Yesterday it happened again. Another friend of mine, a fine, industrious man, one of those salt-of-the-earth types who put bricks on bricks and dreams on foundations, has gone under.
A new home builder, bankrupted. Liquidation. Gone. And this is not some isolated sob story whispered in the margins. It is happening up and down the country like a plague. The scaffolding is coming down. The vans are being sold. Hard hats are being hung up for good.
Another builder by chance, told us last night in the pub that he’s packing his bags for Spain. Not for a holiday, but for good. “There’s no future here,” he muttered, pint in hand. And who can blame him? What sane tradesman would keep battling against a government determined to strangle the very industry it claims it wants to champion?
For here’s the lunacy of it all. Rachel Reeves and her merry band of Treasury alchemists have hit upon an idea so catastrophically deranged that one wonders if they cooked it up after a particularly strong jug of sangria. They plan, wait for it, to hike the landfill tax from its current modest £4 a tonne to the monstrous, ruinous, jaw-dropping sum of £126. Fifteen years ago, landfill tax was a policy nudge. Today, they want to turn it into a wrecking ball.
And the effect? Utter devastation. Critics, quite rightly, brand it a development killer. Let’s put this in plain language: the cost of waste per house, currently about £690, would balloon to a stratospheric £24,820. That’s not a surcharge; that’s an execution notice. It will add £24,000 to the cost of a new home. A tax on mud, a tax on rubble, a tax on the very earth beneath our feet.
Labour, in one breath, promises 300,000 new homes a year, grandiose pledges, the stuff of glossy conference speeches. In the next, they drive the very men and women who build those homes into bankruptcy. What is this if not madness? What is this if not a tragicomic contradiction that would be laughable if it weren’t so utterly ruinous for ordinary families trying to get on the housing ladder?
The government mutters something about recycling, innovation, curbing fly-tipping. Laudable goals, of course. But this is not recycling, it is fiscal sadism. Rocks, chalk, soil taxed at £125 a tonne. It’s like taxing the rain for falling or the wind for blowing.
And let’s be clear about who pays. Developers? They’re already squeezed by soaring material costs and labour shortages. They cannot absorb this lunacy. They will pass it on. And the first-time buyer, the young couple dreaming of their first set of house keys, will wake up to find the dream priced out of reach.
So what happens? Fewer homes built. Higher demand, lower supply. Prices spiral further. And the very crisis Labour claims to be solving deepens into an abyss. The builders flee to Spain, to Australia, to anywhere that will have them. Those who stay are bled dry. And the housing market, on which so much of our national prosperity rests, staggers under the weight of policy folly.
And it is not just housing. Roads, schools, drainage systems, every great public work depends on the movement of soil, stone, and waste. Tax those things to oblivion and you throttle the nation’s infrastructure at birth.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a policy tweak. It is an industrial suicide note.
We are a country that once prided itself on building. We built canals and railways, great cathedrals of commerce and housing estates that put roofs over millions of heads. Now, under Labour’s dead hand, we are reduced to taxing dirt. They really do slap a tax on everything. And as the scaffolding collapses, so too does the promise of a nation that builds for the future.
The truth is stark: those they don’t kill will leave. And when the builders leave, the homes don’t get built. And when the homes don’t get built, the young don’t get housed. It is as simple, as brutal, and as unforgivable as that.
This government must wake up, now, or it will find itself presiding not over a boom in housing, but over a funeral.
