Starmer Labor government announces laws to nationalise trains and facilitate housing construction

This Wednesday, Keir Starmer’s government presents its legislative plans to upgrade trains, create a public company to invest in renewable energy and boost housing construction. These are the first plans by a Labour government in 15 years in a country struggling with public cuts and the effects of Brexit.

“The task of national renewal will not be easy, and this is merely an outline of our plans for the next five years,” says Starmer, who has already announced some of the proposals that are set to be formally presented to much fanfare on Parliament Day.

King Charles III will this afternoon read a list of more than 35 bills that the Labor government wants to approve in the parliamentary session that has just begun and in which Starmer’s party has an unprecedented absolute majority in decades after the July 4 elections. It is a speech written by the new government, but the monarch continues to do so after a few hours of ceremony that includes a ride in a carriage, the “kidnapping” of a deputy at Buckingham Palace if MPs think of stopping the king and knocking three times on the closed door of the House of Lords.

Trains

When the contracts of the private operators of each route expire or when they do not comply with the minimum required service, the state will take over the management of the dilapidated railway lines, as has already happened in several cases during conservative governments. Currently, the services are private, but they receive public subsidies to cover a large part of their operations and also often have a monopoly on the routes, so users do not benefit from the effects of competition in price or service.

The new government would also create a new agency, Great British Railways, which would focus on co-ordinating the now highly fragmented network and introducing a new, simpler and more concessional pricing system.

Prices remain prohibitive despite price caps imposed by Conservative governments in return for more support on overcrowded trains plagued by delays and cancellations. Indeed, the governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have already begun the process of revamping many rail routes and services.

Just taking control of train services will not solve the problem, which is also related to the state of infrastructure.

“As a user, you get a very poor quality-price ratio in the United Kingdom,” Tim Schwanen, professor of urban geography and director of the Transport Unit at the University of Oxford, tells elDiario.es.

The professor believes that the new government’s approach will “focus more on the provision of services and the needs of passengers.” But what comes next to rebuild infrastructure and services depends on the money that can be invested. “They need to make a big investment in addition to taking control. Investment will be needed everywhere. It won’t happen overnight or perhaps in the short term. But organising a sector differently and preventing money from leaking because it should go to shareholders is a starting point,” the professor explains.

A living place

In its campaign, the Labour Party promised to boost the building of one and a half million homes over the next five years, an ambitious target that no government has yet achieved.

The government intends to simplify building regulations and give more power to city councils and regional authorities to raise building limits in areas classified as “green belts”, which resist urbanisation and consist partly of farmland, fields and forests.

Local governments will once again have mandatory housing objectives, which will be turned into mere recommendations by the Conservative government in 2022.

In any case, the construction of new homes is now facing particularly pronounced obstacles in the country such as material shortages, rising prices and labor shortages after the United Kingdom left the European Union.

GB Energy

As he promised during his campaign, Starmer will create a public company based in Scotland to invest in renewable energy projects. According to pollster More in Common, this is one of the most popular projects among voters of all ideologies.

The creation of Great British Energy may be an example of greater state intervention that citizens are willing to support, and it reflects significant consensus amongst the population regarding some measures to tackle climate change.

Rob Ford, an academic expert on public opinion at the University of Manchester and author of the book, commented in a talk a few days ago that “Labour does better when it sells radical ideas as boring ideas than when it sells radical ideas as radical ideas.” Brexitland On the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU. “One of the successes of his messaging on this has been to make it very safe and acceptable to moderate voters for whom climate is not as important.”