Our economy needs to better deliver for workers. Household budgets are under intense pressure. For over a decade, wages have barely kept pace with inflation. Persistently high rents, mortgage payments, and energy bills have hit workers across the country harder than for decades. We face for the first time since the Second World War an economic landscape where children will have a lower standard of living than their parents.
A key part of unlocking our economy and driving the growth that we all need is planning.
Few questions matter more to our prosperity than what should we build and where should we build it. However, these questions have been dominated over the past decade by a vocal minority. A minority that say we need new infrastructure, new housing, and new sources of energy, but that these should never be built in their backyard.
This vocal minority drown out the voices of working people trapped in inadequate accommodation desperate to buy a home of their own, working people who want a quick commute to work that still allows them to see their families in the evening, working people who are worried about the future of their industries with soaring electricity costs.
The barriers we throw up to new construction hurt working people in multiple ways.
First, when the construction of new homes and energy infrastructure gets blocked, it pushes up the prices of the things people rely on from electricity to housing. In a survey of Community members, the monthly budgets of 59% of respondents were negatively affected by high rent or mortgage payments and 93% have been negatively affected by high energy prices.
Second, higher electricity bills do not just eat into pay packets, they threaten jobs. Since the gas spike due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy intensive industries have been hit hard. Our chemicals industry has shrunk by almost two-fifths in just three years. Britain’s sky-high industrial power costs are driving similar challenges in steel and cement. Every planning delay to a wind farm, pylon or nuclear power station is a delay to growth and puts our industry on the backfoot when competing with other nations.
Third, building new homes, new railways, and new power plants creates quality well-paying jobs across the supply chain. In short, more building means more jobs in steel, in cement, and dozens of other sectors.
The forthcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill is an opportunity for change. A new law designed to unlock our economy and remove the delays in our planning system so we can get the homes and infrastructure we need built. It will be working people who will benefit most if Britain gets building again.
Britain Remade exists because our founder Sam Richards saw first-hand how decision-makers in Westminster would hear from the people opposed to new homes and new energy infrastructure, but rarely heard from the millions of working people for whom the economic status quo isn’t working. Our campaign is there to be a voice for the people who want the real economic change that can only come from building new homes, new sources of clean energy, and new reliable transport links.
Community Union has spent decades supporting our members so they have the help they need in their workplaces and communities. From steel to education, Community Union fights to ensure our members’ voices are heard and that their lives are improved. We’ve seen over the past 14 years the cost of living skyrocket, housing becoming increasingly unattainable for our young members, and energy prices for the industries they work grow ever more expensive. There are many challenges that have led to this, but a key one that can unlock our economy for so many people is planning. Through planning reform, we can deliver a programme that builds the homes, the energy, and the future that our communities need.
Our two organisations are partnering to make the case for rewiring our planning system so workers across the country can benefit from cheaper housing, lower bills, and higher wages. Our new economic analysis shows that the Labour Government’s ambitious and necessary plans of building 1.5 million homes over the course of this Parliament and the infrastructure needed to meet the 2030 clean power target would boost long-run GDP by £100 billion - the equivalent of £3,000 per worker - and create a quarter of a million jobs in construction alone. Working people up and down the country would see reductions in their bills and the cost of housing.
Neither target can be reached however without radical change. Britain’s current planning system is only delivering 212,000 homes per year in England and offshore wind projects essential to our energy security can take 12 years from start to finish, despite construction itself only taking two.
Britain Remade and Community Union lay out in this document policy proposals that can help to deliver the change that we need.
Our proposals would create new ‘clean energy zones’ where solar and wind projects gain fast-track approval, take a new strategic approach to protecting nature to accelerate development and enhance biodiversity more effectively, and crucially, reform nuclear regulations to stop Britain being the most expensive country in the world to build new nuclear plants.
To get more homes built in the right places and reduce bills, our proposals create a new ‘estate renewal passport’ so planning is no longer a barrier to enhancing our social housing stock, introduces a brownfield passport that will approve well-connected homes in our least affordable cities, and sets out key reforms to help make the Government’s New Towns programme a success.
These reforms will give businesses the certainty to invest in their workforce, giving them better equipment and training, but we can go even further to ensure workers feel the full benefits. The Government should look to reform procurement so that building projects within the UK benefit our wider economy. Ensuring that when UK money is spent on a UK project it’s UK industry and workers who benefit. We’ve seen how this can work with Hinkley Point C and Heathrow both signing the UK Steel Charter to use UK Steel. UK Government Departments should adopt a formalised pre-tender process overseen by a UK Supply Chain Champion who understands how UK projects can best utilise the wider UK economy.