Britain needs to build more houses — but where?

“More will mean worse,” wrote Kingsley Amis in Encounter magazine in 1960. He was writing in reference to the expansion of higher education. But that emphatic message of pessimism, of defeatism, could have been applied to housing. In some ways when we look at what has happened over the following 60 years, both to our universities and to property development, it is hard to argue.

I am instinctively repelled by such negativism. But most people instinctively nod along. In particular, Conservatives are seldom more content than when defiantly pronouncing such messages of gloom.

Thus we have Conservative MPs who resist the government’s latest efforts to boost the supply of new homes. The idea that more housing is needed is acknowledged by these MPs in principle but resisted in practice. Assurances that new safeguards will mean that the new homes will be better not worse — beautiful buildings of good quality, well-located — are met with cynical dismissals.

Instead, we read that, “Tory MPs say the plans could destroy the character of their suburban constituencies by leading to the construction of large tower blocks to fulfil the targets.”

Matters are not helped by the discovery that a “mutant algorithm” is to blame for ambitious housing targets. It was only a couple of months ago that we had one of those causing havoc with A-Level grades. Many pupils felt the grades they were given — without having actually taken an exam — were unfair. This prompted a U-turn and teacher grade predictions were used instead. It was a triumph for man over machine. But I’m not sure we should be too rude about the computers ‚ if they give us the wrong answers, we probably put in the wrong questions.

This time the complaint concerns figures produced by Lichfields, a planning consultancy, on the number of new homes needed in each part of the country, figures the government broadly accepts. The problem is not so much with the total of 337,000 a year, but with the distribution. The Lichfields computer has whirred away and decided most of them should go where the demand is greatest. This tends to mean affluent areas. That means, despite the demographic changes on voting patterns seen in last year’s General Election, mostly Tory constituencies. The Times reports:

“Tory constituencies would have housing targets raised by 52 per cent, from 81,200 to 123,400. On average, each Tory-run local authority would have an increase of about 370 homes, compared with 250 for Labour-held areas. A total of 25 Labour-held council areas would have their housing requirements cut, with Manchester falling by nearly 1,000, Leicester by 600, Birmingham and Bradford by 500 each, and Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield by 400 each.”

London provides a significant balance to the narrative, being mostly affluent and mostly Labour voting. The target for London would treble to 93,532 a year. But that doesn’t seem to have helped. The Prime Minister has been warned that, as a London MP, he could be among those facing a local backlash.

Of course, the Lichfields computer is only doing what it is told. Feed in a different formula and it will feed up some different results. So there is talk of it being “tweaked”. On the other hand, would such a tweak be welcomed by those in London who are trying to get on the property ladder, or wishing they could afford to rent? I suggest not.

The debate is between, on the one hand, those who say the priority is new housing where affordability is most challenging, and on the other those who urge development in areas in need of renewal, and which could benefit from “levelling up”.

Chris Pincher, the Housing Minister, wrote recently on the “Conservative Home” website:

“In 2018, we introduced a standard, transparent method to determine how many houses were needed in an area. The previous system involved councils employing costly consultants to estimate their housing need — too often with the final numbers being heavily contested. There was uncertainty, there were long delays, and all the while the country was not planning for the homes that are so desperately needed. This standard method was designed to speed up the system and ensure the planning process focused on how and where homes can best be built.”

He has a point. I was once a councillor, voting through many Development Plan Documents or DPDs — hundreds of pages of gobbledygook. But it was a “statutory requirement” to adopt some such document. The meeting would have needed to last for five months to work out what each phrase really meant, let alone to consider whether or not we agreed with it. So we all just gave up and voted it through in five minutes. I suspect that literally nobody read these documents — even the planning officers who supposedly wrote them would have copied and pasted great chunks from here and there.

Anyway, what is the relevance of the target for new homes that a Council adopts for its local plan? Well, it gives the planners power in negotiating with the developer. If the council are meeting the target then they can be more particular about allowing any more buildings. But if they were behind with their quota then the developer would be on stronger ground to appeal any rejection.

A democratic approach would be to say that councils should not be obliged to meet any target. The government has tried to shift towards a system of incentives, with the New Homes Bonus resulting in councils getting extra funding for the new homes they build. They also get extra council tax. They also get extra business rates given that a growing population will result in more commercial opportunities. But there is still a belief that the more power that planers have to block development the less development there will be. Lifting the targets means boosting the power of the planners.

The flaw in this approach is that the state should have these contradictory powers at all. Politicians should not be declaring that we “need” a specific number of new homes, in the manner of Soviet five year plans for pig-iron production. Nor should another bit of the state be routinely empowered to block such building from taking place.

The answer is to ditch the targets but also to liberate the housing market and so allow a much greater increase in supply than those targets would have provided.

The good news is that the Government’s longer term planning reforms do shift towards liberalisation, with the constraint that development must be beautiful. Design codes will be determined according to the preferences of local people, not planners. There will be “zones” — not including the Green belt but a pretty substantial part of the country — where there will be a presumption that new homes can be built if they are attractive. The algorithms, whether “mutant” or otherwise, can be discarded. Individual choice will prevail. The nightmare of decades of new homes that are both ugly yet so scarce as to be much sought after will end. More will mean better.