Reed’s housing plan is just the same as Thatcher’s and Blair’s

The Streatham and Croydon North MP’s cunning plan is ‘using the state balance sheet to crack open the opportunity for private profit’

The housing minister, Streatham and Croydon North MP Steve Reed, spent much of Sunday promoting himself, autographing MAGA-style hats with his ludicrous “Build, baby, build” Trumpian slogan, for his growing band of fans and the terminally hard of thinking.

It was supposedly the build-up to the speech he was to deliver at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool yesterday. But it looked very much like the launch of a potential leadership bid, in case Keir Starmer’s premiership was to fall apart any further.

Reed’s cover is his new job as Secretary of State for housing, communities and local government, and his conference speech on Monday.

As part of the 1.5million new homes that Labour has promised to deliver in this Parliament – therefore before 2029 – Reed announced the intention to build 12 “New Towns”, saying he wants to replicate the post-war Labour government, with thousands of homes built at places including Thamesmead in Greenwich and at Crews Hill, Enfield.

In his speech, Reed promised £1billion new funding “to tackle and prevent the moral stain of homelessness”, he said, “to put a roof over the head of the most vulnerable children in our country”. All very worthy, of course.

And he also announced the government would invest “£39billion to build 300,000 social and affordable homes”.

But Peter Apps, the journalist at Inside Housing and the author of Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen, says that rather than the promised return to the transformative post-war housing boom under Clement Attlee, what Reed is unveiling “looks much more like housing policy under Blair, or even Thatcher and Boris Johnson”.

Apps said, “The New Towns programme of the 1950s was an extraordinary feat of direct state intervention, which would seem totally unrecognisable in today’s world.

“The government created corporations by statute, capitalised them with huge loans from the Treasury and gave them powers to buy up land at low value, plan out designs for modern towns and build them rapidly.

“These corporations would continue to own the land – collecting social rents, business rates and lease payments – which would then be reinvested in the towns. Over a relatively short period we built 32 towns, in what has since been branded ‘the greatest single creation of planned urbanism ever undertaken anywhere’.

“But this was state-owned, state-led development. There were extraordinarily high levels of social rented housing, especially early on.

“We didn’t need to rely on a private house builder model, the new towns could just be built and the houses filled with families, many of whom were homeless or escaping the post-war destruction of the major cities. It was a positive project – part of the post-war vision of a better social democratic future.

“It also worked. The land value uplifts over time meant the corporations paid their loans back early. So it put the state in debt at first, but it was an investment that paid off over time.”

Those New Towns built after 1945 included a ring of developments just outside London, such as Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Harlow and Basildon, Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield, Bracknell, and, perhaps most famously, or notoriously, of all, built in a third-wave that began in the 1960s, Milton Keynes.

But Apps warns of Reed’s proposals: “This is not what Labour is planning.

As Apps points out, the government’s formal announcement this week actually admits this when they said, “Its plans are ‘modelled on the regeneration of Stratford during and after the Olympic Games”.

What this means is the creation of a special body which assembles and prepares the land, before handing it over to private developers and granting them planning permission outside of the normal process. “This looks to me to be a pretty close replica of the Blair-era ‘Growth Area’ programme. This basically involved ‘pump-priming’ housing development in target areas with government cash before bringing in the private sector to finish the job.

“Then, as now, you had a government which had targets to hit and there were lots of vague promises about sustainable development and high percentages of affordable housing numbers.”

Think Cane Hill in Coulsdon, where Boris Johnson, when Mayor of London, gave away a swathe of publicly-owned land to a private builder, Barratts, and allowed them to build the 700-or-so homes on the site for profit, with very little public benefit, beyond a bit of political target-hitting.

“This is a pretty common use of the state in housing post-Thatcher,” Apps says.

“She did it with LLDC [London Legacy Development Corporation] which plunged millions into preparing the old Docklands for development and then handed it over…

“The trouble is that there is really very little guarantee that you will get the good stuff the builders promise. The land will be built out in the normal way these schemes are: properties carefully released onto the market to maintain demand, elements which cause a drag on profits planned out over time to maximise return.”

“Really, what we’re doing here is using the state balance sheet to crack open the opportunity for private profit. The areas under consideration aren’t ‘new towns’ at all. They are sites often where development is underway, [and] that need a boost.”

Apps points out that Thamesmead is already a housing zone on long-standing, and Milton Keynes city centre is the epitome of a new town so “can’t be again!”

“It’s the same sort of housing development policy we’ve had for years and will have the same results,” Apps says.

“In some places, it is probably a good boost to development that brings about some positive change… In others, the opportunity [is] for private developers to use the state to build developments which will be sold off to mostly landlord investors and rented out, because that’s what the housing market does in big cities.

“Whatever the impact, it is not an especially new policy position, and certainly not a return to the transformative post-war position. Those days are gone.”

Peter Apps has recently published a second book, Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, which can be ordered by clicking here

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