With his sleeves rolled up, his hands in his pockets and the frown of a building inspector encountering flammable cladding panels for the umpteenth time, Keir Starmer stares out in black and white from the cover of Labour’s election manifesto next to a single word: “Change.”
The word is printed in bright red in Labour’s official election typeface: a bold and curvy font called Poppins – an apt, if unconscious, allusion to Starmer’s ambition to become the stern but caring nanny for the nation. One who, unlike his incumbent opponent, might have an umbrella at the ready.
Inside the manifesto, Labour’s range of cautious policies are bordered by colours from the party’s approved election palette, as set out in the official branding guidelines. They come with aspirational names, like an earnest Farrow & Ball colour chart, including Growth Pink, Green Energy Green, Policing Yellow and Opportunity Purple – not forgetting Flag Blue, which the guidelines advise should be paired with Labour Red for “positive messaging”. The union flag must also be deployed liberally on all election material wherever possible. “Make sure the smallest blue triangle in the flag is visible at all times,” warn the guidelines. “Don’t combine too many colours at once.”
The obsession with such minutiae speaks of how our likely next prime minister is big on image control, but sadly lacking in bold ideas, particularly when it comes to housing and planning. Among the 33 photos of Sir Keir in the 131-page manifesto, two show him in a hard-hat and high-vis sharing a joke on a building site with his deputy and shadow housing secretary, Angela Rayner. What might they have been discussing up the scaffolding?
Perhaps they were talking about how to “deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation”? Which is an admirable ambition, but one that comes with neither a target figure nor any suggestion of how it will be achieved. Or maybe they were having a little giggle about the right to buy – the disastrous Thatcherite policy which Labour promises to “review” but not abolish (unlike the Lib Dems and Greens, who both want to scrap it). Right to buy has seen two-thirds of council homes transferred from public to private hands over the last four decades, with even brand new homes at risk of being sold off. As Andy Burnham put it, building new council housing while the right to buy remains in place is “like trying to fill a bath with the plug out”.
Or maybe the duo were discussing their proposed reforms to the planning system, which is once again accused of being a “major brake on economic growth”, rather than a mechanism to ensure the best use of land. The proposed funding of additional planning officers and promise to give combined authorities new planning powers is welcome, and there is something approaching fighting talk in the manifesto’s mention of “tough action” being taken to ensure councils have up-to-date local plans. Labour also warn that they “will not be afraid to make full use of intervention powers to build the houses we need”, with talk of prioritising “grey belt” (the less pastoral bits of the green belt) for development. But, given the urgency of the climate crisis, there is surprisingly little about reducing the embodied carbon of the built environment, and no mention of whole-life carbon assessments in planning. Nor is there anything on rent control, or addressing the shortage of skilled construction workers, or a mass programme of council housing, or how post-Grenfell safety issues will finally be fixed.
But the Labour party does have one headline proposal for making a physical mark on the country. One of the more tangible policies, trailed in the run-up to the manifesto launch, is a pledge to build a new generation of new towns, “inspired by the proud legacy of the 1945 Labour government” which oversaw the creation of places such as Basildon, Harlow and Stevenage. It is a catchy policy that successive governments of all stripes have tried to revive with little success.
Crucially, the original postwar new towns were planned and built by public development corporations funded by Treasury loans. They were bestowed with supreme powers, covering everything from assembling land to drawing up masterplans and granting planning permission. Most importantly they were given the ability to compulsorily purchase land at existing-use value, rather than “hope value” (the price of land with the potential for planning permission factored in, which is many times higher).
The “uplift” in land value created by the development of the new town was therefore captured by the public purse, not by a private developer. The first generation of new towns proved so financially successful that they ended up being net lenders to other public bodies: Harlow, for example, repaid all its loans within 15 years, and started to produce a surplus for the Treasury. According to the Town and Country Planning Association, the total £4.75bn loan made to the new town development corporations by the Treasury was repaid by early 1999 and, since then, the assets of the new towns have been yielding £1bn a year for the government. (Similarly, as Shelter argues, investment in new social housing would pay for itself in just three years and return £37.8bn to the economy, including through jobs and savings to the NHS and benefits bill.)
There is sadly no sign of this radical model in Labour’s manifesto. Instead, its new town revival sounds like an open charter for housebuilders – as long as they stick to some “new town codes”. In contrast to the bold modernist language of postwar new towns, which were designed in tune with the optimism of the time, Rayner seems set on ushering in a generation of towns gussied up in historical fancy dress. The images published to accompany her plan depict a chocolate-box world of Edwardian mansion blocks, Georgian terraces and cast-iron lampposts lining streets that appear to be inhabited only by an ethnically homogeneous population. The designs were produced by Create Streets, a “design practice, townbuilder and think tank” founded by Nicholas Boys Smith, who co-chaired the Conservatives’ Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission with the late Roger Scruton, which spawned the government’s Office for Place – an advisory group which Boys Smith now chairs. Create Streets is fond of using AI to help conjure cosy scenes of watercolour-rendered ye olde England. But the aesthetic prejudices in the results show exactly why AI may not be the best tool to shape the future of the nation.
Rayner promises to ensure that “only high-quality, well designed and attractive homes are built”, promote design “with real character that fits in around the local area”, and put an end to “identikit homes straight out of a catalogue”. Yet catalogue homes are exactly what Create Streets is proposing. Its report advocates a return to pattern book housing types for developers to choose from, with examples limited to a similar stylistic spectrum to that found at Poundbury, King Charles’ cosplay fantasy land.
The planning principles of “gentle density”, mixed-use, tree-lined streets and public transport are all sound common sense. But the development model – which suggests no change from the current reliance on the big volume housebuilders raking in ever-higher profits – and the insistence on traditional styles, show that Labour’s vision of Britain will be little different from its Tory predecessors’. Its new towns, coincidentally, look like places where Mary Poppins would feel very much at home.
