Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves target green belt for new homes

The Labour leader said: “I want to make sure that we can make a start on this on day one.”

Reeves said there was an “urgency” for Labour to become the party of housebuilders because “we know that for kids like us today [from working-class backgrounds], some of those opportunities [to own a home] don’t exist”.

If all goes to plan, at the beginning of the party’s second week in power Angela Rayner, the incoming housing secretary, will announce a housebuilding programme.

By the third week, she will have written to local authorities to tell them to start a process of “regularly reviewing” their green belt boundaries to ensure they are hitting housing targets.

The intention is that councils will identify areas to be reclassified for development — a move likely to prompt early confrontations with the Tories.

Building on green belt land is strictly controlled, originally to limit urban sprawl. Reclassifying just 1 per cent of it in England could produce as many as 738,000 new homes, according to research by Searchland, a specialist development site sourcing company.

Reeves, who has previously called for a “common sense” approach to building on the green belt, said: “We all know that there is building on greenfield [sites] today, but it’s chaotic. We also know there are different types of green belt land. Just because something’s designated ‘green belt’ does not mean it’s green.”

A recruitment drive for 300 planning officers, to help speed the rate at which local authorities grant permission for developments, will follow, alongside a “first dibs” scheme, prioritising new homes for a certain number of local residents to prevent properties from being sold to overseas investors.

These policies will underpin Starmer’s central pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the course of the next parliament.

The Conservatives never met their 2019 manifesto commitment to build 300,000 homes a year.

Challenged on whether Labour would deliver 300,000 homes in the first year, Starmer said: “It’s more likely, I think we’ll ramp up over the parliament. Therefore, towards the end of that, we’ll be doing more than the 300,000 [a year].”

When the Labour leader sat down with The Sunday Times on Friday, he was anxious to get home to his wife, Vic, who is Jewish, for Shabbat. As is tradition in the Starmer home, they had plans to sit down to watch the Channel 4 series Friday Night Dinner and eat together.

It is likely to be the last time that Starmer, who has been on the road for the past 37 days straight, will get to spend time with their 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter in the family’s north London home.

Barring the Tories pulling off what they themselves have admitted would need to be the greatest comeback in political history, the former director of public prosecutions will become Britain’s next prime minister.

When we meet in his constituency, he is accompanied by his soon-to-be Downing St neighbour Rachel Reeves.

The couple are intent on emulating the harmonious working relationship between David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne, a feat their Labour counterparts Tony Blair and Gordon Brown failed to achieve.

The “stability of the economy and the stability of the team that is running the country” is something they believe investors will be looking for as they make choices about where to spend their money.

Starmer and Reeves are preparing to attract private investment worth billions of pounds in the first months of a Labour government, which they hope will help the party meet its ambitious growth target and avoid tax rises and spending cuts.

Sitting at Reeves’s side, Starmer, 61, said: “The strength of the relationship between Rachel and me has been there for years because this has been a joint project. We both knew what we had to do with the Labour Party. It’s been four-and-a-half years of hard work, but it’s been a joint initiative and that’s required a steely toughness and a clarity of purpose on both our parts at every step.”

He added: “It will be very good for the country to have, if we get over the line, a prime minister and chancellor who are very close personal friends with a shared political project, working closely together.”

Rejecting the warnings from senior Tories, including Grant Shapps, that handing Labour a “super-majority” would give the party “unchecked power” and put the country in a “dangerous place”, Reeves, 45, claims it will give investors more confidence.

“What businesses say to both Keir and me is that there is a wall of money ready to invest … but businesses won’t invest unless they feel confident that there is some stability in the economy. There hasn’t been. We’ve had five prime ministers, seven chancellors these last 14 years. That is not the stability that the businesses want and need.

“This is a great country, but in the last few years, businesses have looked at Britain and looked at other countries around the world and see stability elsewhere and not in Britain. If we can get that strong mandate next Thursday, then I think that, once again, businesses will look at Britain.”

With President Biden facing calls to stand down and a shift towards the far-right in France, Starmer claims that a strong majority for Labour will make the UK look like a safer bet.

“We actually think Britain’s a good place to invest, but that’s not going to happen while we’ve got chaos and a lack of mandate,” he said. “With what’s going on in France and what may be going on in America … these investors are looking around to say, ‘Which is going to be the country that looks as if it’s got a stable and strong enough mandate for us to put our money into it?’”

While Labour may be only days away from power, questions hang over its plans. Key among them is the party’s drive for growth. Starmer has previously said the British economy could grow by 2.5 per cent under a Labour government. So how will they achieve it?

Labour has said it will stage a global investment summit in its first 100 days in office where foreign investors would be invited to see what the UK has to offer. Reeves has also held meetings with the British Infrastructure Council to discuss how UK-based and international investment firms can unlock private capital for national infrastructure projects.

• Rachel Reeves: ‘I always feel like I need to prove myself’

Attendees of the meetings have included representatives from BlackRock, Lloyds Banking Group, Santander, HSBC, Phoenix Group and Fidelity International, among others.

The plans are a throwback to the last Labour government in the late 1990s and early 2000s when, under Blair and Brown, private finance initiatives and public-private partnerships were expanded.

Dismissing claims that an incoming government cannot fix Britain’s stagnant economy, crumbling public services and infrastructure without raising taxes, Reeves said: “The debate around tax and spend is very frustrating because it misses out on the most important part of the economy, which is the growth in the economy.

“I can understand why the debate about the economy has reduced to tax and spend because that’s all you’ve had from the Tories these last few years, because you haven’t had growth. Without growth, the only choice is what tax to put up to pay for this needed spending. But there is a different way of doing things, and that is growth.”

Labour’s programme for government will be tightly focused around the party’s five national missions. They include a commitment to setting up Great British Energy, a publicly owned clean energy company, to help reach decarbonisation by 2030.

Asked how credible the party’s climate change goals are in the wake of widespread scepticism, Starmer said they were backed by Patrick Vallance, the government’s former chief scientific adviser.

“Vallance is an incredibly powerful endorser because he did a lot of the work that drove the [Covid] vaccine,” he said. “I’m sure when they started that somebody said to them, it is not possible to get a vaccine, it will take at least five years for the testing and they made it a national mission and they did it in a very short period of time.”

Another key focus for Labour will be on illegal migration after Labour pledged to ditch the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy.

Asked to explain his plans to stop the boats, the Labour leader said Britain needed a “better security arrangement with the European Union” over border security and needed to work more closely with the French. Although it was known that Labour was seeking an ambitious new UK-EU security pact, this is the first time it has been suggested that this would also encompass border security.

“We need to work better with the French authorities,” said Starmer. “We want a better security agreement with the EU when it comes to border security.”

Throughout the interview, Starmer and Reeves displayed a steely determination, which they will need in spades if they are swept into Downing Street. They believe a lack of aspiration is what has been holding the country back.

“It’s a psychological barrier that we need to get through,” said Starmer. “The story of aspiration and social mobility has been lost in the last 14 years and the sense that things will get better.”

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