Nimbys need to take one for the team: how do we make planning decisions for everyone?

Local activism is choking our planning system and crippling housebuilding, but we also need radical devolution of power: these two urges will come into conflict

I tweeted earlier with a link to Jonn Elledge’s Substack, The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, because his gallop through the different kinds of objections people raise to house-building when it’s happening in their area amused me, seemed acute and obviously represented a bottled-up frustration. When you can make something witty and readable without sacrificing some valid and hard-hitting policy-related observations, in this business you’re doing well.

That the United Kingdom has a housing crisis seems to be very widely accepted now. It is not easy to pin down every detail, but one estimate suggests England alone needs 340,000 new homes a year, of which 145,000 should be “affordable”. At the last general election in 2019, all the major parties had manifesto commitments to increase the housing supply, and the Conservatives pledged to build 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s and a million new homes over the course of the parliament.

(That figure of 300,000 is deeply embedded in the Tory psyche. At the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool in 1950, a very orderly and restrained rebellion had broken out after Harmar Nicholls, recently elected MP for Peterborough (and father of Coronation Street legend Sue Nicholls), had made a passionate speech advocating a target of building 300,000 new houses a year. It caught the mood of the audience, who began chanting “Three hundred thousand!” After frantic instant consultations with the Conservative Research Department on the platform, the party chairman, Lord Woolton, announced “This is magnificent!” and promptly adopted the target as party policy. When the party returned to government in October 1951, Churchill appointed Harold Macmillan to be minister of housing and local government, disppointing a man who had concentrated on defence and foreign affairs for six years of opposition, but told him it would make or break his career. Macmillan oversaw 240,000 new houses in 1951/52 then 301,000 in 1952/53, and another 280,000 in 1953/54. By the beginning of 1957, Macmillan was prime minister. So the figure of 300,000 is a totem.)

Bluntly, we are not building enough new houses. The low point was 2012/13, when only 125,000 were built, and, while it climbed to 243,000 in 2019/20, the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic was a blow. The rate increased again in 2021/22, but it remains significantly lower than is required, and showing no signs of increasing by the amount which is needed. A report published last February estimated that there is a backlog of 4.3 million “missing” homes, that is, those that were never built.

This is not an essay about housing, not least because there are people who know the subject much better than I do (though this House of Commons Library briefing paper is useful). But there is considerable consensus that one major obstacle is our planning system. Here the ur-demon is Labour’s Town and Country Planning Act 1947, introduced at the height of the belief in a controlled economy and a big state. It established the concept of planning permission, sweeping away the old notion that ownership of land conferred all the permission that was needed, and sought to control urban sprawl that might ensue from the New Towns Act 1946.

The energy which runs through the 1947 act is dirigiste: plans, boards, targets, committees. It created a Central Land Board—could anything sound more emblematic of the Attlee government?—and designated county and borough councils as local planning authorities, giving them extensive powers including compulsory purchase. The current system is built on the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, as well as the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 and the National Planning Policy Framework introduced in 2012. (Different regulations apply in the devolved jurisdictions.) That description alone highlights the complex and bureaucratic nature of the planning régime: it takes too long to be granted permission, the process is paperwork-intensive, and—the point Elledge was making—it is biased towards those who object.

Effectively we have created, only partly by design, a system which favours stasis. It is easier to object to new development than it is to build more houses. One particular subset identified by Elledge struck a chord with me, that which he entitles “No, that’ll only benefit developers”. He is rightly excoriating.

It’s often stated as a sort of gotcha, that new housing would make money for a company, and thus anyone who opposes it must be naive/evil/in the pay of that company… The fact that almost anything produces money for a corporation because we live in a capitalist economy doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Neither does the fact that another group of people it would benefit are the people who’d get to live in the homes, and a third is “literally everyone else” because not having enough homes in the places where the jobs are is crushing the economy.

I paused at this because it is representative of a wider section of opinion on the Left in particular, one which has a squeamish disdain for the mechanistic business of creating wealth. I wrote about the Labour Party’s prejudice against private enterprise in The Critic recently but the problem is more fundamental than that. We simply seem to have lost any taste for the profit motive, regarding it as somehow vulgar and selfish.

The point I want to draw from all of this is that the word I have so far avoided, “nimbyism”, is throttling our housing market and that is having enormous consequences for the economy, the cost of living, the employment market and the whole shape of our lives professionally and personally. To be a nimby—“not in my back yard”, for anyone who’s new to this planet—is fundamentally to be selfish, to say that you will obstruct the nation’s economic development for intensely local or even personal reasons.

One of the reasons Liberal Democrats are so often heartily despised by members of other parties is their skill at exploiting local objections for electoral gain while demonstrating breathtakingly shameless double standards at a national level. A classic example was the Chesham and Amersham by-election in June 2021: the Liberal Democrat winner, Sarah Green, who gained a 25 per cent swing away from the Conservatives, made a great deal of her opposition to HS2, which runs right through the constituency. She vowed to be a “thorn in the side” of the project, but of course the party had supported HS2 at the 2019 general election; indeed, when Rishi Sunak announced the scaling-back of the route at last year’s Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, the Liberal Democrat transport spokesman, Wera Hobhouse, was sharply condemnatory.

