Housing
“Community control” over development sounds progressive. But who constitutes the community? Existing residents are already localised and may be organised; potential future residents are necessarily dispersed elsewhere. Giving the former greater power over whether the latter can move in privileges people who already have access to somewhere desirable over those who do not.
Einstein, Palmer and Glick (2019) find that planning-meeting participants are disproportionately older homeowners and more hostile to new housing than the wider public. Restricting supply then raises the price of access. Existing owners receive a capital gain; prospective residents face higher housing costs. Calling this local democracy doesn't change its distributional consequences.
The same preference for incumbents appears in objections to taxing “income-poor, asset-rich” homeowners. Someone owning a valuable house outright may have little cash income, but they also receive housing services without paying rent and have wealth they could release by downsizing. A renter on the same income has neither advantage. Yet concern about “affordability” is used to protect the homeowner from taxes on that wealth, leaving public services to be financed from other sources, including taxes on people who own nothing. I don't think The Left should regard preserving someone's existing property holdings as a priority over improving the position of those without property. If higher holding costs encourage an owner to move somewhere smaller, releasing a family home, that can be a socially useful response to scarce housing.
As Low Property Taxes Freeze the Youth explains, recurrent property taxes can lower purchase prices and encourage better use of existing housing. The new buyer inherits the tax bill, obviously, but a lower price reduces the deposit required. Higher holding costs also encourage downsizing. These responses are part of the economic case for taxation; “affordability” exemptions protecting valuable assets can undo precisely the effects that benefit people without assets.
Rent control can create similar divisions among tenants. Scotland's emergency cap introduced in 2022 protected sitting tenants but left rents on new tenancies uncontrolled. This is protection conditional on already having somewhere to live. And the distinction becomes more consequential if controls reduce supply: Diamond, McQuade and Qian (2019) find that affected San Francisco landlords reduced rental supply by 15%, even while protected tenants benefited from reduced displacement.
We need more housing, and more construction where people want to live. Rent controls and presumption against development are not Left wing policy.
Government has to work
The Left also needs capable government. Yet loading public services with statutory obligations can undermine their ability to function, particularly when resources become scarce.
I think this is an argument against the expansion of enforceable rights to specified services and centrally prescribed delivery standards. It isn't enough to say that rights should be properly funded. A robust system must cope when demand rises unexpectedly or resources contract; its obligations cannot assume those changes away.
Suppose a service can provide 100 treatments, but 120 people have an enforceable entitlement. Enforcing one person's claim cannot increase capacity immediately. It changes who receives treatment, while administering disputes may reduce the resources available for treatment itself. Those able to sustain an appeal may gain at the expense of people with greater needs but less ability to navigate the system.
Scotland's twelve-week Treatment Time Guarantee was met for 56.3% of inpatient and day-case admissions in June 2026. Edinburgh failed to provide required temporary accommodation on 3,585 occasions in the six months to September 2025. Legal duties did not cause the shortages, but neither did they resolve them, and perhaps they made triage and prioritisation more difficult if not impossible.
Procedural standards add another constraint. Each may be defensible individually, yet collectively they consume staff time and prevent sensible adjustment. Bevan and Hood's NHS research documents the gaming that follows when measured targets become the organising objective.
I would rather recover a public-service model in which valued professionals exercise judgement within democratically determined budgets and priorities. They should have to explain their decisions, and remain accountable for discrimination, corruption and incompetence. But professional disagreement or an individual bad outcome should not automatically generate another procedure imposed on everybody.
A service that adjusts provision when resources fall is doing something unavoidable. Preventing that adjustment does not protect its users; it risks making the whole system fail. And when it fails, those able to buy an alternative leave. The people The Left ought to prioritise are left depending on what remains.
