Image: UK Housing Secretary Steve Reed wearing a “Build Baby Build!” cap at the recent British Labour Party conference.
A reverse movement to Nimby is underway in the UK. Joseph Hackett from the Mineral Products Association explains.
As in many countries, the aggregates sector in Britain has endured years of relatively low construction rates, poor delivery of infrastructure projects and restrictive planning rules, driven in large part by the classic Nimby (Not In My Backyard) instinct.
This was exacerbated by a shift towards local decision-making in the 2010s. Delivering homes and infrastructure requires difficult decisions, and without strong top-down direction, these are often trumped by local interests.
But leaders across the political spectrum are now saying “Yimby” (Yes In My Backyard).
The Yimby approach started in America in the 2010s as a reaction to low rates of house building, which were driving up rents and house prices, and it quickly spread to Britain, where housing costs have also spiralled in recent years.
It went mainstream in 2023 when Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, then in Opposition, adopted the Yimby label, bucking the trend of politicians caving to Nimbyism. Starmer called himself a “Yimby” and promised to reinstate targets and “bulldoze” planning rules. He said a Labour government would “back the builders, not the blockers.” Faced with a tricky fiscal situation, Labour saw planning reform and construction as a means of boosting economic growth and reducing the need for unpopular tax rises or spending cuts.
Elected the following year, Starmer unveiled a raft of planning reforms and set his Government a highly ambitious target of building 1.5 million new homes before the next election in 2029. The rhetoric has only hardened since; at Labour’s party conference last September, new Housing Secretary Steve Reed donned a red cap emblazoned with the slogan “Build Baby Build!”.
A week later the Conservatives unveiled their own blue “Build baby build” caps and hard hats.
So Yimby rhetoric has become something of a cross-party consensus, with the dividing lines now more about where we should build and how more building can be unleashed, rather than whether we need more construction.
Now that rhetoric needs to be converted into reality. Planning reform remains a work in progress and has yet to translate into an uptick in construction activity.
If the Starmer Labour Government want to reach its 1.5 million new homes target, it must act quickly to tackle regulatory chokepoints so the capacity and supply chain can still be there to reap the benefits of planning reform delivering growth when it arrives.
Meanwhile, the challenge for the UK aggregates sector is reminding policymakers that they can’t “Build, baby, build!” if they don’t also “Quarry, baby, quarry!”
The link between the houses and infrastructure, which politicians are now so eager to see, requires a secure supply of the construction materials needed to build them.
They cannot take that supply for granted; it must be planned, monitored and managed to ensure the right products are available in the right place, at the right time.
It’s welcome that across the political divide there’s acknowledgement that Britain needs to get building to grow the economy and tackle living costs. Next will be convincing its politicians you can only be truly Yimby about houses if you’re also Yimby about quarries.