Yes, Britain’s housing market is in a mess. No, that does not mean 75 years of town planning should be torn up just to win the Tories a few more seats. Today’s speeches on housebuilding by the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, and his boss, Rishi Sunak, are in part sensible, in part not.
They are right that there is no “need” for extensive new building over Britain’s countryside. Just because party-donor developers prefer lucrative rural sites, this does not constitute a necessity. A green urban policy is now concentrated – as Sunak and Gove accept – on densifying existing built-up areas and infrastructure, not least in Britain’s extensive suburban sprawl. Density is why the American urbanologist Edward Glaeser, in his 2011 book Triumph of the City, celebrated the unexpected green credentials of Manhattan.
No one who travels through England’s Midlands and north can have any doubt. There are miles of brownfield land, idle factories, warehouses and even streets of derelict houses, emptied by decades of economic policies that have tilted wealth towards the south-east. At the same time every tenet of ecological conservation preaches more green zones, nature corridors and open countryside.
Meanwhile the debate on housing is obsessed with new building, its lobbyists shouting “crisis” through every debate. New houses, especially on new sites, are inevitably expensive to build and service and are almost all for the well-off. They make a marginal impact on overall supply. The issue is demand and that is a function of price, which is currently falling well behind inflation. Indeed home ownership is a cultural rather than a welfare issue. Some of the richest European nations, such as Germany, Switzerland and Denmark, have the lowest percentage of homeowners. The highest percentage is in poorer nations, such as Romania, Slovakia and Hungary.
The easiest way to increase housing supply is not through some national target. It is to encourage renting and thus use more efficiently the millions of houses that lie underoccupied (676,452 in England alone), unextended, unimproved and unlet, all through the poor regulation of Britain’s housing market. These are the houses most likely to be lived in by poor people, and those at risk of homelessness, who should be the state’s prime concern. These people need housing benefit and somewhere to rent, not a place in a queue for that rare bonanza, a new council house for life. “The existing stock of housing in England is not used particularly efficiently”, a House of Lords report concluded in 2016, with disappointing figures for underoccupied homes.
The government should study how the rest of Europe regulates its housing – notably Germany – and learn. Hence what was sadly absent from today’s speeches was some indication of learning. There was no mention of higher but fairer property taxes, no mention of an end to stamp duty, which is a tax on downsizing. Nor was there any mention of removing VAT on conversions and improvements, effectively a 20% tax on the fastest route to new homes.
As for planning reform, Sunak reasonably wants to ease controls on change of use. But who should decide this, central government or local communities? The David Cameron government’s easing of such controls costs high streets dear. In the first quarter of this year, England and Wales lost 51 pubs every month, not because people have stopped drinking but often so developers can snap up key sites. Austerity has slashed numbers of planning staff, delaying decisions and destroying morale. Gove’s cure for this is to send in “super-squads” of his own planners to handle critical sites. For instance he wants to turn the booming city of Cambridge into a megacity. As levelling up secretary he should be boosting Manchester, already a regional science magnet and the only northern metropolis strong enough to rival London. Cambridge can look after itself.
Sunak and Gove repeat the cliche that planning should be about “community support”, but support is not the issue. The issue is control. It may not look much in a manifesto, but the character and fate of how and where we live is not for central politicians to decide. It is the very essence of local democracy.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
