Sometimes, politics looks like an absurd fight over different versions of the same words. Rishi Sunak says he wants to help people “realise the dream of owning their own home”; Keir Starmer tells us he will “save the dream of home ownership”. Even if the most urgent aspects of our housing crisis are about the simple lack of roofs over people’s heads, this is where the political conversation largely remains: the old Tory vision of the property-owning democracy, it seems, must not be allowed to die.
There are policy differences both within and between the two big Westminster parties. Labour has plans for a fresh crop of new towns, and its tough talk about delivering social housing highlights a longstanding Tory blind spot. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are still gripped by tensions between those who want to build, build, build, and MPs terrified about what that would mean for their electoral prospects. But, at the heart of the debate about housing, there is also an underlying consensus. For both parties, utopia still seems to consist of the kind of projects put up by the UK’s corporate builders and overwhelmingly sold on the private market: if this approach can be expanded and accelerated, with a few nips and tucks, all will allegedly be well.
In countless British suburbs and towns, we know what this tends to entail – cookie-cutter developments, bedevilled by stories about poor building standards. They never seem to meet local needs for either genuinely affordable flats and houses or homes for social rent. Shared space is thin on the ground; even children’s playgrounds often turn out to be box-ticking parodies of what people actually want. New projects may be classified as “mixed use”, but this often means a Tesco Express and branch of Domino’s. As local councils tumble into bankruptcy and retreat from any strategic oversight, regeneration policy now often amounts to a silent vacuum, and this is what fills it.
Given the ingrained British queasiness about building on the green belt, politicians talk a lot about turbo-charging housebuilding on land that was once put to other uses. Labour, for instance, seems to want to sweep away a lot of local planning oversight and fast-track approval for “high-density housing on urban brownfield sites”. But in plenty of places, that kind of housebuilding has already transformed the local scene, and not for the better. Land once occupied by the workplaces that gave local areas their identity – factories, mills, foundries, offices – has been sold to developers, while local economies continue to shrink. Weakening planning regulation, moreover, threatens to make this problem worse.
My adopted home town is Frome, in Somerset, a place with a population of about 25,000 people, just beyond the conurbation centred on Bristol and Bath. Whatever its modern reputation as the kind of fashionable settlement that attracts people who spend their money on craft beer and artisan bread, it has a long history as an industrial centre – the town was once full of factories, some of which endured into the early 21st century. They produced everything from wallpaper to the fuses used in domestic plugs, but just about all of them have now gone, and their former sites have been snapped up by developers. Five minutes from my front door, there was once a printworks that had been in business for 165 years, famed for producing Ordnance Survey maps and some of the first Penguin books. It closed in 2014, and is now the location of what one local news outlet calls “the next wave of swanky new homes”.
For thousands of people with family backgrounds rooted in Frome’s history – many of whom are priced out of new housing – this is the cause of a latent resentment and shared feeling of loss. To some extent, the town is becoming a dormitory zone – which, because of dire local public transport, entails mass commuting by car. This is a future nobody wants. But like so many other places, it is where we are being pushed.
The story has now reached a fascinating juncture. Right in the heart of the town is a classic brownfield site, a 5-hectare (12.5-acre) expanse of land, known locally as Saxonvale, which was once the home of factories employing 500 people. Between 2010 and 2015, there were two successive sets of plans to fill it with a retail park and huge supermarket, which would probably have all but destroyed the existing town centre. Then, as that kind of idea was rendered extinct by the internet, along came formulaic plans for new private housing.
The latest began to materialise in 2019, thanks to a company called Acorn, the property group that redeveloped the printworks. On the face of it, its vision was at least slightly better than the most generic regeneration projects. Everything centred on high-density blocks containing 300 dwellings, but there was some space given over to business and employment and plans for a new park. Nonetheless, the plan was met by huge local opposition: among people’s loudest grievances was their sense that the large share of the development given over to new housing would kill the last chance of any industry returning to the town.
It still received planning permission – but by then a radically different set of plans had emerged, thanks to a new not-for-profit social enterprise called Mayday Saxonvale, which had linked up with an avowedly socially responsible developer called Stories (one of 1,500-plus UK companies now accredited as a B-corp, which denotes high social and environmental standards). Its vision, which it says is fully financed by ethical investors, includes 182 houses and flats – with a creditable share for social rent – but also nearly three times more space for employment than the Acorn plan, including premises for what it calls “light industrial” use. There are also proposals for a community-owned hotel, music venue and lido. Compared with the dull reality of most local regeneration, this stuff seems almost magical, but the people involved insist that they have both the funds required and serious expressions of interest from businesses.
This scheme seems to be the first of its kind anywhere in the UK. When it also received planning consent, the town was faced with the strange spectacle of a green light being given to two rival plans. But then, using funds that were partly crowdfunded, Mayday Saxonvale challenged the decision to give planning permission to Acorn in the high court, and won. Acorn’s plans for employment space fell short of what was required by local planning policy, so its proposals were quashed. This victory cut straight to one of Mayday Saxonvale’s key arguments – that although towns such as ours unquestionably need new housing, they also demand a lot more.
This small corner of the West Country is now deep into a political drama that points to an alternative future: here, perhaps, is a model of regeneration that would help the kind of places wondering what became of levelling up. What happens next is down to chewy negotiations between our county council and the people itching to get started on a new model of community-led development. But already, they have vividly highlighted something ignored in Westminster – the dangers of our myopic national obsession with buying and selling houses, and the fact that it risks reducing once-thriving local economies to very little else.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
