoiler alert, sclerosis isn't curable).

• First of all the 'Housing Recovery Plan', to be delivered in the 'first weeks and months'. Does this mean it will be drip fed or that it will take an awfully long time to read? 
• Reintroduction of mandatory housing targets, giving local leaders a say in the 'how' but not the 'if'.
• Passports for urban brownfield sites (presumably so they can go on holiday to Conservative seats).
• Building 1.5 million new homes in the next Parliament and in the 'right' places (Conservative seats again?).
• Employing 300 new planning officers to make it all happen.

1.5 million homes in 'the next Parliament', so five years? I don't need to point out to you the obvious flaw in this proposal. Even if we all magically had an application ready to go the day after the election (alright, I know you do), nobody is putting any of those houses on the ground for well over a year, probably two, that's 20-40% of the time gone. So, best case scenario, there are three years to build 1.5 million homes? Plus all the nice new R&D, industry and infrastructure that we'll also be building at the same time. We can do HS3 in the next five years right? And obviously the UK's housebuilders can build that many properties in that timeframe...

To make this happen, the new government will pull out of the ether 300 new planning officers. Presumably, these 300 officers, who have been sat around waiting for this opportunity, will each have 5000 houses in their pockets. And of course, these planning officers will single handedly manage the entire caseload of a scheme passing through planning, reviewing the ecology, the landscape, the transport, the heritage and so on. It's OK though, because the new Government will release its 'Skills England' programme "to identify skills needs in each area and work with education providers, local leaders and business to fill them". I assume the first chapter will be how to build the time machine to go back ten years to train the relevant candidates.

I may be being glib and scathing (where is that sarcasm font when one needs it?) but I very much like the principle of a more strategic and regional approach to planning, the potential to employ economies of scale within planning authorities and the 'city region' approach. I applaud this and am excited for its potential benefits.

However, like many of you, I am sceptical of the ability to deliver those ambitious targets. If all else fails, they can always revert to the Conservative hospitals tactic of counting extensions as new houses and properties that have already been built.