• Apathy

Part of the reason for this might have been because most saw the result as a foregone conclusion. However, this was the fourth election in a row where the turnout fell. For most of the 20th century, 70 to 80% was common. In the 21st, only the Brexit referendum had more than 70% of the electorate voting. Something does seem to be changing.

This is important because, discredited as it is, this is the system we currently have and the alternatives are probably far worse: as Churchill remarked, democracy – and he was presumably thinking of the British version – is the worst system of government, apart from all the others. Another problem of not voting, as Plato realised many centuries ago, is that there’s the risk that as a result you’ll be governed by your inferiors. Cynics may argue that this happens anyway: but apathy is a dangerous enemy and can allow some very unwelcome foxes into the chicken coop.

Of course, it’s a two-way street. For the electors to be more engaged, they need to be enthused. In this election, as mentioned above, there were very few positive messages apart from vague aspirations for “a new start” and other platitudes that get trotted out every time. To be honest, a rosette saying “I’m not a Conservative” might have been enough in many seats, so unpopular had they become.

• Legacy

This was almost entirely their own fault. In 2019, Johnson was triumphant. Everything was downhill from there with a series of awful personal and political decisions and two prime ministerial defenestrations in rapid succession. Johnson was by far the more culpable as his crimes and failings were more various, and all underpinned by a colossal mendacity that we ought to have seen coming. We also voted him in. No one voted for Truss apart from the party members, whose collective judgement was thus cast into question. Surely they knew what she was like and what she might try to do?

During the campaign, a lot of Conservatives were saying that they had a clear plan, had delivered on promises and made tough decisions. Now most of them are saying the opposite, conceding that they let the country down and had failed. Make your mind up. Victoria Atkins was one of the few to push back a bit further, claiming that British people are instinctively Conservative, whatever exactly that means. Not right now they’re not.

Presiding over a serious decline in respect for politicians and the political system was bad enough. Worse still was allowing Reform UK to advance almost unchecked. The policy at Tory HQ seemed to be to ignore the party altogether, perhaps because they were worried that by picking arguments with them they’d actually convince enough electors that Reform was actually right. Just as Labour sat by and waited for the Conservatives to implode (which they did), the Tories were perhaps hoping that the same thing would happen with Reform. Despite a few unpleasant stories about some of the candidates, this didn’t happen. Just goes to show what you can accomplish if you have a charismatic leader, however flawed he is. The Tories should know all about this: they pulled off this trick with Johnson, after all.

So, Reform seems to be here to stay. The job of the Conservative party now is to combat Reform’s rhetoric. This may be easier said than done as a number of the possible Tory leadership candidates seem more likely to embrace it. Perhaps the Conservatives are currently offering too broad a church and two separate right-wing parties might emerge. That would certainly be Labour’s wish.

• Homes

The Conservatives’ hopelessly inept campaign also deprived us of the chance for some of Labour’s plans to be given a good examination. A number of huge problems – including the deficit, the tax system, social care and the NHS – were largely unaddressed and unexplored in the contest, except in the vaguest terms. One familiar target was, however, unveiled on day one: the planning system.

The plan, Rachel Reeves said, was to build 300,000 new homes a year over the parliament. That’s hardly new: the previous government had the same target, one it came nowhere close to hitting. Mandatory housing targets would be brought back and unspecified reforms would take place to the National Planning Policy Framework. Quite where this last development leaves authorities such as West Berkshire, which are just finalising their local plan, remains to be seen. One thing that seems likely to be beefed up is a presumption in favour of development, as currently and mysteriously exists with the granting of gambling licences.

A big issue is the provision of suitable mitigating infrastructure (schools, medical facilities, leisure centres and the like) and whether this can be done better. At present either developers do some projects themselves (as late as possible in the process, if at all) or make S106 or CIL payments (different ways of accomplishing more or less the same thing). However, the current system is slow and uncertain. Many communities would be happier to accept developments if there were some compensating improvements which they would see rather more quickly than at present. Is there anything that Whitehall can do about this?

Indeed, all the problems that existed before still remain. Three main ones seem to be the effective outsourcing of homebuilding to the private sector; under-funded planning departments at councils which are having to grapple with an increasingly complex system; and a much-needed reform of land valuation, on which all the parties have been silent.

• Solutions

The power of the private sector can be seen in this graph. Nowhere is this point better made than between the figures for 1949 and 2022: almost the same number of completions but in the first year 85% built by councils, most of the rest by the private sector and a small handful by housing associations; in 2022, the same proportions but by private firms, housing associations and local councils in that order.

Arguments exist that the private sector knows best. As far as meeting targets go, however, it’s apt to be disobedient. The targets companies have to meet are set by shareholders, not Whitehall. Despite the best efforts of the planners, the private sector will in general build what it wants where it wants – and, as importantly – when it wants. This is, of course, providing it can find enough skilled labour, something that seems to be in doubt. I don’t know how Reeves et al plan to fix all that.

