Katie Lam is the Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the MP for Weald of Kent.
At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, Kemi laid out the clear dividing lines between us and Labour. They’ll always take more of people’s money; we want to let people keep what they earn. They’ll always think that the state has all the answers; we know that our country does best when people have more control over their own lives.
And, while Labour will always back the blockers, we understand the importance of getting Britain building again.
At the moment, building anything in Britain is far too expensive, and it takes far too long. That’s not because we’ve forgotten how to build; it’s the result of the endless rules and regulations that builders now have to navigate, imposed by the government. That’s true whether we’re talking about roads, bridges, reservoirs, power plants, or new homes in the places that people want to live.
Complying with each and every one of those regulations costs money. Each of these costs may appear modest on its own terms, but, when added together, they either drive up costs for first time buyers, renters, and the taxpayer, or drive builders out of the market altogether – which, of course, means that prices rise even higher.
People often feel this most acutely when they think about housing costs. In 1996, it took the average first-time buyer about a year to save up a deposit on a house. Today, it takes almost a decade. This means that for many people, and particularly for many aspirational young people, the sense of safety, stability, and pride that comes with owning their own home is a far too distant dream.
Net Zero regulations alone, which force every new home to have a heat pump, an electric vehicle charger, and solar panels, are adding tens of thousands of pounds to the cost of a new home. They sit alongside a whole host of other regulations, such as the government’s so-called ‘water efficiency’ standards – which really means the Government deciding how big your bath can be and what sort of flush you’re allowed to have on your toilet.
If people want those things in their home, that’s totally fine – but we shouldn’t all be forced to pay for them if we don’t want them.
At Conference, I was really pleased to announce that the next Conservative government will slash regulations like these, which are driving up the cost of building a new home, and bring down that cost by £50,000.
But our national inability to build goes well beyond housing. In fact, it’s perhaps most acute when it comes to fundamental infrastructure. To take just a single example, in September, the Botley Road Railway Bridge in Oxford was finally finished. It took more than three years to build, and cost more than the London Eye. Meanwhile, we haven’t built a reservoir in this country since 1992, and new power plants take years to come online.
One reason for this is the Aarhus Convention, an international treaty that the last Labour government signed up to in 1998. Under the Convention, when activist groups launch legal challenges to block infrastructure, their legal costs are capped – meaning that they can launch challenge after challenge, even when their legal arguments have little or no merit, while taxpayers foot the bill.
All the while, our energy bills are driven up because of a lack of cheap supply, and people in parts of the country go without running water for days at a time.
The sort of infrastructure that the Aarhus Convention allows anti-growth activists to hold up is the foundation on which modern life is built. The line between civilization and squalor is thin, and it exists only because those who came before us put it there. If we make it impossible to build new infrastructure, that line will crumble into dust.
So I was also delighted to announce that the next Conservative government will leave the Aarhus Convention, and stop these activist zealots holding our country hostage.
These are the people that Labour will always back, always support, and always enable. We have to back the people who want to build, to grow, and to create a life for themselves and their families. Those are the people who make this country work. Those are our people.
It’s such a pleasure to work in the Shadow Cabinet, and in Parliament, alongside so many colleagues who feel as passionate about turning our great country around as I do.