Rishi Sunak using a conference in Manchester to cancel the Northern leg of HS2 would make Liz Truss look like a political genius… This would be a bitter blow for communities and businesses who have seen promise after promise broken by this Conservative government. The Conservatives have already trashed today's economy, now it seems Rishi Sunak is doing everything he can to trash our future economy too. We have a Prime Minister who flies round the country by helicopter then wants to scrap high-speed rail links for the rest of us.

A thorn in the side indeed. Green’s campaign in Chesham and Amersham demonstrated another of Elledge’s typologies, “No, it’ll ruin the character of the area”, while also playing both sides of the game, supporting development in general but not here.

This is an educated electorate, they know what these planning reforms mean and they are quite outraged by the idea that they won’t have a say in developments that happen in their area. I’d like to see more affordable homes but these planning laws don’t guarantee the right sort of housing the community needs.

Reform, yes of course. These reforms, no chance.

All of this doom and gloom might lead you to think that, as housing is a problem affecting us nationally, and people cannot be expected to embrace a long-term strategic view at the expense of their own surroundings or property value, it is a compelling argument for national direction, for Whitehall to make decisions on behalf of the nation and impose them for the greater good.

This comes into conflict with an idea which is also widely supported, that of local devolution. The United Kingdom is one of the most centralised democracies in the world, notwithstanding devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as London, and the creation of directly elected “metro mayors”. There are many reasons for this, and one I think the Conservative Party has to take on the chin. In the 1980s, with an economically radical government in power in Whitehall, many local authorities were in Labour hands, and often the hands of far-left leaders. The Greater London Council was the most striking example: it had been controlled by Conservatives from 1967 to 1973 and 1977 to 1981, but in May 1981, Labour reasserted itself. The party was led by Andrew McIntosh, a centrist who would have a strange Indian summer as Tony Blair’s deputy chief whip in the House of Lords 1997-2003.

The day after Labour took control of the GLC, Ken Livingstone, the most prominent left-wingers in the group, challenged McIntosh for the leadership and defeated him 30 votes to 20. He would lead the organisation for the rest of its life, until abolition in March 1986. During that five-year period, Livingstone used the GLC—based just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament in County Hall—as a platform for radical socialist policies and postures, in part directed at the government. It declared London a “nuclear-free zone” in June 1982; as Lord Murton of Lindisfarne, a former deputy speaker of the House of Commons who had been a staff officer during the Second World War, remarked with exasperation in a House of Lords debate, “That attitude of mind would make the proverbial ostrich jealous for his position as the most stupid of all created beings, if only he could read the message”.

It was deliberate provocation and it worked. Livingstone courted any left-wing group which would enrage the government—the English Collective of Prostitutes, the H-Block Armagh Committee, the Workers Revolutionary Party—and erected a sign on the roof of County Hall displaying the number of unemployed, updated every month. Whatever else it achieved, and that is long and complex debate, it entrenched in the Conservative government the idea of local government as “the enemy”, a home of the “loony Left”. Thatcher took drastic action with regard to the GLC, abolishing it under the provisions of the Local Government Act 1985 and devolving its responsibilities to the boroughs.

There was a broader campaign against local authorities. The Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 introduced a block grant of funding from Whitehall to councils which gave the centre a stranglehold on finance. It also created local development corporations, designed to regenerate economically deprived areas but also removing powers from the local authority: London Docklands and Merseyside but spreading all over the country. The Rates Act 1984 allowed the government to restrict the levels of domestic and business rates, by which councils could generate some of their own income. Fatally, of course, Thatcher sought to revolutionise the way councils were funded by introducing the Community Charge (the hated “poll tax”) through the Local Government Finance Act 1988.

Although Sir Tony Blair devolved powers to London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the high degree of centralisation remained in England, which, even without London, represented about 47 million from a population of just over 60 million. Blair had little more regard for local government than Thatcher had demonstrated: he had never served in local government, and knew the damage that the hard Left had done to the Labour Party in the 1980s. In 1998, he gave an exemplary New Labour verdict on local government, where the solution “does not lie in local authorities gathering again unto themselves all the functions and roles they once had... a flawed model is not the answer to today’s problems”. What was needed was—what else?—“a new—a different—local government”.

Blair published a volume entitled Leading the Way: New Vision for Local Government, which laid out his conception of how local government should work: he wanted higher turnout at elections, directly elected mayors and cabinets to replace council committees and a tough code of conduct to ensure discipline. The Regional Development Agencies Act 1998 kept significant powers away from local authorities and reported directly to Whitehall. The Local Government Act 2000 brought in cabinet systems and the option of directly elected mayors. But Blair’s fundamental concern was with efficiency and effectiveness rather than devolution, as evidenced in the White Paper Strong and prosperous communities which was published in October 2006, less than a year before he left Downing Street.

