Coffee House Shots
Labour goes to war with the Nimbys
The stage is set. Get a front row seat in the run-up to the election by subscribing to the spectator for just £3 for three months. We'll even send you a free election mug. Go to spectator.co.uk/mug. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shot, the spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm James Seal and I'm joined today by Fraser Nelson, the editor of the spectator, and Liam Halligan, the telegraph's economic agenda correspondent. Now this morning Fraser, the splash story on the Times newspaper, is that landowners' profits from sale of Greenbelt sites could be capped. This is the news that councils has been given the power to compulsory and cheaply buy Lutblatt Greenbelt land under plans on ministers to fill their pledge to build 1.5 million new homes by 2030. So this is to stop landowners from profiting on it. Is this a good idea or not? This is a sign of Labour trying to show that it can do what the Tories couldn't. Now the Tories spoke about building houses and how many governments over the last 20 years have come up with house building targets, but nothing really seems to change. Now the Conservatives came up against the political opposition of their own Shires and you've had a Chesham and Amishan by-election where the Lib Dems won that, and the Tories thought okay that's it, we can't push this planning thing anymore. Labour has now come into power, it's worked out, it's got some honeymoon, it's got some political capital to spend, so it wants to confront the nimbies and it doesn't have that. By the way, Labour does actually have quite a few Shires seats more than they've expected. But it feels it can take the political hit and to not exactly invite people to concrete over the Green Belt, but certainly no way at it. Now personally, I'm very pro-planning, I would encourage you this development. I think we need a lot more homes, especially given that migration numbers have run so big. The more people there are in the country, the more homes you need to build. I think it's one of the biggest social problems as well, is economic problems in Britain, and the lack of available housing is one of the things which is really, and you can see this in the way that young people backed Labour and didn't vote for the Tories and way bigger numbers than older people. It's because the British dream has been crushed that if you earn enough money, you can have a decent crew, you can buy your own house. I'm not sure it's going to work though, because in housing, I think the Dominic Cummings was quite right when he was saying that there are so many ways of thwarting developments now. You can get it just reviewed, you can do it, you can get an environment challenge on it. If you lose that, you can appeal and try again. So I will believe it when I see it, but it makes strategic sense to me, but Labour is starting right now to take aim at the green belts and see if it can do what the Tories couldn't. Now, Lynne, there's a bit of a divide among free marketeers about how best approach this issue, because there are those like Ross Clark, we've got up on Coffee House right now who say this land has been artificially restricted for 70-80 years. It's actually right, the government does cap this. There are others at the Allen Smith Institute, for instance, who say it's wrong to cap this, because it would inhibit development in the future. Where do you stand on this line? It's a complex argument. Labour's headline policy, of course, is to reinstate planning targets for local authorities, and then also to make much greater use of compulsory purchase orders in order to free up mainly agricultural land for more house building. And on the latter, I'm particularly concerned because I don't see any real root and branch changes to the planning system here. I see lots of headline rhetoric, but I think our old friend Dominic Cummings is right. The fibrous nature of the planning system that constraints the tricks, the dominance of the big house builders who build a huge share of our homes as opposed to smaller medium size builders who used to build much more of them. The dominance will continue, but look, the Greenbelt is about 13% of the landmass of England. No one's talking about building on areas of outstanding natural beauty or national parks or anything like that. The Greenbelt has also got much bigger over my lifetime. It's more than doubled in size since the late 1970s. And if the Greenbelt is 13% of England's landmass, housing, including gardens, is less than 2%. So there is space to build if we need to, but we seem to specialise in this country on building in areas that are guaranteed to wind up local communities as much as possible. And labourer are right in the sense that we have to tip the balance of these local conversations, often very fraught politics concerning planning. And one way which much of the rest of the world does that is to share what we call planning game, when agricultural land is given residential planning permission, the value of it can go up 100 fold, 200 fold, even more. And in many countries, that planning uplift is shared with local authorities. So infrastructure goes in as houses are being built, be it hospitals, schools, bypasses, the much fabled GP and dental surgeries and so on. My concern about labour's plans and it's really a kind of version of what I proposed in my book Home Truths because many, many other countries do share planning uplift. I wanted it to be shared 50/50 with local authorities. In order that infrastructure gets built, in order that the speculative heat is taken out of land values, so maybe there'll be more money left to build decent sized homes rather than the undersized boxes that big locally monopolistic house builders are building. My concern is that labour are going for the full-blooded ideological, we're going to take all the planning uplift from the landowners, we're going to give it all to the state. That's not going to work. And this reliance on compulsory purchase orders is just going to lead to massive legal battles in the court, maybe even recourse to the ECHR land owners will use in order to protect what we call the hope value of their land. That very same ECHR that Keir Starmer says that under his leadership, labour will not leave. And in other news today, we've also had the first post-election conservative home shadow cabinet ranking tables. Now, unsurprisingly, perhaps given what we saw the trend before the election, once again, Kami Badnock comes to comfortably top of that. But it's worth noting that in the top six of the shadow cabinet, four of those are leadership contenders. So Kami Badnock, Tom Tugenhat, Mel