Lisa Nandy speech to Housing 2023

"I was born and brought up in this great city in a time of huge upheaval.

When our great Northern cities displayed the scars of government choices and inaction in the boarded up shops, unemployment lines and people sleeping rough on the streets.

But we knew then as the People’s History Museum says, that there have always been ideas worth fighting for.

And as the late great Tony Wilson once said, this is Manchester. We do things differently here.

That’s the spirit we will call forth as we seek to rise to the challenge again.

The last decade has been defined by a shift from ‘bricks to benefits’.

The government now spends 10 times more on housing benefit than on creating affordable homes.

And while the costs of housing benefit and subsidies for first-time buyers mount up, year on year we fail to build the homes we need. 

The human cost is everywhere.

I see it in the coastal towns blighted by the HMOs that were once thriving holiday B&BS…

While people sleep rough in the centre of one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

I hear it in the despair of the kids growing up surrounded by damp and mould.

The families uprooted with just a few weeks’ notice from their homes

And the couples who saved for years just to see their dreams of home ownership go up in smoke.

Just today mortgage rates are forecast to reach over 6% .

But even before the shameful events of last autumn, there was something fundamentally wrong.

A political system defined by cowardice, that has failed, for 13 years, to support the foundations of a decent, secure life.

Politicians who are so afraid of the taboo around the greenbelt and in fear of backbench revolts they would rather sit it out and watch housebuilding plummet to its lowest level in a generation with a £17bn hit to the economy.

Who lack the will or imagination to take on a system rigged against first time buyers seeking a home, in favour of cash-rich speculators.

And a land market that inflates prices, incentivises speculation over productive investment and allows money to bleed out of the system.

After the war the health and housing minister Nye Bevan concluded that only by bringing in councils to plan the housing that developers would deliver could they fulfil the promise to a generation returning from war.

He would be shocked by our housing system today – ad hoc, piecemeal – desperately lacking a plan.

But imagine too what Adam Smith, the founding father of modern Conservatism would have made of a market that creates no incentive for competition, innovation or quality?

A broken market and an absent state is the worst of all worlds. A state of affairs as fundamentally anathema to the Conservative tradition as it is socialism.

And as the mortgage crisis deepens – for homeowners and renters alike – it is perhaps inevitable that the debate has turned again to short term fixes.

But as well intentioned as they might be, grants to help one couple get on the housing ladder won’t help the next.

Untargeted mortgage relief that fuels the inflation crisis is no substitute for stabilising the economy and getting interest rates under control.

And when housebuilding is falling off a cliff and buy to let landlords are leaving the market, rent controls that cut rents for some, will almost certainly leave others homeless.

It might be politically easier to put a sticking plaster on our deep-seated problems, but if it is cowardice that got us here, it is never going to get us out.

So we won’t duck the challenge – of building the number of houses we need - and the right homes -no longer will we tolerate council housing being treated as a dirty word.

We will tilt the balance of power back to first time buyers and use the power of the state to help them make the leap into home ownership.

We’ll make it our mission to hand power back to tenants in the private rented sector and end the feudal system of leasehold which has left millions trapped.

In short - to take on the entire vicious cycle and break it – to unlock people’s potential and the opportunities for growth so you in this room can get building again.

What’s gone wrong?

In 1946, as a new generation sought to tackle the housing crisis in America, a young aspiring senator, John F Kennedy, told a nation:

“It is time for men of sincerity…to face the facts…and see these problems through to a solution.”

So let’s recognise the demand problem.

We treat housing as a speculative investment asset rather than as a place to live.

So cash rich investors muscle out first-time buyers, pushing up prices further beyond the reach of local incomes.

The odds are stacked against most of us, - the costs of borrowing, 52% higher for those without access to a substantial deposit.

And let’s recognise the supply problem too.

The business model of many developers means they profit from rising prices

And the market for land is built on an assumption of ever rising prices.

Developers are given too little incentive to compete on quality or innovation.

Leaving us with poor quality development in the wrong places, which in turn makes councils more resistant to development, squeezing the supply of land again and raising prices.

The roots of this stretch back decades.

But in the last 13 years the Tories have taken this broken system and put rocket boosters on it.

So today I want to outline three building blocks behind our plan to rebuild Britain.

Firstly: we are unashamedly on the side of you the builders, not the blockers and we will ensure the houses we need are built.

So we will rethink a planning system hated by developers and communities alike. That is simultaneously too restrictive and too permissive.

Long, bureaucratic and slow processes that often turn on arcane details, and mired in party politicking create uncertainty and delay for developers and investors.

While councils have few levers to direct what type of development happens where, leading to legitimate concerns about unaffordable, speculative development detached from infrastructure.

We will take on the taboo that prevents us being honest about what the green belt is and what it isn’t.

Because for all the yelping from Number 10 since we announced this plan, it is successive Tory governments that have presided over the loss of large tracts of high-quality green belt, the nature-rich greenfield land which protects the character of local communities.

We will instead release poor-quality ex-industrial land and dilapidated, neglected scrubland to build more housing. So we see no more examples like the affordable housing development in Tottenham that was frustrated because a disused petrol station was technically designated as green belt land.

A sensible, strategic approach that ends a decade of potholing on the green belt and helps us tackle the housing crisis.