The coalition and Conservative governments have often talked a good game on local devolution. The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 abolished police authorities and replaced them with elected police and crime commissioners, to allow “the Home Office to withdraw from day-to-day policing matters, giving the police greater freedom to fight crime as they see fit, and allowing local communities to hold the police to account”, according to the Policing Protocol Order 2011. In essence, the idea was not a bad one, offering more democratic local oversight of law enforcement and giving voters a much more direct sense of engagement and accountability.

At the first elections for police and crime commissioners in 2012, 11 independent candidates were elected out of 41, a sign that the electorate was approaching the new institutions with a fresh mind. The new commissioners included a magistrate, former ministers and Members of Parliament, retired deputy chief constables and assistant chief constable, ex-chairs of police authorities, an air chief marshal and a former one-star Royal Navy officer. However, the turnout was abysmal, below 20 per cent in most areas, and the supplementary vote system used was not widely understood. It was a missed opportunity, and the PCCs have never captured the public imagination or become major local, let alone national, figures. Some metro mayors have taken over the responsibilities of police and crime commissioners in their area.

Directly elected mayors, especially the metro mayors of combined authorities, by contrast, have generally been a success. Andy Burnham left the shadow cabinet and the House of Commons to become mayor of Greater Manchester, while Steve Rotheram (Liverpool City Region) and Tracy Brabin (West Yorkshire) also chose local politics over Westminster. Andy Street (West Midlands) left a successful retail career in which he had become managing director of John Lewis Partnership to become a Conservative civil leader. These posts have offered genuine alternative centres of power away from Whitehall, but there are only 24 elected mayors, 10 of them metro mayors. Another seven will be elected this year and next.

The current situation is that local authorities in England receive just over 50 per cent of their funding in grants from central government, around a third from council tax and the balance from locally retained business rates and some other minor sources. That means half of the money that councils spend goes from the taxpayer to HM Treasury to DLUHC to local authorities. Simply as a process issue that seems over-elaborate; but there seems, on an instinctive level, an accountability issue. The greater the distance between collection and expenditure, it seems to me, the less real it seems, and the more divorced the spending becomes from those who have funded it. It’s the opposite, I suppose, of valuing what you pay for.

I was never seized with enthusiasm for the European Union (or the European Economic Community before that). The UK had been a member for less than five years when I was born, but it does mean that it was part of the ether as I grew up, and our membership seemed eternal and inevitable until at least, I suppose, 2010. (British Euroscepticism matured, I think, in the decade during which the late Jacques Delors was president of the European Commission, 1985 to 1995, as I proposed recently in The Spectator). But the European dream never captivated me as it did and does some people. The culmination was spending a week covering for a colleague in the National Parliament Office at the European Parliament: it was the most exposure I’d had to the Brussels institutions, and I was horrified and repelled by an atmosphere which mixed cynicism, arrogance, superiority, amorality and indifference to corruption.

All of that is secondary. One thing I did like about the EU, though it was often ignored, was the principle of subsidiarity: responsibility should lie with member states by default and be assumed at a higher level only where that is necessary. Or, as it was pithily summed up, “Europe where necessary, national where possible”. The Maastricht Treaty, ironically, took the principle further, and stipulated that “decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity”.

That was not always honoured within the EU but I think in general terms it is good an important. Decision-making should be pushed outwards and downwards, away from Whitehall, so that as far as possible decisions are taken at the level at which they are implemented and have effect. One of my fundamental, if slightly fuzzy, beliefs is that people and small groups of people generally know best what services and support they need from the state, and I have a secondary instinct that, even if they don’t, there is also a strong argument that they have a right to make wrong decisions.

Obviously there are some decisions which reach their lowest sensible or efficient level much higher up than others. At one end of the spectrum, it is difficult to see how much defence or foreign policy could be devolved; on the other hand, there are large swathes of criminal justice and law and order which would be best managed at a very local level. But there is always a tension, between theory and practice, and it is highlighted by the issue of planning.

Ideally, planning, zoning and connected decisions would be pushed right down the chain so that local communities could have control and accountability over the way their environment is shaped. But we have to remember that the nation is an aggregate of tens of thousands of communities, and at a national level there are some services and provisions in which we need balance, rather than simply the end result of local micro-decisions. Otherwise the lazy and selfish kneejerk of “Build houses, but not here” is replicated across the country, and no houses are built. In essence, someone sometimes needs to take one for the team.

At this stage, I don’t know how we resolve this tension. Is the solution structural, cultural, financial, behavioural? Is there a magic bullet upon which someone might stumble, or will the challenge yield only to long hours of thought and experimentation? In Whitehall terms, do you need a hard-working policy team of five, or one free-wheeling, counter-intuitive thinker?

I am certain of the following things: the planning system needs radical change in the direction of liberalisation, simplification and speed; that the balance of decision-making and accountability needs to be changed substantially in favour of sub-national levels of authority; and that a very happy side product of this would be to leave Whitehall doing less but doing it much better. I don’t claim to know at this stage how we get there, but I do think I have at least clarified in my own mind where it is we need to go. Small victories.