Gove wrong to bow to Nimbyism

He is still one of the best brains in government and has so far at least made a success of every job he’s had in government. His Achilles’ heel is that he is so bright, so good with words, so emollient that nobody in government appears to completely trust him.

It reminds me of what Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich is reported to have wondered in 1822 on hearing that his old British sparring partner and foreign secretary Lord Robert Castlereagh had died by suicide. “But what did he mean by that?”

These days it really is hard to work out what a bright man like Gove is thinking when he has abandoned the government’s 300,000 annual housebuilding target and decided that holiday lets should need planning consent, thus guaranteeing that all those parts of the country that rely on revenue from holidaymakers will now be that much poorer.

All the evidence is that we should be building more homes than the target figure. And basic economics should surely have taught the Tories that you don’t help young people by stimulating demand, which is what the ludicrous Help to Buy policy did. You truly help them when you stimulate supply, which is precisely the opposite of what Gove has achieved.

The notion that local nimbyism translates into lost Tory votes is a myth

So what on earth could have persuaded this bright man to act in such a truly unhelpful way? I think we now know the answer. Friends who know tell me the prime minister has remarked on several occasions that when he meets Tory supporters as he goes around the country, many of them mention their concern about building going on near their homes.

I have no doubt this is the case. But it ignores two obvious truths. The first is that despite building going on around them, these people are still Tory supporters. If they were sufficiently outraged, they would presumably have torn up their membership cards and stayed away.

The second is that the notion that local nimbyism translates into lost Tory votes is a myth for which there is no actual evidence. When MP for Chipping Barnet Theresa Villiers led the backbench attack on mandatory five-year housing supply targets, she was doing exactly what her constituents no doubt wanted her to do. But had she stayed silent, I can say as a former member of parliament, who knows what it’s like to win and lose, that the impact on her success or failure at the next general election would have been so minimal as to be irrelevant.

Failed policies

Sadly, what Labour are talking about is frankly either daft, as in rent control, which London mayor Sadiq Khan wants to impose, but which has been tried and failed so many times you wonder why any party would keep trotting the idea out, or so vague, as in giving first-time buyers “first dibs on new homes”, that you get the impression some focus group mentioned the idea and nobody bothered to follow it through.

“We’ll stop entire developments being sold to overseas investors” is a direct quote from the Labour website. Really? Do you have any idea how the build-to-rent market works in this country? They say they’ll reform planning, but don’t offer a hint as to how they might actually do it, not least because they know that’s much easier said than done.

If Labour really wanted to improve the lot for young aspirational homeowners, they would drop their opposition to Right to Buy and commit to restoring the mandatory five-year housing supply. So no answers from that quarter.

Yes, I know I’m an old Tory, but that’s precisely because for all its manifold failings, at least the party never indulges in the corrosive politics of envy that Labour under leader Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t seem capable of forgetting. Starmer may be an honourable man, but he is definitely not Tony Blair.

Steve Norris is chairman of Soho Estates