LONDON — Britain’s technocratic ministers aren’t the most obvious candidates to don MAGA-style red caps and belt out punchy slogans.
But Britain’s housing secretary has a real fight on his hands, and he’s not afraid to channel Donald Trump in waging it.
Steve Reed took office in early September with a colorful promise to “build, baby, build.”
Britain is in the midst of a housing crisis. The availability of affordable housing has plummeted, Brits are getting on the housing ladder later in life, and many families and renters are living in overcrowded, substandard and insecure homes.
To try to fix this, the government came to power promising to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of the parliament. Reed and his team went into this fall’s Labour conference wearing hats emblazoned with the Trump-style three-word phrase, a rabble-rousing address and a social media strategy to match.
But his MPs are already worried that the tradeoffs Reed and the U.K. Treasury are pushing to get shovels in the ground ride roughshod over the environmental protections that Brits cherish — and put some vulnerable Labour seats at risk.
The three-word slogan is “completely counterproductive,” said one Labour MP who was granted anonymity to speak candidly like others quoted in this piece. The government must acknowledge “that nature is something that people genuinely love, [which] improves health and wellbeing.”
Planning battle
Front of their minds are a host of changes to the U.K.’s planning bill, which is snaking its way through parliament.
The bill aims to cut red tape to fast-track planning decisions, unlock more land for development, and create a building boom.
The legislation is on a journey through the U.K.’s House of Lords, and has been tweaked with a slew of government amendments on its way.
In October, Reed introduced further amendments to try to speed up planning decisions and overrule councils who attempt to block new developments.
But the first MP quoted above said they are concerned Reed’s “build, baby, build” drive will only see Labour shed votes to both Zack Polanski’s left-wing Green Party and Nigel Farage’s populist Reform.
“Making tough decisions about how we use our land for important purposes, such as energy, food, security, housing and nature, is what government is about,” the first MP said.
But they added: “We need to make sure that we are making the right decisions, but also telling a story about why we’re making those decisions, and dismissing nature as inconvenient is going against the grain of the British public.”
They added: “Nobody disagrees with [building more homes] as a principle, but ending up with a narrative that basically sounds like you’re speaking in support of the [housing] developers, rather than in support of the communities that we represent, is just weird.”
Making changes
Last week, Reed opened up another front in his battle.
The government announced that the quotas for affordable housing in new London developments would be slashed from 35 percent to 20 percent.
City Hall said the measures would help speed up planning decisions and incentivize developers to actually build more houses. But cutting social housing targets is an uncomfortable prospect for many in the Labour party.
The government’s message is “build, baby build — but not for poor people,” a Labour aide complained.
Reed firmly defended the change, telling Sky News last week: “There were only 4,000 starts in London last year for social and affordable housing. That is nothing like the scale of the crisis that we have.”
He added of the quota: “35 percent of nothing is nothing. We need to make schemes viable for developers so they’ll get spades in the ground.”
Blocking the blockers narrative
Reed has the backing of the U.K.’s powerful Treasury in waging his battle. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the government wants to back the “builders not the blockers,” language a second Labour MP, this one in a rural seat, described as “terrible” and an approach that “needs to stop.”
Such rhetoric will fail to persuade constituents worried about new developments that trample nature to support new housing. “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” they warned. “It’s all vinegar.”
The government has already shown that it’s willing to take the fight to pro-environment MPs — sometimes dismissed in the U.K. as “NIMBYs,” short for “not in my backyard.”
2024 intake MP Chris Hinchliff was stripped of the Labour whip in July after proposing a series of rebel amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and attacking the legislation for having a “narrow focus on increasing housing supply.”
While there is vocal opposition to the “build, baby, build” strategy within Labour, there are also MPs who align themselves with the general message, if not the exact wording.
“I would not go out to my constituents who are concerned about the Green Belt wearing a [build, baby, build] cap,” said a third Labour MP, also in a rural seat, “but at the same time, you have to be honest with people about the trade-offs.”
They accused the opposition to Reed of “fear-mongering” and stoking the idea that England’s green belt — a designated area of British countryside protected from most development — risks being “destroyed.”
“That has killed off responsible discussions on development,” they argued. “Do I love the slogan? No. Am I going to lose sleep over it? No, because as a constituency MP you can have reasonable conversations.”
The red hat brigade
Reed also has a cohort of willing warriors on his side.
The 2024 intake of Labour MPs brought with it some highly vocal, pro-growth Labour factions. The Labour YIMBY group and Labour Growth Group have been shouting from the rooftops about building more.
Labour Growth Group chair and MP Chris Curtis says: “We have some of the oldest and therefore coldest homes of any developed country. We have outdated, carbon intensive energy infrastructure, hardly any water storage, pipes that leak, old sewage infrastructure that dumps raw sewage into our rivers, and car dependency because we can’t build proper public transport.
“Anybody who thinks blocks on building has been good for nature is simply wrong,” he added. “Protecting our environment literally depends on us building well, and building quickly.”
Labour MP Mike Reader, who worked in the construction and infrastructure sector before becoming an MP and is part of the pro-building caucus, was sanguine about Reed’s message.
“The U.K. is the most nature-depleted country in Western Europe,” he said. “So to argue for the status quo … is arguing for us to destroy nature in its very essence. The legislation that we [currently] have does not protect nature.”
As for concern that the government is too close to housing developers, Reader shot back: “Who do they think builds the houses?”
“I want each [MP who rejects the ‘build, baby, build’ message] to tell the thousands of young families in temporary accommodation that they don’t deserve a safe secure home,” he said. “If they can’t do that they need to grow a pair and do difficult things. That’s why we’re in government. To change lives. And build, baby, build.”
A fourth unnamed Labour MP said the slogan is “a bit cringe and Trumpian,” but added: “I’m not really arsed about what slogans they’re using if they’re delivering on that as an objective.”
There’s also unlikely praise for the effort from the other side of the U.K. political divide.
Jack Airey, a former No. 10 special adviser who tried to get a planning and infrastructure bill through under the last Conservative government, said “people that oppose house building often have the loudest voice, and they use it … and yet, the people that support house building generally don’t really say it, because why would they? They’ve got better things to do.”
“I think it’s really positive for the government to have a pro-house building and pro-development message out there, and, more importantly, a pro-development caucus in parliament and beyond,” he said.
In a bid to steady the nerves of anxious MPs, Reed told the parliamentary Labour Party last week that his Trump-style slogan is a “bit of fun” that hides a serious point — that there simply aren’t enough houses being built in the U.K.
And an aide to Reed rejected concerns from Labour MPs that nature is not being sufficiently considered, saying “nobody understands [nature concerns] more than Steve.“We reject this kind of binary choice between nature and building,” they said. “We think that you can do both. It just requires imaginative, ultimately sensible and pragmatic policy-making, and that’s what we’re doing.
“We’re not ashamed to campaign in primary colors,” the Reed aide said.
Noah Keate contributed reporting.
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