Clarity not carte blanche

Developers need clarity as to where they can build, We need to zone our countryside to prevent conflict and the erosion of this limited and precious resource

- Simon Jenkins

WHEN Britain’s probable next prime minister finished his conference speech last month, Britain’s countryside must have given a shudder. Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer could hardly have been more explicit. He repeated the pledge of his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, that development, rural included, needed ‘builders not blockers’. He wanted to ‘drive a bulldozer’ through planners’ offices. He wanted to defy the nimbys and shout: ‘Yes in my backyard.’

Only five weeks earlier, Sir Keir had written in COUNTRY LIFE that he ‘wanted everyone in the countryside to know’ that he was determined to ‘restore respect’. He meant to ‘shift power back into the hands of communities’, which, in the context, meant rural ones. Yet in his speech and subsequent interviews, he said the reverse. He wanted to give developers ‘licences’ to build in the green belt—where he called it grey belt—without planning permission. If energy companies wanted wind turbines and pylons in rural districts, the taxpayer would bribe local people not to oppose them. He would restore local house-building targets, too, the single greatest curb on local democracy in decades.

Sir Keir nowhere mentioned levelling up, but rather declared himself in favour of more construction in the South-East, mentioning something called ‘the M1 corridor’. He proposed more ‘Labour new towns’ in the countryside, the most old-fashioned, energy-inefficient, car-dependent form of 20th-century development. He stopped short only of mimicking David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak by donning a hard hat and hi-vis jacket.