Labour manifesto: the good, the bad and the vague
There are some good ideas in here. But they are not answers to the fundamental challenges of the housing crisis.
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Keir Starmer tries to go ‘blue steel’ but, in choosing to peer slightly down his nose at the camera, succeeds only in making himself look like stock imagery for a news story about the need for more workplace diversity.
He’s in black and white and the word “Change” is in red. That’s all there is on the front page. A graphic designer somewhere, who knows how to deploy the word “minimalist”, has had an easy day’s work.
Anyway - don’t judge a manifesto by its cover, as the saying (nearly) goes. Instead let’s take a look inside and judge it by that instead - specifically the bits this Substack is most interested in: building safety, social housing and housing policy more broadly.
(NB - per my previous disclaimer, I’m not going to bother writing about the other manifestos because Labour are going to win the election. If you are really interested in my thoughts on the Conservatives’, the short summary is that they’re promising more of things they’ve previously promised, so if that’s enough for you, you know where to vote. Anyway…)
Building safety and Grenfell
Since Labour’s manifesto was published a day before the seventh anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, let’s start here.
The key pledge on building safety was this one on page 80:
“Labour will also take decisive action to improve building safety, including through regulation, to ensure we never again see a repeat of the Grenfell fire. We will review how to better protect leaseholders from costs and take steps to accelerate the pace of remediation across the country. We will put a renewed focus on ensuring those responsible for the building safety crisis pay to put it right.”
What to make of this? Well - it sounds basically good, but very deliberately non-specific. How exactly will they better protect leaseholders? How will they accelerate the pace of remediation?
These are ambitions everyone has, the important question is how to achieve them.
It may surprise you to read that I do actually have some positivity here.
I’m not going to pretend I have highly placed Labour Party sources, but from what I do hear trickling down the grapevine, I am fairly convinced that Labour has a good grasp of the ideas it needs to get the remediation of buildings moving.
I think - and this is implied by the manifesto if not stated - it is intending a move towards Australian-style direct involvement in the remediation process rather than the laissez-faire approach of the Conservatives. This is a move which has been desperately needed since day one.
Why not say that directly in the manifesto? Labour’s biggest fear at the moment is promising anything which looks like a spending commitment, because it would be grabbed by the Conservatives and used as a “tax rise” attack line. So they have couched what they are going to do in careful enough language to make it impossible to attach a solid commitment to it.
Of course, that does also pose a problem for us all down the line. It’s hard enough to get parties to live by the things they’ve objectively promised, let alone the things they have hinted and winked at.
I think the highest I will go in my praise is that the knowledge and ambition to make a dent in the cladding crisis clearly exists within the Labour Party machine and this paragraph speaks to that. But the battle post-election will be converting that knowledge into actual, funded policies, which will need the Treasury to buy in. And that will not be easy.
Elsewhere, the manifesto also promises a “Hillsborough Law” which will “place a legal duty of candour on public servants and authorities, and provide legal aid for victims of disasters or state related deaths”. This is good. Every major disaster - including Grenfell - has involved some degree of dissembling and obscuring and a law which could impose consequences for that is desperately needed.
But this is only one part of what victims of disasters have been campaigning for. The other is a National Oversight Mechanism - an independent body to review the implementation of recommendations from major public inquiries and inquests. That did not make it in.
Worrying, in that context, is the wording around the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, which will report on September 4 - two months into the new Parliament.
The manifesto commits to “act on the findings of the Infected Blood Inquiry, and respond to the findings of the Grenfell Inquiry”. Note the change in wording from “act” to “respond”.
Perhaps this cavaet is necessary before the report is released. But we already have the unimplemented recommendations to government from Phase One of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. I would have liked to have seen an unambiguous commitment to implement at least these, and it’s concerning that it’s not there.
Social housing
Here’s what the manifesto says on social housing:
“Labour will deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation.
“We will strengthen planning obligations to ensure new developments provide more affordable homes; make changes to the Affordable Homes Programme to ensure that it delivers more homes from existing funding; and support councils and housing associations to build their capacity and make a greater contribution to affordable housing supply.
“Labour will prioritise the building of new social rented homes and better protect our existing stock by reviewing the increased right to buy discounts introduced in 2012 and increasing protections on newly-built social housing.”
