The housing element is perhaps the most politically sensitive. The government has set a target of 300,000 new homes per year, with a requirement that at least 40 per cent be built on brownfield land in existing urban areas. To achieve this, the plan streamlines the planning process for developments that meet new design and sustainability standards, while creating a network of publicly owned development corporations modelled on the success of the London Docklands and Salford Quays regenerations.
Local authorities have broadly welcomed the strategy, though with the customary caveat that funding must actually arrive. The chair of the Local Government Association described the plan as “the most serious attempt at spatial rebalancing in a generation,” while cautioning that councils would need multi-year settlement guarantees to plan effectively. “We have been burned before by announcements that look magnificent in a press release and vanish in a spending review,” the chair noted.
The private sector response has been cautiously enthusiastic. Major construction firms have reported a surge in tender enquiries, and several international infrastructure funds have signalled their intention to establish or expand UK operations. The Confederation of British Industry has called for the creation of a dedicated infrastructure delivery authority, independent of the Treasury’s annual spending cycle, to ensure that projects are not delayed by political changes.
Critics, inevitably, have questioned the affordability. The Opposition has argued that the borrowing required to fund the plan will burden future taxpayers and crowd out private investment. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has noted that while the long-term economic returns are likely to be positive, the short-term fiscal impact will require difficult choices elsewhere in public spending.
Burnham, for his part, has been characteristically blunt in response. “You can borrow to build a hospital, a railway, a wind farm,” he told a conference of regional mayors in Leeds. “What you cannot do is borrow your way out of a country where half the towns have been left to rot for thirty years. That requires action, and action is what this government intends to take.”
For the residents of towns like Wigan, Grimsby, Merthyr Tydfil and Derry, the plan is more than a policy document. It is a signal that they have not been forgotten. Whether the cranes actually appear on their skylines within five years remains to be seen. But for the first time in a long while, the promise feels less like rhetoric and more like a plan.
