The Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission does wonderful work, but it’s not translating to the ground. By-and-large developers are not “creating streets”, they are sticking up blocks inspired by the screw you school of architecture. Still, let’s not be naive. We could build Rivendell and half the nimbies still wouldn’t be satisfied. So perhaps the Tories should defy them instead. With a majority of 80, they could afford to lose some seats down South, especially if there are more to be gained up North.
But the trouble is, the reforms would do nothing to make housing any more affordable. The only way that houses get cheaper is if supply rises relative to demand. It therefore matters who controls the supply and demand.
On the supply side, it’s not just the planners, but the big developers. After all, they’re the ones who sell new houses into housing market. Unfortunately, they’ve got no reason to increase supply to the point at which house prices stabilise or fall — and so, obviously, they won’t. As for demand, that isn’t just controlled by aspiring home owners, but also by property speculators — which these days don’t just include the amateur buy-to-let market but major private equity firms. These people also have no interest in letting house prices fall.
So, bugger the nimbies. They may have a big influence on the politics, but they don’t control the economics. Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that.
This still leaves the political problem. Lose enough seats and your policies won’t matter because you won’t be in government. The answer is to concentrate new housing in as few, very carefully selected, locations as possible.
There’s no reason why mini-cities like Cambridge and Oxford shouldn’t become bigger cities. At the moment they’re surrounded by absurdly restrictive green belts. Stopping sprawl is a good thing, but these university towns are the size of a single London borough. Using the gentle density model of the Georgian square or the Edwardian mansion block, we can have expansion without sprawl. And what about Canterbury? It’s ridiculous that Kent, with a population of 1.5 million people, doesn’t have a single proper city. Elsewhere in Europe, a building like Canterbury Cathedral would take pride of place in a major regional centre.
Also let’s not forget that these are open-minded, Remain-voting, university towns. I’m sure that a progressive community that supports liberal immigration policies could have no objection to providing homes for a growing population. But if, for some strange reason, they do, then central government should insist. It is said that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But if you seriously displease just a select few of them, then you’ll probably get away with it.
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