With all the stealth of a late night backroom fix, Labour have quietly ripped up a decade old protection of the green belt and replaced local democratic decision making with top down diktat, says Claire Bullivant.
There are moments in a nation’s life when one rubs one’s eyes, reaches for the teapot, or perhaps something stronger, and asks, is this really happening?
Is this truly the best that a once proud democracy can do, handing the keys of our countryside to anonymous inspectors while local people are told, politely but firmly, to put their objections in writing and jog on?
Because that, in essence, is what this Labour Government has done. With all the stealth of a late night backroom fix, they have quietly ripped up a decade old protection of the green belt and replaced local democratic decision making with top down diktat. Planning inspectors, unelected, unaccountable, and steeped in the same bureaucratic mindset, are now empowered to override councils and communities alike. So much for power to the people. Apparently, that slogan now comes with an asterisk, terms and conditions apply, democracy not included.
And yes, I completely agree with the Conservative politicians who have called this out for what it is. Sir James Cleverly is right. Mark Francois is right. This is not reform, it is vandalism. A slap in the face for local democracy, delivered with a smirk and a press release.
What makes this all the more galling, tragic even, is that it is being done in the name of a housing target Labour is manifestly failing to meet. The numbers are brutal. Housing starts have collapsed from over 200,000 a year to barely 139,000, the lowest since Covid. Builders across the country are going to the wall. Small and medium sized firms, the very engines of delivery, are folding under uncertainty and regulatory churn. This is not a government building homes, it is a government building excuses.
And the irony is that there is a quicker, smarter, less destructive path. There is enough brownfield land to deliver 1.5 million homes. Fifty five per cent of it already has planning permission. A genuine quick win. Yet Labour ignores it. Why? Because redeveloping brownfield sites does not allow them to sneer at farmers, insult rural communities, or caricature anyone who values England’s green and pleasant land as some sort of reactionary peasant clutching a pitchfork.
Instead, we are served the politics of division and desperation. Green belt first. Democracy second. Results never.
Anyone who has spent five minutes in the real planning world knows this will not even work as intended. Developers already do better at public inquiry than under rushed, inspector led processes. Inspectors, often ex local authority planners, carry the same instincts and biases, and these changes will simply encourage a flurry of poor, speculative schemes. They will be refused, appealed, dragged through the system, and ultimately waste time, money, and trust. There is no shortcut to proper plan making. None. And while inspectors dither and plan examinations crawl, local government reorganisation has paralysed progress entirely. Offices wait. Files gather dust. Homes do not get built.
Michael Gove, to give credit where it is due, at least understood the complexity of the problem. This lot? They behave like children with a Lego set, smashing pieces together and wondering why the model does not resemble the box.
The consequences are profound. Our green spaces, already under pressure in an overcrowded Britain, face destruction. Flora and fauna will be decimated. Quality of life, peace, tranquillity, and access to the natural world, will be sacrificed on the altar of a target Labour cannot, and will not, meet. Net Zero zealotry and open borders lunacy converge, as ever, at the expense of local communities and beleaguered farmers, whose protests are waved away by soulless fixers armed with clipboards and national policy.
And let us not forget the democratic farce at the heart of this. An enormous parliamentary majority, achieved on the support of barely 20 per cent of eligible voters, is now used as a mandate to centralise power, curtail scrutiny, and move decisions behind closed doors. Public inquiries scrapped. Councils overridden. Objections reduced to written footnotes. This is not democracy renewed, it is democracy managed, controlled, sanitised, and censored.
Where is the consent? Where is the trust? Where, indeed, is the country in all of this?
This is not housebuilding. It is ideological vandalism. A government flailing as another flagship promise sinks beneath the waves, desperately concreting over the countryside to save face. It will fail, environmentally, economically, and politically. And when it does, we will all be poorer for it, fewer homes, less nature, and a planning system in which faith, already fragile, has finally been smashed to pieces.
What a sad moment for our country.
By Claire Bullivant
Main Image: For illustration only.
