Those in favour of more housebuilding in this country like to tell the story of Winston Churchill’s deal with Harold Macmillan in which the Prime Minister told his housing minister to meet the Tory target of building 300,000 new homes. ‘It is a gamble – it will make or mar your political career,’ Churchill told Macmillan. Well, Macmillan hit the target a year early, and we all know what happened to his political career.
Given George Osborne was clearly thinking about the implications for his own career of this week’s Budget, it is perhaps hardly surprising that housing plays a strong part. The Chancellor has today announced plans to get more homes built in this country, and these ‘sweeping’ changes form the second half of the Budget. They include automatic planning permission on all suitable brownfield sites and the government intervening to write local plans for councils which have failed to produce them.
The local plans policy is particularly interesting, given a failure by a council to produce a local plan is one of the reasons why development gets forced upon a local area against the wishes of those already living there. Those involved in the policy have stressed that this is developing a local plan in consultation with local people, rather than the gun-to-the-head approach of the regional spatial strategies that Labour pursued.
This is a huge shift in the planning regime in this country, and if the Tories get this and other reforms which may be announced in the future right, Osborne will end up with enough homes and largely happy local people (as opposed to placated Nimbys: some leopards will proudly retain their spots and there’s not much point in trying to keep them happy). If the Tories have got it wrong again, then those sceptical about development who were upset by the situation the last tranche of planning reform left us in will be even more antagonised and Tory MPs even less likely to support planning reform in future.
There is an expectation that MPs will be very supportive of these changes and lead the way in convincing their constituents that they will improve their local areas, not ruin them.
The emphasis on consulting with local people about those local plans came from David Cameron, who completely supports Osborne’s desire to build more homes, but who is a more instinctual Conservative who understands the need to build more homes that are good quality and doesn’t just see it as numbers on a spreadsheet.
The Chancellor is both desperate to build more homes to solve the housing crisis, and to ensure that the Tories are not outflanked by Labour on housing. They are the party of Macmillan, after all: and Osborne may personally be hoping that the same political trick will work for him. If nothing else, his personal commitment to building more homes will ensure that finally there is political will at the very top to get things going: and there’s nothing quite like a legacy project from someone hoping to move up the ladder to ensure that something actually happens.
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