Labour will ignore local opposition if it has to to deliver more homes, says Starmer – UK politics live

Keir Starmer has said the BBC should explain why it is calling Hamas militants, not terrorists, in its news coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

Echoing a complaint by Tory MPs, including Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, who told GB News this morning that Hamas represented “pure and simple terrorism” and that other terms did not fully convey this, Starmer told LBC:

The BBC needs to explain why it [is not use the term terrorists] because for most people – I said terrorism and terrorist, and to me that’s obviously what we are witnessing. So I think it’s for the BBC to explain why then not doing it.

I have asked the BBC for a response to what Starmer and Shapps said this morning. But last night John Simpson, who for many years was the BBC’s world affairs editor, posted his own explanation on X.

British politicians know perfectly well why the BBC avoids the word ‘terrorist’, and over the years plenty of them have privately agreed with it. Calling someone a terrorist means you’re taking sides and ceasing to treat the situation with due impartiality. The BBC’s job is to place the facts before its audience and let them decide what they think, honestly and without ranting. That’s why, in Britain and throughout the world, nearly half a billion people watch, listen to and read us. There’s always someone who would like us to rant. Sorry, it’s not what we do.

The BBC’s style guide says:

The word “terrorist” is not banned, but its use can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should not use the term without attribution.

At the Labour conference Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, is delivering her speech now.

As Richard Adams reports, she is saying Labour would replace Rishi Sunak’s demand for compulsory maths classes until 18 with improved maths teaching for younger children and “real world” numeracy lessons for pupils in England.

Keir Starmer was talking about Labour’s plans to reform the planning system yesterday. He covered some of this in his speech, but after he had finished Labour published a much more detailed briefing, which does not seem to be available online. I’m posting it here for the record. This is what Labour describes as its housing recovery plan.

Upon entering office, the deputy prime minister and secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities, Angela Rayner, will publish a written ministerial statement and write to all chief planning officers to instruct local planning authorities to approve planning applications in areas which do not have a local plan and fail other key policy tests, such as the housing delivery test.

This statement will also signpost changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, which will reverse concessions the government made to Tory backbenchers in December 2022, reinstate and enforce compulsory local targets.

The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has announced they would increase planning capacity – ensuring every local authority has at least one full time, experienced planning officer and expanding the government’s strategic planning capacity for housing and infrastructure – funded by increasing stamp duty on overseas buyers.

Where local authorities don’t meet their requirements, a Labour government would work with the planning inspectorate to use all powers available to build homes, with interventions ranging from mediation to worst case scenarios that may require use of ‘call-in’ powers or see local planning authorities designated.

As announced by Angela Rayner, increasing flexibility in the Affordable Homes Programme so Homes England can support build out of the increasing number of ‘stalled’ sites with planning permission, but that are no longer viable due to soaring interest rates and economic uncertainty.

As well as clearing the backlog, Labour will reform the system to accelerate planning permissions while strengthening local consent on ‘how’ developments can best support local communities, not ‘if’ the homes that people need are built at all. This will put the local plan front and centre in the planning system and create a genuinely plan-led system.

Labour will strengthen the presumption in favour of developments that are aligned to local plans, with a lighter touch process for approval in line with plans and, where criteria are met, a strong community right to appeal against off-plan and speculative development.

We will increase transparency, monitoring and enforcement of requirements to maintain up to date local plans with fixed timelines for renewing local plan. We will also introduce a ‘backstop’ option allowing central government or the planning inspectorate to draw up local plans where they are significantly and egregiously delayed.

Under our new streamlined system, we will lowering the thresholds for applications being made directly to the planning inspectorate to reflect the fact that decision making should be smoother.

We will give planning officers stronger authority to grant permission on smaller sites that are in line with the plan, without referring to the planning committee, and define in guidance that pre-application advice by officers is a material consideration to the planning decision, and a ‘cooling off’ period where members go against officers’ recommendations.

We will provide guidance on off-the-shelf environmental mitigations which cut down on endless surveys and halt the vexatious frustration of applications.

In addition to increasing planning capacity by raising stamp duty on overseas buyer, Labour will accelerate the government’s plan to increase planning application fees, and potentially going further, with revenue ringfenced for more planning resource.

We will also make HM Land Registry data publicly available to increase transparency of land ownership, preventing landowners from holding a de facto veto over local plans due to an opaque land market.

Keir Starmer has said that, in order to achieve his aim of accelerating housebuilding in Britain, he will be willing to ignore local opposition to developments.

He also said that he would not tolerate Labour MPs trying to block his housebuilding plans either.

Last year Rishi Sunak abandoned plans for mandatory national housebuilding targets in the face of widespread opposition from his MPs, many of whom represent green belt constituencies where housing developments are often unpopular with residents.

Labour’s plan for housebuilding depends to a large extent on reforms to planning law. The party is not going to stop communities registering objections, but it wants to limit the extent to which some developments can be held up.

In an interview with the Today programme, Starmer was asked if he would be willing to tell people: ‘We hear you, but I’m afraid we’re ignoring you.’ He replied:

Yes. We’re going to have to do that. Now, that’s not going to be a crude exercise. I think one of the problems we have is that planning is at the moment very, very localised.

There isn’t the ability to look across a wider area and say: ‘Where would the best place be for this development? Where could we have a new town?’ And so we need to bulldoze through it, but we also need to be pragmatic about how we do it.

But I’m going to be clear: we aren’t going to have to do things which previous governments haven’t done because otherwise we’ll end up where we are now, which is talking about housing – this has been the story of the last 13 years – but not actually getting very much done.

Asked about his own opposition in the past to the plan to take HS2 to Euston, which is in his Holborn and St Pancras constituency, Starmer said that MPs were entitled to stand up for their constituents, but that government had a different role. He said:

You will always get – and quite understandably and quite rightly – individual MPs standing up for the communities in their patch.

The role of government is obviously different. The role of government is to deliver on big projects. And we’re going to have to get that balance right.

In a separate interview with Times Radio, he indicated that he would not let Labour MPs block his plans in the way that Tory MPs vetoed mandatory housing targets. He said:

We are going to have to be tough with anybody who stands in the way of that and that will include any Labour MPs who say: ‘Well, I’m signed up to the project but just not here.’

Good morning. Keir Starmer has been doing an interview round this morning, and he used a striking phrase when he described what he was trying to do with his conference speech yesterday. He said he was trying to reach “the inner soul of the British public”.

He told Radio 5 Live:

What I was trying to do yesterday was not so much lay out layers and layers of detailed policy; we have done quite a lot of policy in the last year or so.

What I was trying to do was to reach, if you like, the inner soul of the British public who have had 13 years of decline, 13 years of hope almost beaten out of them, and to say: we can go forward, what is ruined can be rebuilt, wounds do heal and if we set our face to it we can have a decade of national renewal.

That helps to explain the “we are the healers” language in the speech. For a full summary, here is Pippa Crerar’s story.

And Rosa Prince at Politico has a good round-up of the reaction. It implies the inner soul of the public might be responding quite well.

As Peter Walker reports, on his media round this morning Starmer also said that he was “bomb-proofing” all of his policy pledges to ensure a Labour government does not break promises.

I will post a full summary from the Starmer media round shortly.

The Labour conference finishes in Liverpool today at lunchtime. With Starmer’s speech over, it may feel to some as if it is already over, but we will be hearing this morning from Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, and Jonathan Ashworth, a shadow Cabinet Office minister.

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