How much of a role should the government have in building homes? The vogue these days is for talking about localist solutions and helping the private sector to grow, but today Danny Alexander signalled a significant shift in the other direction. As he launched the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury said he was examining how the state could commission and pay for new developments itself. The government is already building 10,000 homes at former RAF base Northstowe in Cambridgeshire, which is the first instance of the government working as a developer. Alexander said:
‘An idea I’ve been promoting is direct government commissioning of housing. The message to the house building sector will be simple – if you don’t build, we will.
‘We will be undertaking a detailed government review to examine the potential of direct government commissioning for housing to deliver the number of homes we need.’
Those who have studied housebuilding over the decades point out that it is only when the state has been involved that truly mass housebuilding has taken place. The building booms of the postwar years had a lot to do with the government. Building on land the government already owns is one thing, but if Alexander’s review concludes that the government could directly commission homes elsewhere, then this will become a major venture.
There is, though, a political question about that second possibility which is whether the British public would support greater state involvement in commissioning of new homes again. Those post-war housebuilding drives were made possible partly because voters were quite used to the government taking many decisions on their behalf during and after the war. But in the intervening years, it seems that the state both took the goodwill of those voters for granted in the way it planned new housing and failed to notice a change in the British psyche towards greater self-reliance. That mistake contributed to the current standoff over new housebuilding. If the state is to have an increased role in ensuring that sufficient numbers of new homes are built, then it will have to deal with this living nearby in quite a different manner.
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