Politics: 39 steps

By Richard North - July 18, 2024

“Starmer Rips Up Planning Rules for Growth in King’s Speech” says the headline on Bloomberg, the message replicated elsewhere announcing what is in fact a major assault on what is left of local democracy.

Typically, this is being projected by the Labour administration as “reform”, a move supposedly to enable 1.5 million homes to be built in the next five years, in addition to “critical” energy, industrial and transport infrastructure projects.

With 39 Bills in the King’s speech, though, the media is spoilt for choice in addressing the worst of the batch, and the planning “reforms” will have to wait their turn before they are given the treatment they need.

In The Times, for instance, we only get the sketchiest of details about what is labelled the “Planning and Infrastructure Bill”, a “vital piece of legislation” that the Labour administration claims will make it faster and cheaper to build houses, onshore wind farms and other pieces of national infrastructure.

Also, we are told, it will reduce the compensation paid to owners of land subject to a compulsory purchase order for affordable housing, and supposedly speed the planning process for large infrastructure projects such as nuclear power stations and data labs. `

Says The Times, the devil will be in the details of this Bill – but then that is invariably the case with such proposals, although the paper focuses on the proposed plans to “modernise” planning committees and reform compulsory purchase orders. These, it says, “are likely to be met with protests from landowners”.

However, one knows instinctively that trouble lies ahead when Bloomberg tells us that Starmer’s administration is saying that it will enable “democratic engagement” with planning reforms, but that the emphasis will be on “how, not if, homes and infrastructure are built”. This, we are informed, is a direct warning to so-called NIMBYs who have opposed building works in their local areas.

Yet, to get some idea of the detail is not so straightforward. There is only the briefest mention of the Bill in the King’s speech itself, so the next port of call has to be the government’s background briefing.

Here, rather predictably, we find that the new administration has learnt well the black art of propaganda, saying as much as possible while actually minimising the flow of information.

The Bill, the government says, “will make improvements to the planning system at a local level, modernising planning committees and increasing local planning authorities’ capacity to deliver an improved service”. It goes on to use such words as “streamlining” and making “improvements” to the planning system at local level.

There is also much talk of “modernising” and increasing capacities of local planning authorities to “deliver an improved service”, but not the slightest hint of how that will happen. Only when we get into the nitty gritty of the Commons debate do we get some idea that the classic “Orwellian inversion” is in play.

This comes initially from a figure of another age, a very much shrunken man called Rishi Sunak. He is still around, currently masquerading as the leader of the opposition who, in his official response to the speech notes of the Bill, “a system that does not allow local people to have a say will damage public consent for more housing in the long term”.

We are at last getting to the nub of the issue but are still short of any of that devilish detail. But not even the Guardian is much help.

All this paper tells us is that the Bill is one of the government’s main measures. It is, that paper tells us, “intended to streamline and speed up planning and associated infrastructure needs to get more housing built”. Tantalisingly, we learn that it “includes a more top-down approach, with penalties for councils that fail to get moving”.

Somewhere in all this, though, is a cross-reference to an English devolution Bill, which is intended to give new powers to metro mayors and combined authorities, supposedly to “support local growth plans that bring economic benefit to communities”.

Almost certainly, this is going to mean that local authorities will be stripped of even more powers, which will be handed to largely invisible mayors who nobody wanted and almost nobody could be bothered to vote for.

In the last elections, the West Yorkshire mayor got 50.4 percent of the vote on a turnout of 32.7 percent – which would have been even lower has it not been linked to the local elections. But even this inflated figure only gives the mayor a mandate from 16.5 percent of the registered electorate.

With such extravagent mandates, these “local leaders” are to be given the tools to kickstart their economies, “as well as empowering communities to transform their neighbourhoods, high streets and important community assets”.

But you know the government is up to no good when it blandly declares that it is “improving and unblocking local decision-making” through more effective governance arrangements, ensuring mayors and Combined Authorities can get on and deliver for their areas.

No one, as yet, has pinned the government to the wall, asking for the detail of what these mayors are supposed to deliver, but what – I suspect – we are not supposed to do is make linkages with other parts of the government’s programme.

There is, on that list, the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill – again with detail on the thin side. But part of that is “clearing the asylum backlog” to end hotel use. And when one asks how the displaced asylum seekers are to be housed, there emerges the distinct possibility of links.

Helping us do that is the Telegraph which is telling us that Labour will fast-track plans to grant asylum to up to 90,000 migrants earmarked for Rwanda. With at least 60,000 of those expected to be approved in short order, that can only increase the burden on the housing stock.

Needless to say, the NIMBY tendency will be out in full force when locations are decided for housing these unwanted migrants, and a new planning bill which will allow central government to impose settlements on local communities might prove to be extremely helpful.

Then, if you want to see the effects of – as Sunak put it – “a system that does not allow local people to have a say”, in damaging public consent, one might look across the water to Ireland where low-grade civil war seems to be on the verge of breaking out.

At the centre of the current storm is the village of Coolock, where the Irish government is intent on forcing the settlement of potentially 1,000 asylum seekers on a local community, provoking massive demonstration and violent confrontations with the police.

Even relatively sanguine commentators are beginning to question the policy, while one activist notes that If you live in Coolock and somebody in Donegal is building a bungalow, you have the right to lodge a planning objection.

On the other hand, he remarks, if you live in Coolock and government is proposing a tent encampment in your area for 1,000 migrant males, you have no legal rights at all.

On the face of it, with yesterday’s King’s speech, that is what our own government is lining up for us. In the context where a significant cause of the UK housing shortage is “soaring immigration”, this seems the obvious outcome of the government’s “asylum friendly” policy.

It would be quite interesting, therefore, to fast forward fifty years or so, to see whether future historians have marked down this King’s speech as the 39 steps in the breaking down of democratic consent that led to a civil war.