So, it’s going to be July 4th. The Prime Minister has decided that this is as good as it’s going to get and he’s made the call. He’s going for a long campaign, 6 weeks, just as John Major did in 1997, in the hope that this offers more chances for the Labour Party to make mistakes.
This is very exciting for us political nerds. There will, doubtless, be many incidents that capture media attention: Slip-ups or things that go wrong that provoke the question – “is this where it all turned?” Maybe someone will ‘do a John Prescott’ and punch a voter? Maybe someone will ‘do a Gordon Brown’ and be recorded calling a voter a bigot? Maybe someone will forget their manifesto promises or, under pressure from an interviewer, highlight some ‘holes’ in their Party’s key arguments? (My money’s on Nick Ferrari from LBC claiming another scalp). All sorts of things can go wrong for political parties during a campaign. My experience, though, is that voters are adept at picking up on the key dividing lines and the big choices. Assuming the next prime minister will be from either the red or the blue team, which is a fairly safe assumption, insofar as our industry is concerned, the choices are these:
The Conservatives: Internally, the Conservative Party is facing the same issue that is impacting centre-right parties across Western Europe – namely the inability to tally a traditionally liberal (principally in a fiscal sense, but also increasingly in social affairs) voter base with new voters, and representatives, who have come from left-wing parties and are more willing to intervene in both financial and social issues. Post-Brexit, this has led to several distinct, and often confrontational, factions within the Party, voicing their disagreements in print and online.
There are some in the Party who argue that the logic of Brexit leads you towards a low-tax, minimal-government model – less Stockholm, more Singapore. Liz Truss embodied this approach and, although it’s a minority view in the country at large, it enjoys a significant following within the Conservative Party. There are others, of the ‘One Nation’ tendency, who resist this approach – their ranks were thinned during Boris Johnson’s premiership but they are still a force within the Party. And there are others, whose power bases are in the so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats, who feel their voters want greater social, economic, and cultural intervention from the State, and whose priorities are not lower taxes and reduced regulation. While the Party has been at war with itself over its direction the impact is felt across all areas of government – including December’s delicate and rather messy compromise over the NPPF – implemented as around 60 Tory MPs took advantage of Rishi Sunak’s political weakness and threatened to rebel. The fate of levelling up is another example of what happens when there is a lack of consistency in government direction – in this case the Treasury took control of its funding after Boris Johnson, its principal cheerleader, left office.
Labour: For its part, the Labour Party has been very clear about what it wants from housebuilding and its view of regeneration/levelling up (or ‘powering up’, as they prefer to call it). They have been clear about reintroducing new house building targets, delivering housing at scale via ‘new towns’, and they stress the importance of volume housebuilding in tackling the housing crisis while generating economic growth. They have also redefined what levelling up means and have put their own stamp on it – so it is less about regeneration projects and more about housing and greater workers’ rights at work. The major questions for the Party actually fall post-election, if they form the next Government: 1) Do they demonstrate the political will to push through the changes needed (for example, what happens if they win a series of rural seats where resistance to new development is more likely), 2) Will they have the political capital to lead, and even overrule, devolved and local leaders and 3) Can they, aside from the political will, do the practical things necessary to boost housebuilding and supporting infrastructure – for example, can they unlock the £billions in unspent S106 and CIL payments or follow through on their proposals to merge the National Infrastructure Commission and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority ?
Maybe housing building and development will become major election issues or maybe they won’t – it depends on what resonates with the electorate. The important thing for the industry is the agenda of the new government: Does it know what it wants to do, does it know how to get there and is it willing to invest political capital where it has to?
Redwood Consulting has been delivering a series of talks on the politics of planning. If you are interested in receiving one of these briefings please contact Gabriel Abulafia, Redwood’s Head of Political & Stakeholder Engagement, at gabriel@redwoodconsulting.co.uk or on 07860 866 884.