Outside Glastonbury last month, festivalgoers might have caught sight of David Cameron’s policy of planning de-regulation in action, sprawling across Somerset. Acres of identikit houses, mini-Tudor and mini-Georgian, seemingly flown in and dumped from somewhere off London’s North Circular Road. Hundreds of other similar estates appeared across Gloucestershire, Berkshire, Suffolk, Essex and anywhere a Whitehall inspector thought to plant a housing statistic. Local context was disregarded, electors revolted and the policy was eventually reversed.
Keir Starmer wants to bring the policy back. He has identified the nation’s economic problems with a lack of growth and lack of growth with housebuilding. This, he believes, is being impeded by local planners and despised nimbys. He showed his machismo towards them by getting his energy secretary, Ed Miliband, immediately to inflict two giant solar panel arrays on to a furious East Anglia, with a promise of onshore wind turbines and pylons to come.
New houses are nothing to do with growth. They are consumption, and a diversion of resources from productive investment. Labour’s leader had merely been arm-twisted by Britain’s most powerful lobby, the construction industry, which argued that new houses hold the key to political popularity. The same lobby persuaded Cameron to let them create “executive estates” across meadows in the home counties and Midlands, with the bonus of a few luxury towers in central London and Manchester. It is what the lobby meant by “meeting housing need”.
The consequence of Cameron excluding local people from a say in the future of their communities was a surge in direct action and resort to the law. Coupled with an end to land-use zoning, this simply put vast areas of previously protected English countryside up for grabs. Increasingly the courts and the secretary of state became local planners. This was the chief cause of the delays now associated with British planning. The idea that more Whitehall centralisation will speed up the bureaucracy is absurd. It merely shows how long Labour has been out of office.
Starmer’s policy to restore the “let rip” approach will incite a surge in speculative land acquisition in the south-east. When house price rises slow, as they do periodically, this merely freezes supply, as developers bank the land and stop building until they rise at a faster pace. As for Starmer’s point that his new policy will be determined by an ethos of “how, not if”, this does still not account for the countryside as being of agricultural or amenity value, which will mean the resumption of past battles.
It will be rural communities – with plenty of urban support – against Whitehall. The outcome will simply attract more people to move out of higher-density cities into lower-density countryside, with all that means for pressure on transport and social infrastructure. Nor can it do anything genuinely to improve the north of England.
The idea that it is the government’s job to ensure that everyone gets the house of their choice – defined somehow as “housing need” – is quaint collectivism. The British have grown accustomed to living well, in houses rather than in flats. They tend to own rather than rent them, a legacy of Thatcher’s mortgage subsidies. This is a tradition, not a right. Thus 20% of Britons live in flats against 60% of Germans. Houses mean that London’s residential density is also exceptionally low, at 9,000 people per sq km, against Tokyo’s 16,000 and New York’s 19,000.
The housing debate in Britain is obsessed with new building, largely because that is where the construction industry’s profit lies. In fact, only 10% of the housing market involves new building, with vast amounts of space lying underused in unconverted commercial and retail buildings or simply in houses mostly too big for their occupants. Walk down any shopping street and look at the upper storeys.
Sensible policy in an age of climate crisis should be directed at maximising the use of the “embodied carbon” of existing buildings. For many city-dwellers the implication may not be welcome. It may mean more converted office blocks and stores, more mansion flats, more development of backstreets and mews, and even of gardens. At present, government discourages this. It imposes 20% VAT on restorations and conversions, while the lobby ensures that VAT is not levied on new building. Housing policy is like taxing wind power but not petrol.
Policy should encourage downsizing by abolishing stamp duty and raising council tax valuations to reflect size as well as price. It should encourage, not discourage, landlordism and renting. It should stop pouring public money into student residences: 80% of British students now expect the luxury of living away from home, filling rental properties in cities across Britain. Eighty per cent of Italian students live at home. So should more Britons.
The most urgent need is to concentrate housing policy on those who most need help. Rather than subsidise housebuilding and first-time purchases for the rich and middling rich, aid should be directed at the poor. A “social” house donated by the state to a family for life is so rare and expensive that it can only go to a very few. It is the equivalent of their winning the lottery. Aid should surely go to help in renting only as long as it is needed. That is rightly called housing benefit.
I once visited a street in Newham, east London, where some 50 council houses, many of two and three bedrooms, had each been lived in by elderly singles or a couple. Under right to buy, they were then “bought to let” by commercial landlords, and the street rented out. It now housed some 800 poor people, many immigrants, many from the council waiting list and mostly on housing benefit. They were overcrowded, but for them it was better than the alternative. There was no question: this was social housing.
These are not the people Starmer is going to see living in neo-Tudor Somerset. Some of them are sleeping rough on the streets of Charing Cross and Deansgate. He is doing nothing for them. Directing any social policy at voters rather than the needy is bound to lead to mistakes and distortions. Nothing illustrates that better than British housing policy. It should return to focus on those who desperately need somewhere to live.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
