Growth, rightly, is a key plank of Labour's plans to generate more money to spend. Today Rachel Reeves has pledged to “deliver growth” in her, with plans to restore mandatory local housebuilding targets and relax planning restrictions on “ugly” parts of the green belt.
Am I alone in wondering how this is actually going to deliver any growth for years?
Firstly, the level of opposition to building on greenfield sites (helpfully redefined as only the grey and ugly bit now) means that it will take for ever to get plans approved. Even changing the law won't really help, as local MPs get dragged into opposing every plan, and the inevitable cries of 'undemocratic' as the views of local people are ignored.
There's plenty of housebuilding taking place at the moment, on land that is increased massively in value because of the planning permission granted by the State. In turn farmers and landowners sell this land for housing and make extra-ordinary profits (agricultural land carries a huge number of exemptions from CGT and IHT). Likewise housebuilders benefit too when/if they buy land without planning and hold it for years.
How about taxing the value that exceeds pure agricultural value heavily, and investing those tax receipts in proper social housing, or in public infrastructure? In the south, land with planning can easily be worth £1m+ an acre, but is worth, at best, £25k an acre as arable land. Stick a windfall tax on this, and return allow them to keep agricultural property relief for genuine cases of farms being passed from generation to generation of working farmers - not institutional investor farmers like Dyson.
Secondly, building stuff takes people with skills. And and as anyone knows if they've been involved in construction on an industrial, commercial or residential level, thanks in part to brexit, in part to COVID and in part 30 years of prioritising university education over technical skills, there's a shortage of pretty much every trade needed to build stuff. So why not just let more people in with the right skills, to work, pay tax, spend money and grow the economy? Rather than this mealy mouthed ' oh cancel Rwanda, we will process everyone and send them back to the country they came from' anti immigration rhetoric. We need people to work, and we have no idea where most illegal immigrants have come from anyway as they've destroyed their papers.
And as a side note, how can one take the position that local mayors should be given more power to determine what happens in their cities, while at the same time take power away from those in more suburban/rural areas to control what happens in their areas?