‘BUILD, BABY, BUILD’.

This irritating slogan, a parody on the lunatic Donald Trumps prayer to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’, has been promoted by Housing Minister Steve Reed.

There is no better indication of the retreat from everything that the Labour Party used to stand for. What it signals is ‘Let the Market rip’...let’s build houses whenever and wherever we can and as a ‘bonus’, in a country that hardly produces anything anymore, this will stimulate the economy!

Hooray! It’s Magic!!!

There is no difference between this approach and that of generations of Tory governments. Tories (including Red neo-liberal Tories like Mr Reed) hate the very notion of planning: it has become a ‘dirty word’. Planning, they say, ‘doesn’t work’.

The point about housing is this. If you don’t plan where it needs to go, it will go EVERYWHERE. It will flow along transport routes, on flood plains and into green belts. It will demolish woodland and old historic buildings. It will go wherever there is profit.

The provision of homes was essentially privatised by Mrs Thatcher and handed over to building companies. Profit would drive production. Council Housing was sold off and re-christened as ‘social’ housing for ‘the deserving poor, tucked away out of sight.

Now that the ‘deserving poor’ in need of housing has exploded, Labour ‘strategists’ have concluded that we need to abolish planning and leave it up to the house-building barons to satisfy demand! It really is putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

So, hats off to the Leader of the Forest District Council. He has highlighted the housing targets that have been inflicted on the Forest: 13,000 new homes in the next 20 years. If the Council doesn’t agree to this number, then they will be ‘imposed’ on it.

There are already over 1,000,000 ‘private’ planning permissions given for housing across the country. Why aren’t they being built? The answer is – profit. So long as owner occupation dominates, developers will trickle provision out depending on how much profit they can make, which in turn depends on how much people can borrow.

This is what drives house prices up. Housing is not about need: it is just another free market commodity.

There is only one way to provide sufficient housing at a reasonable cost and that is to mobilise the state behind it. The only way to keep ‘Market house’ prices down is to have substantial Council House provision.

The key issues are this. How much is needed? Where does it go? Who is to provide it?

You need the whip of coercion to deliver significant development. Use local councils as the builders. Fund them and allow them to borrow. Control private sector rents.

The ‘let the market rip’ approach to planning succumbs to the propaganda that it is planning that is to blame for the shortage and poor quality of housing. It is not. It is the idiotic view that the developers know best. They don’t. They are only in it for the money.