Michael Gove is right. Essential to a true democracy is the idea that local communities should have some control over their surroundings. They must not have change rammed down their throats just so someone can make money. The great cynicism of Brexit was the cry “take back control”. The government took back control only to give it all to themselves, to deny it to national and local governments. Every power “repatriated” to Britain was seized by Whitehall.
Nowhere is control more sensitive than over planning, one of the few areas of discretion that had been with local elected councils. This was effectively ended by the Cameron government in its planning and housing reforms of 2012. These imposed bizarre algorithmic targets for population expansion on every locality, based on a confusion of need with demand. The purpose was to meet an arbitrary election pledge to “build 200,000 houses”. The result can be seen in the sprawling Legoland estates that proliferated outside villages and towns across south-east England. They set it fair to becoming the Los Angeles of Europe.
Nimbys who object to this are not evil. They are exercising a civil right. They are concerned about what has often been the traumatising of their communities through central diktat. At the very least, they want to play a part in such decisions. As it was, the Cameron government reforms merely declared “a presumption in favour of development”. They drove a coach and horses through the traditional distinction between town and country and permitted building on the green belt. According to CPRE, the countryside charity, in 2018 building on green belt land had risen from virtually nil before 2010 to permits for 460,000 houses.
Green belts are not elitist hunting-and-fishing estates. They are a natural lung around British cities created in the 1940s to impede what was the breakneck sprawl of private housing, precisely the sprawl that now threatens them. They have depended entirely on planning discipline to survive.
This has all but collapsed. The CPRE has found that 91 of the biggest 144 major greenfield developments are ones that have been forced on to reluctant councils through the courts. This has made judges the new planners, instructed to “presume in favour” of developers. It has encouraged incredibly rich companies to buy up banks of unbuilt-on land. Waverley borough council in Surrey has spent almost £1m fighting such cases, money councils can ill afford.
As the American urbanist Edward Glaeser keeps repeating, today we should be building where infrastructure already exists. They are the sustainable settlements. We should build where population is dense, journeys are short and public transport works. Today’s greenfield housing is based on cheap-to-build, highly profitable “executive homes”. It is utterly unlike the organic growth of housing outside most continental towns. As for “need”, only a small share of these homes are “affordable”, and even that means price-reduced, not “social”. Current estimates are that London boroughs alone contain brownfield land sufficient for a million new houses. That is where they are wanted and where they should be created, preferably by retrofitting existing buildings.
No one listens because the housing debate is dominated by builders’ lobbyists, notably the ubiquitous Home Builders Federation, quoted at every turn. They pretend they are concerned with homelessness, first-time buyers, affordability and crisis. They are about money, which is fine, but let us recognise that.
The lobbies were on form this week, generating anti-Gove headlines such as Gove capitulates to Nimbys. Jumping on the same bandwagon, Labour’s Keir Starmer pledges to “bulldoze” local planning departments – we assume he means dismantle – and restore central targets. His spokesman, Matthew Pennycook, claims Gove wants to “hammer economic growth” and see housing “fall off a cliff”.
Housing in the countryside has nothing to do with economic growth, nor with urban homelessness. It has nothing to do with housing need. In a market economy, everyone’s “need” for a better house is reflected in their demand and their resources. Large numbers of Britons occupy more house space than they require. The reason is that regulation and taxation are chaotic – especially that related to rented housing that caters overwhelmingly for the poor.
The remedy for real need lies in what is desperately inadequate in Britain: social housing. It lies not in the green belt or rural sprawl but in policies that Gove does not address. It lies in denser suburban building. It lies in progressive property taxes – not Britain’s regressive ones – as are applied in most other countries. It lies in vigorous incentives for downsizing, not taxing it through stamp duty. It lies in not charging VAT on conversions and retrofits. These failings are why British housing densities are among the lowest in Europe. If there is a crisis, this is the cause.
Housing policy in Britain is almost entirely directed at the south-east, because that is where government policy has long concentrated growth. It is led by governments of both parties that have taken money from the construction sector. That is why green belts and countryside are today seriously at risk. All I can say is thank God for nimbys.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
• The caption to the picture on this article was amended on 17 December 2023 to make clear that Crediton in Devon is not in a green belt area.