Bringing empty homes back into use is suggested as one solution. The figures, as presented by the LGA, seem simple: there are about a million people on council waiting lists and the same number of empty properties. However, these cover every gradation from pristine but empty second (or third, or fourth) homes to ones that are in danger of collapse. It also includes those briefly empty, such as between tenancies. The real problem is the long-term (more than six months) empty homes, of which there are about 260,000.

As there seems to be no single reason why all these properties are empty, it’s hard to see a simple way that the problem can be fixed. One thing worth looking at is replacing the current stick of higher council tax on vacant properties with a carrot for bringing them back into use. However, even if all these 260,000 are re-used (very unlikely) that only addresses about 17% of the target. Politically, Labour might also be reluctant to come between an owner and their property in any way.

Then there’s office space which can be turned into dwellings where permitted development rights exist. This is quite a good way of creating very small flats though not always perfectly appointed:  about ten years ago the government mandated that such conversions must have windows, proving that previously some didn’t. As these effectively by-pass the planning system the numbers can’t be predicted or controlled by local councils: however, councils still have to deal with any mitigations that are needed, such as those caused by the properties being in inappropriate locations.

Particularly in rural areas, more use could also be made of community land trusts and rural exception sites. The former provides a specific kind of land tenure and the latter a specific route through the planning system. Both can, subject to need assessments, produce social housing. However, as these depend on a particular alignment of local circumstances, there’s little the government can do beyond publicising these approaches, which currently seem under-utilised.

None of these methods, even with tweaks, are likely to come to the rescue of the 300,000-home target. So, what does that leave?

• Colours

The traditional method has different kinds of sites and different kinds of land. We’re already familiar with green-field and brown-field sites. There are also grey-field sites, generally referring to under-utilised or partly redundant building.

Now we have grey-belt, which refers to poor quality or ugly sites within the green belt. These sites will, it seems, now be easier to build on.

I’d suggest that there also needs to be another belt or field (yellow?) to describe land that’s adjacent to development in an AONB (now called a National Landscape) and which is, in AONB terms, compromised as a result. It’s pointless to pretend that AONB land never gets built on so it might be as well to have some planning designation to recognise the changes that result.

To what extent the new government will reform this is uncertain. Plenty more colours are available. However, unless it’s aiming to decide all applications centrally, the burden of the decision-making will still rest with local planning authorities. Are they adequately tooled up for the job?

• Councils

The simple answer is “no”. Most agree (including many in the homebuilding industry, who are hardly objective) that the system is problematic. Words like slow, expensive and unpredictable are regularly used. The challenge is that the planning departments are, as it were, being asked to play a symphony with only a small brass band. The government either needs to simplify the score or hire more musicians. This will require more money and, as there’s probably a national shortage of officers, more time.

As regards making it simpler, that’s a tough ask. As systems build up more regulations and precedents, they tend to become more, not less, complex. This also means that staffing it becomes more challenging, so widening the disconnect. This kind of organic growth is one thing, but Whitehall can also add its own passages from time to time, all of which it expects the municipal orchestra to sight-read at once.

A case in point is the nutrient neutrality regulations which were, without notice, widened to include areas such as the Lambourn Valley catchment a few years ago. This isn’t the time to explain why I feel that this was attacking the wrong target in the wrong way. The main point is that councils had serious problems in understanding and implementing the new regulations. Promises of funding from Defra didn’t greatly help as this was for specialist officers, not enough of whom existed. As a result, the planning system in parts of West Berkshire, and doubtless elsewhere, ground to a complete halt.

There are also various quaint aspects to the planning system which could do with reform. One is the prohibition on councils charging fines for retrospective applications. In a rational world, these could range from nominal in the event of minor oversights to pretty serious – for example where someone has had permission refused, gone ahead and done it anyway and then wanted to regularise matters. Appeals could be handled in the same way as those into CIL charges are (in West Berkshire now, at least). This would keep people honest and provide revenue where this didn’t happen.

Many of those who call for the situation to be streamlined and made more presumptive in favour of approval – as seems to be the intention, though how is less clear – will be among the first to complain about “a brutal system over-riding local concerns” or words to that effect when something unwelcome is approved across the road from them.

There’s also the problem of enforcement, which amazingly isn’t even a statutory responsibility for planning authorities. You can have a planning system or not: there are advantages either way. However, if you have one it has to be properly funded and properly enforced. Neither is happening at present.

• Affordability

Some of the measures discussed here would increase the number of social-rent and affordable homes. As the private sector is perhaps naturally unwilling to supply these, one solution is for local authorities to do what they used to do in pre-Thatcher times and build them themselves. The problem is that most lack the in-house skills. There are several success stories (such as Wokingham) to set against some abject failures (such as Croydon) with councils setting up their own housing companies. Joint ventures between councils and housing associations can also work, although they’ll have to do a lot better than the wretched fiasco that West Berkshire Council and Sovereign cooked up a few years ago.

