Britain’s Labour government has declared war on NIMBYs

Stand on the bridge where Iver lane crosses the M25 and look north. Eight lanes of traffic hurtle along London’s orbital motorway beneath you. Shift your gaze east of the roaring stream, between the motorway barriers and an industrial estate, and you will see a former landfill site that happens to sit in the green belt (protected land that surrounds many English cities).

In 2022 Buckinghamshire council blocked a proposed data centre here, saying it would harm “the ecological value of the site”. Last year the Tory government threw out an appeal, in part because the site would have been visible “above the vegetation along the motorway”. A smaller scheme was nixed by the council in June.

Bizarre decisions such as these exemplify the paralysing effects of Britain’s planning regime. They are now firmly in the cross-hairs of the new Labour government. In her first speech as chancellor on July 8th, Rachel Reeves said that two blocked data centres, one in Buckinghamshire and another in Hertfordshire, would be called in for reconsideration; more projects are expected to follow. She announced that the government had ended an “absurd” de facto ban on onshore wind farms in England and would reimpose housing targets on local authorities. “The system needs a new signal,” said Ms Reeves. “This is that signal.”

Ms Reeves’s speech recalled another, four decades earlier. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher did not consider the main opposition to her economic reforms to be the parliamentary Labour Party, which had been humbled. Instead the prime minister saw her fight as being with hard-left councils and the National Union of Mineworkers, says David Willetts, who worked in her policy unit. In a speech in 1984 she labelled them the “enemy within”.

Ms Reeves, too, is focused less on the rump of Tory MPs, more on “voices of local opposition”. Where Thatcher singled out Ken Livingstone and Derek Hatton, leading figures at councils in London and Liverpool respectively, Ms Reeves might have mentioned the likes of Martin Tett. As Tory leader of Buckinghamshire council since 2011, Mr Tett has a reasonable claim to being Britain’s most successful NIMBY. Responsible for an almost 1,900-square km county nestled between London and Oxford, his administration has turned blocking development into an art form.

The data centre is but one in the catalogue. In May Buckinghamshire blocked a plan backed by Sam Mendes, a British film director, to build a £750m ($960m) studio in Marlow, also on a former landfill site. It was also by far the most obstructive council along the route of HS2, insisting that much of the high-speed railway be buried in tunnels and cuttings and then using legal challenges to hold up the lorries needed to remove rubble. It has failed to produce an up-to-date plan for making land available for housing. All of this goes down well with local voters, of course.

Ms Reeves outlined three ways in which Labour will take on the blockers. The first is the use of “call-ins”. The proposal near Iver lane was for a £2.5bn data centre, which the developer argued would bring investment in Britain’s tech sector. Ms Reeves says that she and Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, “will not hesitate” to review such decisions. The government can simply decide that Britain will start saying “yes”. One test will be whether it is as keen to overrule Labour councils.

Data centres are the most obvious big investments that have been gummed up. But in recent weeks Labour aides have been asking around for other blocked projects. According to the British Venture Capital Association, a trade body, there is more than £145bn of “dry powder” ready to be invested in Britain in the next three to five years. Flexing the government’s muscles on “call-in” powers offers a boost to developers and a warning to local councils. Decisions on large onshore wind farms will be taken nationally, said Ms Reeves.

The second strand is that Labour will reimpose top-down housing targets on councils. That will reverse the changes brought in under Michael Gove, the former housing secretary, and put more pressure on councils like Buckinghamshire to come up with local plans.

Third is building on the green belt. Labour had already promised to review the policy, which has throttled cities for decades. In her speech Ms Reeves offered little extra detail other than saying that councils would be expected to review green-belt boundaries and prioritise housebuilding on the “grey belt”—low-quality land such as former landfill sites. Labour could overhaul the policy to make councils take “confident bites” out of the green belt, says David Rudlin, a planning expert. Railway stations near cities are often surrounded by empty fields, for example.

One concern raised since the election is that its success in winning seats across the south of England will crimp Labour’s boldness. But most constituencies with green-belt land remain Tory-Lib Dem marginals or safe Labour seats, says Sam Dumitriu of Britain Remade, a think-tank. And bluntly, Labour can afford to sacrifice some of its new MPs to achieve its principal objective of boosting growth. The real risk is that a top-down approach—in which ministers browbeat councils into action—relies on spending a lot of political capital. That becomes harder once the shine comes off a new government. Local authorities will return fire with judicial reviews, a way of challenging the legality of official decisions, which can take years. Councils can be steamrollered; courts less so.

Ms Reeves’s speech is therefore best understood as a “very well-constructed day-one package”, says a former minister. She has pulled together the rapid measures available to her within the existing system. But it is not a plan for building the 1.5m homes over the next five years that Labour has promised. That will require trickier reforms, like adopting a more rules-based approach to planning and tackling knotty issues such as land-value capture and compulsory purchase—areas where Labour has only begun to set out its ideas. The government has fired an opening shot. Its battle with the blockers has just begun. ■

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