Let’s establish community rights – and stop prioritising water-guzzling data centres over affordable housing
4 min read
Britain’s recent history has been marked by a hollowing out of our ability to provide the foundations of a dignified and meaningful life.
Affordable housing is out of reach for millions. Meanwhile, the nature that brings simple joys to our lives has been concreted over for luxury apartments and environmentally harmful data centres, which continue to spring up despite accelerating the climate crisis that a generation of politicians promised to address.
Successive governments abdicated their responsibilities to the public, so family life has become constrained by the cold calculus of profit-seeking corporations, when it should be enriched by an enabling public realm.
The government has outsourced its duty to provide affordable housing to the private sector, even though the interests of profiteers will never align with the public good. If your household needs an affordable home today but it is more profitable to bank the land until prices rise, or leave properties empty, your needs come second.
Homes are built on flood plains because developers can cash in before the consequences are felt, and environmental protections have been stripped back, leaving us one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. Birdsong falls silent, but BlackRock grows richer.
Whenever the quality of the places we call home collides with the pursuit of quick profit, our whole society loses out. Too often, estates have more “No Ball Games” signs than green spaces where children can play. And communities have little room to grow food locally, even as our livelihoods are increasingly dictated by supply chain shocks hundreds of miles away.
After the war, Labour built a radically brilliant planning system designed to meet local need, democratically expressed. The vested interests that lost out from this historic rebalancing of power between wealthy landowners and ordinary people never accepted it. It was picked apart over decades, creating the nightmarishly complicated mess we have today.
With the stroke of a pen, developers can erase the things that turn a cluster of houses into a thriving community: the space where children learn to kick a football, the river where families can swim, the trees that cool our streets or the allotments where people grow food. In their place comes another identikit estate, designed around returns on investment rather than quality of life.
We must abandon the rotten habit of smearing anyone who speaks up about the place they live as a nuisance ‘blocker’
Community rights offer a different future. The seven rights proposed in a new report, the Charter for Community Rights, provide a framework in which the things that underpin a healthy life are not extras to be bargained away but non-negotiables, replacing the profit motive as the foundation of decisions about the places we live. They are:
1. A right to a clean and healthy environment;
2. A right to a healthy home;
3. A right to play;
4. A right to grow food on public-sector land;
5. A right to roam and swim;
6. A right to participate in local decisions that shape communities;
7. A right to challenge local decisions that affect our lives.
All of these are capable of being legal rights; until then, policy can create the conditions for them to be realised in practice.
The report comes amid a renaissance in the national debate about redistributing power to ordinary people. We must abandon the rotten habit of smearing anyone who speaks up about the place they live as a nuisance “blocker”. If the only opportunity people have to shape their communities is to oppose the latest speculative planning application or water-guzzling data centre, the system has failed. When decisions are made behind closed doors but their consequences are lived with for generations, conflict is inevitable.
Communities know they need housing and infrastructure. The challenge is to build a system that treats their passion for their communities as an asset rather than a problem to be managed. With a little optimism, we can create better ways to encourage participation, harness collective knowledge and deliver development that is sustainable, restores our environment and upholds our rights.
Chris Hinchliff is Labour MP for North East Hertfordshire