If money is the problem, that’s available quite cheaply through the PWLB. If Whitehall wanted to push the boat out it could offer authorities cheaper money still, providing this was used to build social housing within three years.

• Land

This is in many ways the big one. As this article points out, landowners – who take the least risk in any development – frequently reap the largest profit. I’m surprised that Labour has not proposed taxing the sometimes hundred-fold uplift in value when a plot is changed from agricultural to development use. Indeed, it’s likely that no one measure would do more to allow new entrants to the market, create a wider and larger supply of homes and lead at cheaper prices.

This seems to me to be the one to start with. Does the Labour Party have the bottle to take on the landowners? If not, more tinkering around the edges will be the likely result, with each proposal that supports environmental objectives or local choice lobbied away and an increasing number of complex issues for cash-strapped councils to deal with. The losers, as ever, will be those trying to get the homes that all seem to agree are badly needed, particularly of the affordable kind which the current system only fitfully delivers.

• Clearing up the mess

No one who’s had a builder, plumber, electrician or whoever come round to look at something that’s not working can be unfamiliar with the phrase “who put that in, then?” before telling you that it’s something between a cowboy job and a death-trap. Many years ago I had the pleasure of retorting to a plumber “actually, you did, about three years ago” which led to a rapid reverse-ferret.

Certainly, new political administrations use this phrase, which has a good many synonyms. Several of the announcements in the past week have involved phrases such as “the situation we inherited is far worse than we thought”, something that was also frequently heard after the change of leadership in West Berkshire last May.

How justified these claims are is another matter. Certainly they act as a brake on public optimism for a quick fix. They probably also follow a sobering series of discussions with civil servants or officers in which the various Sir Humphreys explain that most of the things the new lot wants to do are illegal, impractical or impossibly expensive. They may also just be a result of looking at something in a different way.

One of the aspects of public life which many feel has been allow to slide into decline is our policing. It’s certainly a more complex business than it used to be with more resources now needing to be spent by PC Boffin on dealing with cyber-crimes rather than by PC Plod on chasing apple scrumpers (not that conventional crimes have vanished; far from it). The question as to how well the government had supported the force came up during the election, with one Tory MP saying that his party had, over the past couple of years, presided over the largest single increase in recruitment since goodness-knows-when. Two minutes’ research revealed that, although strictly correct, the remark was basically drivel. This increase only happened because numbers had been allowed to decline so steeply since 2010.

Some statistics publicised here by Matt Ashby (an academic and former police officer) make this situation all the plainer. These refer to a decline (and then increase) in funding which mirrors the decline in numbers mentioned above, both of which reached their nadir in 2018; the reduction in the number of people (particularly PCSOs) working in the service since 2010; and the more or less doubling of the number of people who claim never to have seen a police officer on patrol.

Allowing these figures to fall and then in most cases rise again suggests, if the decisions were based on operational need, that the demand for policing declined from 2010 to 2018 and then increased. This clearly can’t be true. Why, then, did this happen? Another question for the Conservatives. One of the results has been that a large number of experienced people left the service and have, if the posts have been re-filled at all, been replaced by less experienced ones. If this was the object of the reforms, it’s worked a treat.

Nor does the current situation encourage either recruitment or retention. A recent statement by the Suffolk Police Federation suggests that “more than one in five officers across the country plan to quit the service”, with poor treatment from the government, low morale, mental-health and pay all being cited as major reasons. It will be interesting to see if Labour manages to improve this situation.

 • And finally…

• France appears to have dodged a bullet in its own election with the second round of voting producing a more balanced result than many had feared. By an irony, those on the right who were hoping for a smaller state might have their wish granted – the three-way split with no one having close to an overall majority may well result in the state not being able to do very much. Perhaps there’s something to be said for this two-stage system. You vote once, have a look at the results and then say, “oh hang on a moment…” Shame we didn’t have that in 2016 for the Brexit vote.

• The USA may wish for the same thing come November. I was seriously worried that Trump would get re-elected but the events of the past couple of weeks haven’t made me think that Biden will be much better. Which is worse: a President who’d be happy to deny that the sun rises in the east, or one who can’t remember?

• Farmer and author James Rebanks has been long outspoken about the plight facing the British farmer and our dysfunctional relationship with our land. Since Brexit, the Conservative government repeatedly failed to provide any meaningful financial support for farmers, and was generally seen as turning their backs on their core rural voter base. This was reflected in the general election result. Now many farmers, Rebanks included, are asking our new Labour government: will things now change? See more on what Rebanks has to say here, which seems common sense to me.

• Another final looms for Southgate’s boys who have confounded many expectations, including mine, by getting this far. Spain, unquestionably the best team in the Euros, might be too tough a test. The Women’s World Cup Final last year (in which Spain defeated England 1-0) will not be an omen worth recalling, any more than will be 2021’s Euros defeat to Italy on penalties. England’s teams, men and women’s, have only won two international tournaments, both at Wembley and both against Germany. This final is in Germany, which is perhaps the next best thing. Whether the fates take the same view remains to be seen…