Blake Stephenson: Rayner’s housing policy is entrenching the blockers, not bulldozing them

Blake Stephenson is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Mid-Bedfordshire.

We stand at a crucial juncture in the fight to solve our housing crisis. For years, we have struggled with the dual challenges of affordability and supply, constrained by an outdated planning system that stifles innovation, limits growth, and deters investment.

Labour’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which is currently winding its way through Parliament, is being heralded by the Government as the solution to our housing woes – but it is nothing more than rigid directives and misguided intervention.   

They insist their approach will streamline development, remove barriers, and create homes for the future. Yet their vision prioritises top-down controls, centralised mandates, and a rigid framework that threatens to exacerbate the very problems they claim to fix.

The irony is hard to miss: Labour wants to “break down blockers”, but their approach merely entrenches them. There is little chance of getting those “blockers” onside if the reward for communities that do the right thing and commit to building homes is a New Town – additional to local housebuilding targets – which swallows up even more of their local countryside. 

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill fails to tackle the real issues with planning policy or resolve pain points that drive communities to become blockers. For example, Labour has chosen not to stand up to big-box developers and close planning loopholes that enable them to build on floodplains. The result will be yet more bad development that compounds the risk of flooding, while developers get away high and dry with their profits.

This is not only a missed opportunity to deliver positive change, but it will also cause serious damage to many communities throughout England. Labour’s strategy to force councils to comply with arbitrary targets, ignoring infrastructure limitations, environmental concerns, and the wishes of residents promises only to deliver more objection to housebuilding.

Meanwhile, Reform are positioning themselves as the party that will block all development. Whilst this will be welcomed by some across Britain who object to any and all housebuilding, the country needs a sensible approach to deliver affordable homes for the next generation.   

As a Party, we must offer the country common-sense Conservatism, ensuring quality homes are built without destroying communities. We must champion dynamic localism and smart investment incentives to drive growth and build communities with regional identities, access to the countryside, improvements for nature and innovative design.  

Conservatives must strike the balance to ensure that we have the right (but fewer) centralised controls, whilst ensuring local authorities have the flexibility to shape housing development in partnership with businesses and residents – with councils able to reinvest a proportion of land value increases into local infrastructure, amenities and services.  

We must tackle housing targets, too. Labour’s approach is to hand down politically-driven housing targets to local authorities; increasing building targets in rural communities and reducing targets in urban areas. Instead, we should be focused on increasing housing supply in areas where housing is most needed.

Urban densification must be encouraged and enforced to deliver homes for the next generation. Brownfield regeneration should be incentivised to improve supply of affordable housing in areas where issues for young people are most acute – in proximity to employment opportunities and transport infrastructure. To achieve this, urban areas will need robust targets that can be enforced to ensure a noticeable improvement in supply.  

We also need sensible state intervention to ensure that builders deliver developments with community feel, quality design, and regional identities. Conservatives must aspire to put spatial planning and place-making at the heart of planning policy. Too many developments are thrown up without proper consideration of community focal points or suitable infrastructure. Where considerations are made, residents of new developments often wait years, or even decades, to access basic provisions like GP surgeries.   

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill waters down many of the aspects of planning policy that enforce high quality building and design. I believe strongly in the need for creating places that are designed to reflect the qualities of the local identity and history; the utilisation of locally sourced construction materials in housebuilding in Cornwall is an example of great planning policy that delivers homes that are unequivocally unique to the region.

Whilst not all regions have local slate to source for rooftops, we must move away from the same carbon-copy housing which is now found across all regions of Britain. We must strive to ensure developments are characterised by high quality design that is sympathetic to regional identities, as well as attractive tree-lined streets and appropriate infrastructure to inject both a sense of place and beauty back into communities. 

Labour’s Bill will stall growth – not accelerate it. At its core, it is too state-heavy, control-driven, and divorced from reality. It imposes rather than empowers; it mandates rather than innovates. By contrast, a next-generation Conservative housing vision must be bold and dynamic, driven by flexibility and community empowerment.  

Conservatives must build a system that enables growth from the bottom up, delivering well-designed, beautiful development with access to high quality infrastructure. This is the real difference between Labour’s dead-end directives and a future of common-sense Conservatism.