Sir Keir Starmer has said Labour will allow more homes to be on green belt land and relax planning restrictions.
In an interview with BBC Breakfast, Sir Keir said that they “would make those tough choices and say to local areas, notwithstanding that it’s greenbelt, if it’s a car park or similar land which doesn’t affect the beauty of our countryside… then we’ll change the planning rules, we’ll give you the powers to do that”.
The Labour manifesto states that they would boost homeownership and housebuilding by setting the target of a homeownership rate to 70%. It also states that it would help first-time buyers onto the ladder with a new, comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme.
Under this scheme, the “state will act as guarantor for prospective homeowners who can afford mortgage repayments but struggle to save for a large deposit”.
More on this, the manifesto states that build more high-quality homes across the country and ensure more of these are genuinely affordable and bring the present leasehold system to an end through fundamental reform of the tenure and to enacting legislation to that end as soon as possible.
In an article in the Times, the “Labour leader accused the Conservatives of killing the ‘aspiration of homeowning for a whole generation’ and warned that housebuilding was on course to fall to the lowest level since the Second World War”.
Sir Keir also confirmed that Labour would raise stamp duty paid by foreign individuals, trusts and companies when they buy UK residential property and reform planning and arcane land purchase rules to get Britain building, while fixing the country’s development model.
The latest research from Searchland, the development site sourcing specialists, revealed that reclassifying just 1% of the nation’s green belt could unlock the potential to deliver almost 738,000 new homes with an estimated market value of £317.5bn.
The green belt across England currently covers an estimated 1,638,150 hectares, or 16.382bn square metres, accounting for some 12.6% of the nation’s total land area. With the average new-build plot requiring an estimated 222 square metres of space, England’s entire greenbelt could facilitate some 73.790m new homes.
The new paper from the Whitehall Group, “A vision for the UK housing market”, written by Anne Clare Harper and Emma Fletcher, stated that 98% of homes that will exist in five years’ time will have already been built, and 80% of the housing stock in 2050 already exists.
“We are building less: 2.2 million net additions were built between 1961-71, compared with 1.7m net additions between 2006-2016,” the paper says.
In an article from the Times, Sir Keir said:
“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.”
On the other hand, Rishi Sunak is said to be considering relaunching the £29billion Help to Buy fund to woo voters. His plans come as thousands struggle to get on the housing ladder at a time of high interest rates and soaring inflation.
Spokesman Jonathan Rolande said:
“Help2Buy did enable many to purchase their own home, but it came at a cost. Billions of pounds were transferred from the hard-pressed taxpayer to the profits of large new-home builders whose income and share price soared during the giveaway.
The property system is based on pure free-market thinking and if you put money into a buyer’s pocket, and the seller knows this, the asking price goes up.
Help2Buy helped to fuel enormous house price growth over ten years – bringing it back is not the way to fix the problems that it caused.
Whilst its true that a huge Government subsidy would help incentivise developers to get building it will not mean that insufficient numbers will be built.”
Rolande stated that in the last 13 years “only half of the relatively modest 300,000 requirement have been built due to a combination of planning delays, nimbyism, land-banking, a lack of plentiful skilled labour and shortages of materials”. He added:
“Whether you’re a homeowner, a renter, a landlord or a professional in the property business the chances are you will agree on one thing – the property market in the UK is well and truly broken. House prices have recently reached a record high. Rents are now following them. Worse still, wages are failing to keep up with the rising cost of living, including rising mortgage rates. We can’t carry on like this.”
One Response
What does the Whitehall Group do? And who is Jonathan Rolande a spokesman for?
Thanks