And, to deliver more houses and more affordable houses, we will spur the creation of a new generation of local development corporations, spearheaded by and accountable to communities.

Replacing a reactive and overly adversarial approach to new housebuilding with a partnership, where communities, state and business work hand in hand.

We recognise that in many areas of the country with the highest housing need, the distorted land market frustrates development and squeezes the supply of affordable housing and local infrastructure.

Some speculators are incentivised to sit on land in expectation of large, unearned profits while housing need goes unmet.

That is why we believe there is a case for reforming rules around compulsory purchase, removing ‘hope value’ in those specific cases where there is a clear public interest, and where it can support large scale development, more social and affordable housing and increased supply to create growth and prosperity.

We’re not talking about giving councils unlimited powers, scrapping property rights or expropriating land at below market value.

This power will sit with development corporations, with the local leaders, communities and business working hand in hand and in the driving seat.

Through them we will back proportionate action to end the absurd situation that sees some speculators make eye-watering profits from purely speculative ‘hope’ value - and bring us back into line with most major economies.

There are difficult choices that must be faced to build the houses we need and make no mistake - we choose growth.

Secondly, we will replace chaos with a plan.

Across England nearly half of all local planning authorities have no up-to-date Local Plan and that may fall as low as 1 in 5 by autumn next year.

Our Government will require every area to have a plan for their place – a local growth plan, which includes housing delivery

We will reverse many of the changes to the National Planning Policy Framework in December 2022 and reintroduce local housing targets.

Because the decision to abandon them this year was the very definition of political cowardice. Weakness in the face of backbench hostility.

Our Government will affect the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster and Whitehall in modern British history.

And our message to combined authorities, councils and development corporations, is this – we will make clear your right to take charge of your own destiny, we will hand you the powers to do so and we will be crystal clear about your responsibility to deliver.

Thirdly, no plan can be realised without stability and this will be our watchword.

17 housing ministers and three major overhauls of the planning system have made it impossibly hard to plan for next week, let alone next year.

Add to this a paper-thin Brexit deal, and the worst inflation crisis in the G7 and we are left with sky high construction costs, struggling supply chains and labour shortages in every part of Britain.

Every house builder I have spoken to has told me one thing: desperation for transparent, long-term planning frameworks, quicker decisions and a more stable political environment –

Today I say we have heard you, and that is how we will govern.

Because that absence of security and certainty, felt acutely in every business, every family and every community, is acting as a brake on the ambition in every nation and region of the UK.

It is why, last year, Keir set out our plan to 70% of the population make the leap into home ownership by introducing state backed mortgage insurance.

Frankly I was astonished by the reaction of some people in my own party who said this was Tory lite.

They argued home ownership and social housing were a zero sum game and we were making the wrong choice.

To those people I say you couldn’t be more wrong.

The biggest and most consequential divide in Britain today is between the people and the communities who have assets - and those who don’t.

If you want people to have real resilience in their lives, they need the assets that sustain them and help them weather hard times, and offer choices and chances when times are good – like your own home or the child savings funds set up by the last Labour Government.

And they need common assets, like Council Housing which provides a secure home for life, handed back to be used for future generations.

The Right to Buy – whose abolition has come to be a totemic issue for many on the left - was originally a Labour policy.

It was the decision of the Thatcher Government to fail to replace the council housing stock that was sold, pitting the rights of the individual against the rights of the community

For too long we’ve relied on that Thatcherite consensus.

That cost us a million social homes in just one decade, which on current rates of social rent delivery would take around 150 years to replace.

That treated social justice and growth as opposing objectives.

Where governments face a choice between building social housing or allowing the market to deliver homes to buy.

These are false choices and we reject it.

There is no solution to the housing crisis that does not involve a substantial programme of social and affordable housebuilding.

So we need a refreshed model of housebuilding. One that will put social and genuinely affordable housing at the very heart of our plans to jump start the house building industry.

Large scale housebuilding relies particularly on the local SME private builders that have been lost, who in turn rely on a steady stream of social housebuilding to insulate them against the market cycle. 

Get this right and it means good jobs, in every part of Britain.

And the ability to turbo charge low carbon technologies and standards - because while the incentives to invest at the level required don’t yet work in the private market - they can readily do so for long-term public investors.

If we can invent a COVID vaccine in record time, and lead the world in fusion research, surely it cannot be beyond our wit to build affordable, carbon neutral, high quality homes fit for the future.

We will say more about our plans for social housing in the coming months. But we are clear – this isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do.

We understand what we’re asking from you is more than we’ve asked before.

Openness to doing things differently.

Willingness to embrace the change that is coming.

Readiness to rise to the scale of the challenge.

It will take leadership, from Keir, from me, and from every person in this room.

The state of our housing will only ever be as good as the quality of the leaders we have. A stream cannot rise above its source.

But while we do not underestimate the scale of the challenge, do not underestimate the scale of our ambition.

Our ability to solve the economic crisis, to rebuild Britain and provide for people the foundations of a decent secure life again – this will be the defining task of a generation.

If we want to live in a country where children don’t have to go to school too tired to learn.

Where people with disabilities can live the richer, larger lives they deserve.

Where older people don’t have to fear growing old without dignity or warmth.

Then we need to deliver the housing that underpins it all.

That is why we are determined to rebuild Britain the only way that counts.

Together."