So far, this book has explored finance, housing and planning from the perspective of overall national housing policy. This chapter turns to three detailed examples of how the finance– housebuilding complex has decisively influenced specific national policies on housing and planning. The rise and rise of the property lobby is not always in plain sight at the level of national policymaking, or at the local level, because its influence is obscured by legal and technical jargon and by high- level political lobbying.

The following examples demonstrate how important it is to open up the assumptions and practices of the property sector and its relationship to the government at the national and local levels to public examination. Inside each example lies a truth about the impasse that we have reached about housing, and about the need to do things very differently if the nation is to have any chance of meeting the needs of all those who have a right to housing.

New Labour's Growth Areas programme, 2000– 10

In this first case study, we are going back to the period before the financial crash of 2008. This retrospective is relevant because it helps to explain why the housing crisis is not simply a consequence of having Conservative governments or a financial crash – though they have made things very much worse. The housing crisis is more systemic than that and understanding how the finance/ property system works across governments of all colours helps to explain why we are so stuck when it comes to tackling it.

The period of New Labour governments between 1997 and 2010 casts a light on how the Labour Party approached the problem of planning for housing growth. In 1997, New Labour had significant economic and political flexibility when it came into office. The economy was picking up and was soon to enter a boom period, Labour had a large parliamentary majority and it had spent years in opposition in the 1990s working up detailed plans to tackle the housing crisis. It was prepared to spend government money (with some important limitations, as discussed later) and allow local government to take the lead in regeneration and rebuilding public services. It also had ambitious plans for regional government and strategic infrastructure. Labour had a socially and environmentally interventionist housing and planning tradition, which included a spatial- planning and a market- directing approach.