Given the Tories are the party of Macmillan, it seems quite right that they’ve picked housing as one of their six key election priorities. David Cameron gave a speech on it today, promising 200,000 ‘starter homes’ – properties sold to first-time buyers at a discount – by 2020.
There have been some complaints today, notably from Shelter, that this policy will not increase the supply of housing overall because developers can swap plans they already had for affordable homes for the starter homes instead. Given housing supply is currently so low (see the two graphs below for the UK and secondly for England in the quarters covered by this Coalition), surely ministers should be more interested in overall supply, rather than tenure?
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Incidentally, other campaigners are objecting on the grounds that even if this does increase overall supply, it will not increase the number of affordable homes being built and that therefore many of those who are priced out will remain priced out. That argument is easier to demolish because increasing the overall supply of housing increases the affordability of housing as a whole because demand is not pushing up prices.
Government sources insist that they can deliver both the 200,000 starter homes and the 270,000 affordable homes that they have already pledged, rather than one taking from the other. This is how they see the policy working.
By tweaking the definition of ‘affordable home’ (a slippery term if ever there was one) to include starter homes, these new homes can avoid Section 106 and the Community Infrastructure Levy, which makes them cheaper to build and sell. On top of this, it costs two thirds less to build an ‘affordable home ownership product’, which includes a starter home, than it does to build a social rented property, because the developer gets money as soon as the house is sold. This means that more homes can be built for the same amount of money. But there are more policies specifically targeted at affordable housing that will be announced ‘in due course’, as a nod to the concerns expressed today.
This is all well and good. But anyone claiming that today’s announcement is even vaguely ambitious is in a very good mood indeed. One of the reasons that this is not ambitious is that Cameron couched everything in pre-election caveats designed to soothe the Tory party’s core vote, even as he tried to reach out to young aspirational voters who may well be natural Tories but who feel that the party has very little to offer to them. The most passionate section in his speech was not about aspiration and those young families waiting for homes, but on his love of the countryside and the Green Belt. The Prime Minister said:
‘And when it comes to our Green Belt, I have been clear. The line remains scored in the sand – that land is precious. I am a country man. I love our countryside.’
He later added:
‘And for me it comes down to this. I want my children – and their children – to be able to play on a day out in the North Downs near London. I want them to be able to walk, as they can now, from Liverpool to Leeds through green belt protected land.’
This was a very powerful case, but it does rather caricature the Green Belt as a thoroughly green and pleasant land, which is not what it is and not what it was designed to do. The Green Belt is not allocated on the basis of the quality of land, but on its position on the outskirts of a town or city in order to prevent urban sprawl. This sounds a noble aim in itself, but it does have two side-effects: firstly that development within towns becomes more intensive, with green space inside the doughnut of the green belt threatened by developers, and secondly that development is then pushed into more rural areas outside the green belt, where opposition to new homes is even higher.
Cameron may well be worried about the North Downs, but unless a government proposes to remove the area of outstanding natural beauty designation that covers much of those chalk hills – the Surrey Hills and the Kent Downs – then it is unlikely that the bulldozers will be rolling up any time soon to destroy the precious woodlands and chalk grassland there.
So is the Prime Minister protecting something not because it should be protected but because voters aren’t fully informed as to what it actually is? It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened, and it is perhaps not the best plan to start making the case for innovative policy on the green belt with weeks until the General Election. But the party of Macmillan probably isn’t being as ambitious as its heritage suggests it could be.
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