Reflections on Labour Party Conference 2024 – Housing, housing, housing
This week marked my first Labour Party Conference for some time, but also a double first – my first Conference in Liverpool and first with Labour in Government.
I was expecting to find a feeling of buoyancy, verging on jubilation, after 14 years in Opposition and a landslide election victory back in July. Whilst there was certainly positivity around the ACC, much of the focus was the job at hand.
In 1997 Tony Blair’s priorities were defined by the slogan “Education, education, education”; after three days at Conference I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Prime Minister had said “Housing, housing, housing” during his keynote speech. I counted 28 housing-related events, panels or gatherings across Conference, demonstrating the collectively acknowledged importance of delivering new homes in the next five years, for the fundamental purpose of housing people but also to drive economic growth, create jobs and generate investment.
My takeaways:
- 1.5m homes (or 300k a year) is a big mountain to climb and whilst the focus at Conference was largely on social housing, the role of local authorities and residential providers through partnerships, the private sector cannot be left out in the cold if the Government wants to come close to meeting these targets.
- The Labour YIMBY movement is gathering pace, with keynote speakers at the YIMBY rally emphasising the need for members to talk-up the importance and benefits of housing delivery in their home communities, not just in online echo chambers.
- Quality community engagement is incredibly important to delivery and communities must be taken on the journey, and this must be done well through investment of time to tackle cynicism around developers.
- The private sector and particularly SME house builders need stability, pipeline and opportunity.
- Similarly, registered providers need security of increased social rents over the next 5-10 years to effectively plan and finance their house building and retrofit programmes.
- Design, sustainability and quality of new homes is high on the agenda, and the whole development industry must rise to meet expectations of politicians and communities if applications are to progress smoothly.
- Local authority resource (where to begin!) was frequently tabled as blocker for development, with RTPI Chair Christine Whitehead outlining her personal desire to add a “0” on the Government’s pledge of 300 new planners. Supporting this is a clear need to make local authorities, and specifically planning departments, exciting and progressive places to work where people can build a career.
- There is a desire to deliver housing across the country, if it comes with infrastructure communities want to soften the landing, and MPs (new and old) talked of the courage needed to “make hard decisions” and how this cannot waiver in the face of lost by-elections.
- Devolution was a strong and recurring theme throughout Conference, with renewed calls for increased fiscal and policy freedoms for devolved authorities across the country.
- Linked to this, there was a strong sense that the Capital should be firing on all cylinders with the majority of boroughs being Labour run, a Labour Mayor in his third term and now a Labour Government.
Taking all the above into consideration as being largely positive, there were unanswered questions that were quickly deferred to the upcoming Autumn Budget – arguably the result of the unexpected July General Election. Ultimately, the spotlight will be on Rachel Reeves come 30 October to answer these lingering questions and establish a landscape for growth.
I remain quietly optimistic about the Government’s plans for housing delivery, coupled with a wider push on development (infrastructure renewable energy and data centres to name a few Conference hot topics) and, ultimately, believe there are crop of new MPs who are keen to promote development in all parts of the country – I hope I have the same optimism after Conference next year.