‘They knocked down our old house in three hours,’ says a friend who has embarked on what he says is a conventional rebuild, nothing Grand Designs about it, on the south coast. ‘But it’s taking forever to get planning permission for the new one. They want reports on everything, from bats to highway impacts: you’d think we’re trying to build a whole huge housing estate.’
And if you do happen to be in the business of building whole huge housing estates, you’ll be eager to know whether Rachel Reeves’s reforms and ‘mandatory targets’ – aimed at delivering 1.5 million new homes in this parliament – will put rockets under the planning system or run straight into a brick wall of nimbyism, exacerbated by lack of capacity and adverse market forces.
What am I talking about? Shortly after Reeves’s speech on Monday, I spoke to a northern housebuilder who used to be a planner himself. Under Labour in the 2000s, he recalled, local authorities were well staffed, there was EU money to be had and planning decisions were often settled on an exchange of emails. If that all sounds a bit cosy, apparently it kept the pipeline flowing. Then came Tory ‘cuts, cuts, cuts’ combined with ‘incredible amounts of new paperwork’ addressing issues such as ‘nutrient neutrality’ and ‘biodiversity net gains’. Approvals slowed to a glacial pace and many planning officers took early retirement, leaving a gap that Labour’s pledge to recruit and train 300 new ones could take years to fill.
Meanwhile social media enables nimbyists to form larger and louder groups: every greenfield development will be fiercely opposed, there aren’t enough brownfield and greyfield sites, and councils will back away from controversial approvals even for sites that are already inked on local plans.
There may be a building spurt, adds my source, but new homes are not going to become magically more affordable. Rather the opposite, as developers compete for skilled workers and building materials (the latter have already risen 43 per cent in two years); and ‘all these green interventions have to be paid for too’. All of which makes the new government’s instant approval of 14,000 new homes in Liverpool, Worcester and elsewhere – oven-ready schemes held in limbo during the election, we can safely assume – look like the sort of cynical spin we might have wished not to see from an earnest Starmer regime. Plus ça change, you might say. Housebuilders and home-seekers alike hope for positive progress, but all we can say for certain is that a new series of The Thick of It starts here.
Wheels falling off
Another day, another Boeing disaster. This time it was a wheel falling off a United Airlines Boeing 757 as it took off from Los Angeles: the wheel came down in a nearby car park while the plane flew on to land at Denver. No one was hurt, but the incident came just a day after what still counts as America’s greatest manufacturing company agreed a guilty plea deal and a $240 million fine with the Department of Justice to settle fraud conspiracy charges relating to two 737 Max crashes, blamed on faulty control software, that caused 346 deaths.
Only last month I wrote of Boeing’s travails as ‘a business-school case study in brand destruction’ – and it gets worse. How safe do you feel boarding a Boeing these days? Millions of us will do that this summer but no airline has ordered a 737 Max for the past two months, Boeing’s senior management is in disarray and warning lights are flashing all over the corporate cockpit.
Labour’s City links
One survey of Labour’s 211 new MPs found just 44 had experience of ‘business, finance and investment’ among an overwhelming majority who have had first careers as political staffers, lobbyists, union officials and charity workers. So who will the Prime Minister and Chancellor turn to for connections in the City? Reeves, as an ex-Bank of England staffer, must already have one hotline to Governor Andrew Bailey and another to his predecessor Mark Carney, the global guru of green finance who endorsed her last year as ‘a serious economist’. But look out also for Emma Reynolds, Labour’s new MP for Wycombe: having lost a Wolverhampton seat in 2019, she filled the gap by working as public affairs director for The CityUK, the lobby group for the financial sector.
And Treasury officials who bear the scars of the previous Labour regime will be choking on their digestive biscuits at the rumoured return in an advisory role of Baroness Shriti Vadera, the chair of Prudential (and former chair of Santander) who used to be Gordon Brown’s fire-breathing enforcer.
Highland start-up
One notable entrepreneurial talent in the new House of Commons will be sitting, perhaps surprisingly, on the Lib Dem benches that are more often filled with college lecturers and veteran pothole protestors. The MP in question was, literally, the last man in and the one from farthest away: he is Angus MacDonald, whose victory over SNP incumbent Drew Hendry in Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire was the 650th and final constituency result to be declared. An old friend of this column, Angus has ventured in everything from financial publishing to forestry, and two of his family businesses – one in soap, the other in spare parts for wind turbines – have been finalists in our Economic Innovator awards.
Latterly he turned social entrepreneur, running a community cinema and bookshop in Fort William. But he tells me his overturning of Hendry’s huge 2019 majority was thanks to ‘a campaign run like a business start-up, funds raised, key hires made, strategy agreed upon, media and marketing plan in place… I hope my passion for building businesses and growing an entrepreneurial culture can somehow help Britain push back the tide of bureaucracy.’ I wish him lots of luck.
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