Once more - some good, some bad, some vague. The biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation sounds more ambitious than it is, given that we are talking about a generation (mine) which has lived through extraordinarily low levels of social house building, so even a relatively modest increase could claim this prize.
More depressing is the commitment to “make changes to the Affordable Homes Programme to ensure that it delivers more homes from existing funding”. That is not what is required. We’re already at ‘blood from stone’ levels in terms of existing funding, and trying to squeeze even more volume out of it without an overall increase in the cash available would be a doomed project in the current climate.
Both councils and housing associations are facing an existential funding crisis, and if they want to keep developing - particularly for social rent - the state needs to put more in. That’s no longer a statement of political preference, but a plain, cold look at the sector’s balance sheets.
The commitment to use the planning system to build more affordable housing is welcome. There have been enough YIMBY ‘destroy the planning system’ ghouls circling Sir Keir in recent months that I feared the promise would go the other way: reduce burdens on developers to get more overall volume (which doesn’t work anyway).
And while I would have swung for the abolition of Right to Buy and its replacement with an open-market buying scheme for social tenants, reviewing discounts downwards in a higher interest rate climate may be enough to have the same effectively kill the policy, especially in areas where house prices are highest.
All in all this manifesto offers more than Ed Miliband’s did on social housing. But it is still way, way short of the ambition of Corbyn in 2017 and 2019. And you can criticise those documents all you want, but in my eyes, the housing promises were a big part of what energised young people to campaign for him, and nothing at all to do with what turned other voters off.
Starmer has probably ultimately landed in Gordon Brown territory on social housing: under whom Right to Buy sales slowed to a trickle, and our last serious Affordable Homes Programme was launched, with social rented homes at its heart.
This still feels like a good change after the last 14 years, but we’re getting Gordon Brown at a time when we really needed Nye Bevan.
Other housing bits
The other housing policies will probably be better analysed elsewhere, so I will keep my comments light.
I’m pleased to see a clear promise to replace the leasehold system and to quickly end Section 21 evictions. We have probably all got a bit fatigued with hearing these promises and not seeing them delivered, but a change in government is probably the best hope of getting them done. Do not underestimate how much both would change the power dynamics between those who own buildings and those who live in them.
Similarly, I was pleasantly surprised to see a promise to extend “Awaab’s law” to the private sector. This makes sense, as the excellent Giles Peaker writes, “either the works are urgently required, or they aren’t, it is not a tenure issue”. But it is also a major change for private landlords. None who I’ve rented from would have been remotely capable of meeting the requirements of Awaab’s Law.
This means they would either have to professionalise, leave or suffer repeated legal challenges for the dreadful state of their properties (we all have stories - my best is probably the flat where waste water from the sink started appearing in the bath, and the landlord poured bleach down the plug to clear it, the fumes from which put a housemate in hospital).
What a smart Labour Party really needs is a plan for a clear transition towards either the municipalisation of professionalisation of the buy-to-let sector, rather than simply panic when the National Residential Landlords Association says its members are thinking of selling up because of the new burdens.
On Labour’s New Town plan, my feelings have not changed much since it was first announced: broadly, it’s a good idea, but unless you disrupt the volume house building model and provide stacks more social housing, you’re going to get a 20 year building site not a new town.
I’m also utterly in favour of reviewing the Green Belt and getting some more land round stations for use as housing. Densifying our cities while priortising most of the country’s land to feed cows serves no one, and it’s refreshing to see a political party brave enough to grasp that nettle.
As a closing thought, I think what bothers me most about this manifesto is what isn’t in it. The ideas mostly range from promising, to fine, to bad but not terrible. But it doesn’t actually offer anything to tackle the big challenges of the housing crisis.
What are we going to do about the volume house builder model which doesn’t provide the right kind of housing at the right prices? What are we going to do about the funding crisis in social housing? What are we going to do for people who can’t pay the rent and are saving nothing for their retirement?
What are we going to do about our increasingly unaffordable cities, the social cleansing that results and the disappearing, displaced communities that are leaving them? What are we going to do about the tens of thousands of mothers stuck with their children indefinitely in temporary housing because neither benefits nor wages come close to paying the rent?
These are the sort of questions we need politicians to answer. And while this manifesto isn’t all bad, it doesn’t do that.
This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.
If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book. Or you can buy a copy here.