Do I owe the Prime Minister an apology? Yesterday, I wrote about how the Conservative housing offer, as leaked to the Tuesday papers, was very bad. Not only was it a collection of mostly ill-conceived policies, but there was no mention at all of increasing supply and building the homes we need.
Except! Then we got the full manifesto, and it turns out the Prime Minister apparently does intend to build houses. Not just a few houses, but 1.6 million houses. Better still, the manifesto says he’d do it the way I said he should do it: concentrating on London. From page 55 of the manifesto:
“Raising density levels in inner London to those of European cities like Paris and Barcelona. We will ensure the London Plan delivers more family homes a year, forcing the Mayor to plan for more homes on brownfield sites, like underused industrial land. We will regenerate major sites like Euston, Old Oak Common and Thamesmead.”
There’s plenty of other bits for the voter-who-wants-a-prosperous-future to like, too. From page 49:
“Scale up nuclear power, building on our work establishing Great British Nuclear. Within the first 100 days of the next Parliament, we will approve two new fleets of Small Modular Reactors to rapidly expand nuclear power, create well-paid, high-skilled jobs and deliver cheaper, cleaner and more secure energy. We will halve the time it takes for new nuclear reactors to be approved…“
Or how about this, from page 9:
“We can only achieve our infrastructure ambitions if we continue to simplify the planning system to make it easier to build, faster. We will speed up the average time it takes to sign off major infrastructure projects from four years to one.“
“Ensure any requirements to offset the impact of new infrastructure and homes on an area are proportionate, without compromising environmental outcomes.”
“End frivolous legal challenges that frustrate infrastructure delivery by amending the law so judicial reviews that don’t have merit do not waste court time.”
And from page 8:
“Reopen Beeching lines and stations to reconnect communities around the country, building on the success of the Dartmoor Line in the South West. We are committed to all the schemes set out in the Network North Command Paper.”
Hold on a minute… ‘Network North’? Wasn’t that the project supposedly meant to ensure every penny saved by abandoning HS2 was spent in the north of England, and which ended up fixing potholes in London?
This is where the spell starts to wear off. We have glimpsed the men behind the curtain, and those men are Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt. Is it really plausible to think that, if re-elected with a presumably tiny majority, they would do much of any of this?
Hosing London in housebuilding might be politically doable, via something like a London Development Order. But the Tories have had 14 years to do that and haven’t. Perhaps there’s a Goldilocks zone where they are re-elected but Iain Duncan Smith, Greg Hands, and Theresa Villiers all lose their seats, but it feels pretty remote.
As for the rest… building new railway lines would involve building them through constituencies held by Tory MPs, who will whine about it. Ditto two new fleets of Small Modular Reactors, an excellent model for nuclear energy which nonetheless spreads the planning pain versus one big site. Ditto four new prisons (page 45).
The Prime Minister has had 18 months to show us what sort of leader he is. The result was attempts at a horribly-conceived smoking ban, a cancelled railway line (with the capex savings diverted into pothole maintenance), the abolition of T Levels, and a football regulator. In short, an agenda trivial from nose to tail.
If you take them at face value, there’s a hugely exciting story to be told about many of the proposals in the manifesto. But it wasn’t the story the Party itself chose to try and tell yesterday. Sunak is, on paper, committed to a Baron Hausmann-style transformation of our capital city; the press got Help to Buy 2 and a badly-designed Stamp Duty exemption.