Stride, and James Cleverley as well. Obviously, Robert Gennrich, I pretty tell they're not in the shadow cabinet. But also, Jeremy Hunt comes second as well. I mean, Freila, were your reactions to that, and Kami Badnock being apparently the front runner at this stage? I'm not quite sure it's said she's a front runner. I'd say Robert Gennrich is the front runner. Certainly, if you look at the bookmakers, the shortest odds are on Gennrich. Kami Badnock, I remember, has got quite a few critics amongst the conservative MPs. I think she's not clubable enough. She hasn't spent enough time building a tribe. There's also the usual Tory curse that whoever is the front runner starts, everybody else gangs up against them. I think that Kami Badnock ended up as the person with that target around her head. Now, what the conhome pool does, I think, show us is that if she does get into the final two, she will be difficult to beat. I think the members prefer her. If you look at the last time around, they actually preferred her to rush to neck in this trust as well. But the MPs made sure that they didn't get the chance to vote on her. So unless Tom Tugenhat is elevated to the status of being the guy to run up against Gennrich in the actual final pool, I think that Kami Badnock would win. But if you look at the bookmakers, they seem to think that she won't. Now, I'm not going to put too much wisdom on the handful of people making bets. Probably you think Tories will have learned not to make bets after the debacle of the date of the last general election. But I still think it's... This is going to be a long campaign. Remember, we're still now in early August. We're going to be discussing this in October. So there's a long time left to run. But it's not the sort of home and away Kami race, which I looked at. It was going to be at the beginning. And it was brought to the weekend that Kami Badnock did say that she was not a puppet of Michael Gove at the first hosting. So the right approach to have getting out there saying no one's puppet. Well, these two fill out quite significantly. It was the case that Michael Gove did back her in relationship end. And people were a bit suspicious because she wasn't a nobody back then. And all of a sudden, why would Michael Gove back his arm? He's only doing it so he can basically ventriloquize her somehow. But then they had a big falling out and then they weren't speaking for a long time. So I think that Kami's being polite when she says she's not Gove's puppet. I think the two of them are no longer close. And it's sort of interesting, Kami aside, though. I mean, this is what she does. She will have flares and chafes and things. She's a candidate who I think she's well-suited for the job simply because she gets so much attention. She's a very interesting, original character. Pretty much everything she says is quotable. Now, that's what you want in an opposition leader. You don't necessarily want somebody who comes up with the usual chat GBT political cliches. You want a character. The problem of characters is they cannot not always the best one as rallying tribes around them in parliament. So that is the Kami Baden a conundrum. I'm talking of quotable, Liam. You got one of the first interviews there last week, 50-minute long interview. You can watch on YouTube. It's brilliant. What will your key takeaways from that and where she is in the current stage of the campaign? So we did the first interview with Kami Badenok since she made her leadership declaration for the Planet Normal podcast. I have to say she was in a pretty punchy mood. Almost immediately after she declared there was a series of front-page articles in the Guardian, unnamed Whitehall sources accusing the former business secretary of various misdemeanors. It felt a lot like when Priti Patel was in the home office and was subject to these anonymous attacks. Dominic Raab as well. There seems to be a pattern here. She was coming out punching, if you like. At the same time though, she didn't want to say too much about policy. She said she was in listening mode. As Fraser says, this is a long campaign. I don't think we're going to find out who the next Tory leader is until November the 2nd. So this is going to go on and on. In some senses, she's the front-runner because she is the most popular among the activists. But it may be a lot like the MPs stopped Michael Portillo getting through to the final two candidates. It may be that there's a one-nation faction in the Tory party that's big enough to stop Kemi. Just like there was a stop Michael campaign back in the day, I think there could be a stop Kemi campaign. Tom Tugenhatt showing is pretty impressive. The one-nation share of the much diminished Tory parliamentary party is probably higher than it was when they had 365 MPs. Now they've only got 121 MPs. What matters about who the final two candidates are is the share. It may be that she doesn't get put through, which a lot of the activists would really, really be gutted about because that she is the candidate that she wants. For now, she's positioning herself as the right-wing candidate that the TRG, the Tory Reform Group, the one-nation crowd can do business with. She was reluctant to say the UK would definitely leave the ECHR. She said that only applies to legal immigration anyway, that the much quicker problem is legal immigration. She said she may leave the ECHR, which should become a sort of a systemic issue if the circumstances were right. She's not ruling that out. But at the same time, she also weighed in quite heavily during the interview because as we were talking, it was when the riots were beginning, and she's talked a lot about the fact that she doesn't think that the UK is a racist country. She was a big backer of the Sewell Report, of course, in 2021. But she did say that we can't just assume that integration has worked. We need to work harder integration. We need to be honest and open and grab these third-rail issues. And she said the reason that the Guardian is targeting her is because she is the candidate that Labour fears most. And I think quite a lot of neutral observers would agree with that. Certainly, Peter Mandelson weighed in the same day as I interviewed her by saying that she is indeed Labour's worst candidate, if you like, the one that they fear most. So she's got a target on her back, as Tory frontrunners always do have. So in that sense, I'd say, now at least, this competition is hers to lose. And a good thing, perhaps, that we're not out at the ECHI yet, given all the landowners might want to sue about the land. Thank you very much for joining us, Liam. Thank you, Fraser. And thank you for listening to Coffee Outshots. [MUSIC]