That didn’t take long. Last week, less than a month since Labour won the general election, the deputy prime minister Angela Rayner stood up in the House of Commons and made some of the most ambitious pronouncements about housing since her party’s government of 1945 – 1.5 million new homes in the term of this parliament, new towns, more social housing.
Local authorities will be obliged to set ambitious targets for numbers of homes. The green belts around the country’s cities, a hugely successful planning concept that has turned in some places into an agent of suffocation, can, Rayner said, sometimes be relaxed.
It’s been plain for years – indeed, decades – that the dysfunction of housing has intolerable effects: young and not-so-young families unable to find secure and affordable places to live; rising levels of homelessness; the obstacles that high prices put in the way of people moving to find work. Labour’s plans have the potential to reverse a slow burning social catastrophe.
Whether the government’s policies do this depends on which of them are implemented and how. Labour has a chance of going into the next election with millions of people housed better, more happily and less expensively than they are now. But it also faces the danger that decent homes will be no more accessible than they are currently, while hundreds of thousands of home counties voters, enraged – and with some justification – by the mediocre products of volume housebuilders in their back yards, will be determined to do their bit to get Labour out of power.
It won’t be done by quantity alone. There’s an idea that the country can build into affordability, that if only the bolts of the planning system were sufficiently loosened, housebuilders would flood the market with new homes and the magic of the laws of supply and demand would bring prices tumbling down. But, as the Conservative former minister Oliver Letwin pointed out in 2018, volume housebuilders will never build at such a rate that they devalue their own product.
There will, realistically, always be planning restrictions – most people, when it comes to decisions affecting their neighbourhood, want them – which means that the free-market nirvana of unfettered development will never come to pass. The government’s current proposals will certainly be slowed by opposition: Labour may feel empowered by its huge majority to take on people who are not their natural supporters, but it should expect that the Absolutely Bloody Livids of Tunbridge Wells will come marching on Whitehall with their handcrafted heritage pitchforks and 4x4 tumbrils.
And, given that the British housing market is composed mostly of older buildings, the difference that new construction can make to price is marginal. Any effect would be a slow response to an urgent situation: it’s not much comfort to say to someone who is in desperate housing need now that there may be a house somewhere in the green belt that they may be able to buy slightly more cheaply some time in the future.
There are other flaws with the cult of numbers. It’s not clear where the materials and labour will come from to sustain a sudden surge in construction, and shortages will lead to higher costs. It’s easy to foresee that, in the rush to hit that 1.5m target, good and sustainable design and the provision of local amenities – all of which Rayner is promising – will be compromised.
Above all, there’s the impact on climate. According to one study, a construction rate of 300,000 homes a year would use up England’s entire 1.5C carbon budget – the cumulative amount of emissions a country can emit over a specific period. This effect could be reduced by employing more sustainable forms of construction and the adaptation of existing buildings but, again, haste makes these more considered approaches less likely. Building effectively and well, in other words, is more important than sheer numbers, and easing green-belt planning restrictions is only a start.
The more promising parts of Rayner’s announcement, including her pledges to increase affordable and social housing, go further. She hinted at measures that would enable land to be compulsorily purchased for this purpose, without paying the full, exorbitant cost of development sites. She proposes ways in which the colossal latent value of green-belt sites – the metaphorical oil wells of wealth that can be tapped when land gets permission for residential use – can partly be turned to public benefit.
The idea of new towns, whether built from nothing or as extensions to existing settlements, could also be helpful. In principle, they concentrate housing where it is most wanted. They make it easier to provide the schools, parks, healthcare, social housing and transport that make successful communities.
There is more that could be done. Given the high cost of rents, the government could actively encourage building for rent by both the public and private sectors, which is usually more quickly deliverable than housing for sale. The priority here is getting roofs over people’s heads by whatever tenure is most effective, rather than favouring ownership over tenancy, as previous administrations have done.
The current government should in general look harder at the ways in which the most urgent problems can be mitigated quickly. Its publicly announced ideas are, for now, preliminary, and have been put out for consultation, but they at least allow the chance that housing can be provided in the ways and in the locations that would best alleviate the crisis.
To achieve this, Rayner and her fellow ministers have to concentrate on what should be the overriding purpose of their policies. This is not primarily to boost the economic activity of construction, welcome though that may be, but to create the possibility of decent homes for all.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
