Bringing the house down?

Why Labour finds it so difficult to get housebuilding off the ground.

“If people can persuade me that actually not building enough houses, not allowing young people to get onto the housing ladder until they’re in their late thirties or early forties, [it doesn’t matter], that’s fine. But I think it does matter. And if it does matter, we’re going to have to do big things to solve it.”

So I was told not too long ago by one passionate millennial MP from the Home Counties, determined to champion housebuilding on behalf of his party.

No, this has nothing to do with Labour’s planning overhaul and mass housebuilding drive announced yesterday, which is crucial if the government is to meet its ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes built over this parliament. Those words belong to Bim Afolami, former Conservative MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, who spoke to me back in 2023 about his party’s problem with young people. “I think we’ve been complacent, to be frank,” he told me back then, warning that unless the Tories rethought their offering to young people, a generation would turn against them not just for the next election, but potentially for good.

Afolami was one of too many Tories to count who lost their seats in July. The leafy Hertfordshire constituency of Hitchin (as it was redrawn) is now represented by a millennial of a different party, Labour’s Alistair Strathern. When I spoke with Afolami, we discussed the arch-nemesis of the Conservative Party’s housebuilding agenda: Theresa Villiers, in the nearby seat of Chipping Barnet, who once campaigned against a development that wasn’t even in her constituency on the grounds that the desperately needed new homes might make it harder for her constituents to find parking spaces. Her nimbyism didn’t save her – Chipping Barnet is another former Tory stronghold that turned red. Its new millennial Labour MP, Dan Tomlinson, is a vocal yimby spokesperson for the Labour Growth Group.

The housing crisis is far from the only reason the Conservative vote crumbled in the last election (here’s a useful primer of everything that went wrong), but it’s a key factor in the collapse of support among young people (read: those under 50) in particular. As Afolami and others warned, the notion that people naturally become more conservative as they age isn’t holding up. Those aged 30-39 – the key age when people start to think about settling down and starting families – were nearly four times as likely to vote Labour over the Tories in July. The figures for 40-49 year-olds aren’t much more comforting. These millennials and younger Gen Xers have seen the dream of stable homeownership snatched away by years of pumped-up demand and restricted supply. For 14 years the Conservatives talked a good game on housebuilding but whenever attempts were made to liberalise the planning system, the government bowed to pressure from MPs like Villiers.

Now Labour is trying the same thing – and facing the same objections. Housebuilding is central to the economic growth mission (planning reform one of the few supply-side levers the government has to pull while its short on cash), and building 1.5m homes was the second milestone announced in Keir Starmer’s big “plan for change” speech last week, along with 150 infrastructure projects to accompany them. The plans announced on Thursday impose new targets on local councils and free up both brownfield and so-called “grey belt” land for development. The howls of rage were as instantaneous as they were predictable. The Tories lost no time in accusing Labour of waging “a war on rural England”, “concreting over” green belt land, and trying to “bulldoze through the concerns of local communities”.

The Conservative Party is currently in opposition-as-a-reflex mode: anything the Labour government does is de facto bad, however popular (VAT on private school fees), economically pragmatic (winter fuel allowance changes) or niche (inheritance tax on farms) it may be. The Liberal Democrats have seen tremendous success running hyper-local campaigns against virtually any development. A significant subsection of the wounded Tory party thinks there are lessons to be learned there.

But taking up arms against the prospect of new homes comes with its own risks – and in a different corner of Westminster, that is understood only too well.

The Next Gen Tory group has been set up to shape Conservative policy in a way that at least vaguely acknowledges that the under-40s exist. Afolami spoke at a launch event for the group back in February and is a founding member of the advisory board. So is erstwhile Tory housing secretary Simon Clarke, who also lost his seat and has called the risk to his party of falling support among younger people “existential”. As his former colleagues were frothing at the mouth about Labour’s housing plans, Clarke tweeted “a reminder to Conservatives” that housing was unaffordable and that an entire generation had deserted the party. “Clearly there will be scope to criticise what the Government is doing,” he continued. “Local democracy matters *BUT* we should be debating the ‘how’ rather than ‘whether’ or ‘why’ we fix the shortfall of millions of homes that this country needs – which are the foundation of Conservatism.”

It is too much to expect an opposition frontbench still finding its feet to resist the heady sugar rush that comes from scaremongering about new housing developments, especially as Kemi Badenoch struggles to hone a viable line of attack against Labour. But there is a resistance movement within the Tory party – a movement that can see the damage the Theresa Villiers types have done to Conservatives’ prospects among younger generations, that has noted the wave of yimby Labour millennials in parliament who have first-hand experience of the housing crisis.

In the meantime, Labour will have to stand firm in the face of criticism – not just from the Tories but from Lib Dems, local campaign groups, and even its own rural MPs – if it is to make a dent in the UK’s chronic housing shortage before the next election. Any hope at all of economic growth depends on it.

This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.