BPF Spotlight Series: One week on - insights on the UK's new Government and Parliament
For our latest BPF Spotlight, we spoke to our Head of Communications Dominic Curran to find out more about our new Government and the many new faces seen at Parliament.
As well as giving his views on who the key figures are, and how much built environment experience there is in the new cohort of MPs, he also set out what the immediate priorities might be for the new Prime Minister and his team.
Here's what he had to say:
The new PM has appointed his top team, for the built environment, who are the key players?
There’s been a welcome carry through from Shadow Ministerial roles into Government. The key team for us is of course at MHCLG – a reversion to its previous name and a clear signal that ‘Levelling Up’ as a slogan, if not intent, is being dropped.
Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook have, as we expected, moved across into the Cabinet and Ministerial roles there, bringing their experience and energy with them.
We understand that the PM wants to keep Ministers in place for the long term. This alone would be a positive change from recent Ministerial musical chairs, particularly in housing.
There will of course be important roles in the built environment for the Treasury and Business and Trade, and Energy Security and Net Zero Department, and so it’s good to see, respectively, James Murray, Jonathan Reynolds and Ed Miliband move into those roles.
There's also lots of new faces in Parliament, how much knowledge and experience of our industry is there amongst the 2024 cohort?
It’s true – something like half of all MPs are newly elected and Labour MPs have less business experience than other parties.
However, around 10 have come from housing associations, one from Shelter, and many more from local government roles. So there’s a reasonably large pool of Labour MPs with a good understanding of key issues.
The former head of the Town & Country Planning Association is also a newly elected LibDem MP, and there are others with relevant interests or backgrounds that we’re looking to develop relationships with through meetings and site visits.
If we're to look ahead to the Government's first 100 days, what do you think its priorities are going to be, and could there be any surprises in store?
It’s clear that the Government is banking on economic growth to plug the tax gap, and so planning reform, as it supports growth will be key, as evidenced by the Chancellor’s speech only three days after being appointed.
The mantra of this Government is change but allied with no surprises. So they’ll be promoting new towns, unblocking planning, setting up GB Energy, unlocking pension fund investment and boosting grid capacity, as promised before the election.
I think they will want to give comfort to domestic and international investors that they are a stable, predictable and maybe even boring Government, which I think they would see as a positive thing after the turbulence of recent years.
One criticism of Labour was that it is big on ambition, but light on detail. Are we starting to see more detail come through?
As yet, not so much, but we’re only in week one.
We’ll see what next week’s King’s Speech heralds, and as Bills get published and time goes on we will of course see more detail emerge. I think they haven’t got to the detailed thinking yet on a lot of policies, with the possible exception of planning, not least as there is limited capacity in opposition to develop detailed policies. We expect a consultation NPPF reform to be published soon, so that will be an early example of detailed thinking, but even that is unlikely to herald many – if any – surprises.
