It’s striking how quickly certain segments of the Labour Party have been seduced by a right-wing, deregulatory approach to housing policy. Much of this, I’m sure, stems from a genuine desperation to tackle the housing crisis left by the Conservatives. We’ve inherited sky-high waiting lists, and homeownership is a distant dream for millions.

But the Planning and Infrastructure Bill gets it wrong by positioning environmental protections and community engagement as the chief villains of the crisis. All that is needed, we’re told, is a bonfire of ‘red-tape,’ and then the free market will deliver the goods.

It’s hard to miss the parallels between this thinking and Tory rhetoric. The ‘builders vs blockers’ framing echoes Liz Truss’s ‘anti-growth coalition’ — the line she was touting around the same time her own free-market experiment crashed the economy. But this narrative doesn’t hold water: our planning system consistently approves more homes than developers build.

Of course, as our population grows, we will continue to need to build additional homes, but with more than one in three granted planning permissions since 2015 still unbuilt, it couldn’t be clearer that the bottleneck for housing isn’t just an issue of process — it’s corporate profiteering.

Instead of rewarding developers for failure, it’s time to get tough on those holding us to ransom. There’s plenty of deregulatory carrot in this legislation — what’s missing is the stick.

So, I’ve proposed giving councils the power to block developers with a track record of sitting on land after gaining permissions and the ability to impose financial penalties where shovels aren’t in the ground within a reasonable timeframe.

I welcomed the government’s commitment to penalising stalling developers in future legislation, last week. That’s the kind of ‘backing builders, not blockers’ voters will get behind, and it’s hopefully a sign that developers won’t alone be able to determine our path forward.

It’s crucial to note that increasing the market supply of housing alone is an inadequate response to the disgracefully high waiting lists left by the Tories. Take the two local authorities within my North East Hertfordshire constituency, for example. In the ten years from 2014 to 2024, North Hertfordshire and East Hertfordshire delivered a significant expansion in housing supply of 3,973 and 7,948 net additional dwellings, respectively. But what happened to local authority housing waitlists over the same period?

They rose from 1,612 to 2,449 in North Hertfordshire and from 2,005 to 2,201 in East Hertfordshire. There have been more than enough new homes in my local area to clear housing waiting lists, but the affordable homes we need are simply not delivered by a developer-led, profit-motivated model.

Everyone deserves a home that won’t bankrupt them to build their life around, and the fact that thousands of children are growing up in families without that security is a damning indictment of the situation the Tories left to the Labour government. This is why one of the first amendments I tabled to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill would ensure that councils aren’t just set aggregate housing numbers, but also specific targets for the social homes needed to bring waiting lists down.

And it’s not just about how much affordable housing gets built, it’s also about what we mean by ‘affordable’. Time and again communities watch the countryside next door disappear, while pressure grows on dwindling services and infrastructure; too often the homes that eventually get built are beyond the financial reach of younger local residents, forcing them to move away and ripping the heart out of the area in the process. This is why, backed by Shelter, I have proposed redefining ‘affordable housing’ to mean social rent, so that rates are tied to average local incomes.

Over that same decade in which housing supply and waiting lists grew simultaneously in North and East Hertfordshire, a further fact stands out: not a single council house was built in either authority. Given the Thatcherite constraints on their ability to act and the impacts of more recent Tory austerity, it is hard to blame local authorities for not delivering the thousands of council houses we need. But all serious commentators are clear that addressing the housing crisis will be impossible without a new era of mass council house building.

Councils must once again have the power to assemble land based on what communities need, not just what developers aim to profit from. That’s why I’ve also tabled an amendment to replace the developer dominated ‘call for sites’ model with proactive site identification and acquisition through compulsory purchase at current-use value.

This would eliminate inflated, speculative ‘hope value’, which funnels public money into the pockets of wealthy landowners and makes delivering affordable homes functionally impossible. If we couple these powers with proper funding and the tools needed to hold underperforming developers to account, we’d have the beginnings of a truly progressive planning system.

The path of slashing red tape in the hope the market will deliver is a political cul-de-sac. It won’t provide the homes we need, and in a few years, the developer lobby will be back demanding another round of deregulation — a little less democracy, a few more habitats destroyed, some more dead badgers, and then, the homes will come.

It’s time to break from the failed, developer-led status quo and forge a new path — one that puts the public sector back in the drivers’ seat and delivers genuinely affordable homes for key workers like nurses, teachers, posties, and millions more.