Is the government’s housing policy aimed principally at increasing the stock of homes and making them more affordable or at punishing Tory voters? I ask because of its obsession with Nimbys and the green belt. According to Keir Starmer last week the planning system exerts a ‘chokehold’ over the housing supply. Writing at the weekend Angela Rayner declared: “I won’t cave into the blockers as the last government did”.
You have to be blinkered to think that the reason young people find it so hard to get on the housing ladder is mainly down to Nimbys
True, Nimbys exist. Green belts help to strangle cities – green wedges would be better, where development is allowed to fan out along corridors with good transport connections. And sure enough, there are a few parts of the green belt which better fit the government’s concept of ‘grey belt’ – disused car parks etc. But you have to be somewhat blinkered to think that the reason young people find it so hard to do as their parents did and get on the housing ladder in their twenties is mainly down to Nimbys greedily defending the views from their rural homes and starving the country of new homes so that they can continue to feast on sharp capital gains caused by a shortage of housing.
For one thing, councils are quite capable of dragging their feet over planning applications without any input from Nimbys. A couple of years ago, I put in a planning application for a pavilion for my cricket club. It was essentially a timber shed on shallow foundations on what had previously been a deep-ploughed field. There was a not a single objection. Yet still the local authority took 11 months as it fussed over non-existent archaeological remains and the like.
In spite of inefficient planners, councils have still managed to grant permission for construction of over three million homes in England over the past decade – sufficient to meet the previous government’s house-building target. However, according to the Planning Portal, which tracks planning applications and construction of new homes, a third of these properties – 1.2 million in all – have yet to be built. In other words, it isn’t so much the planning system that is thwarting the home-owning dreams of the masses; it is the failure to translate planning permissions into actual housing.
There are a number of reasons for this. It suits developers to release housing at a rate which keeps prices inflated. But then again, even if they did try to let the bulldozers rip and build out their sites much more quickly they would quickly run into problems. There is a shortage of tradespeople to build houses and fit them out – too many potential recruits having been diverted onto low-value academic courses at minor universities. Moreover, building regulations are becoming tougher all the time.
Developers are now, for example, expected to conduct pressure tests to check for the absence of draughts. Sound insulation tests are another criteria that they have to consider. Before they can build, they must make allowances for newts and the like. They must also pay increasing sums for local infrastructure through the Community Infrastructure Levy. The costs of meeting these requirements inflates the cost of building. This forces developers to keep prices high.
Poor infrastructure is also thwarting house-building. Over-loading of the electricity grid by data centres – of which Rayner wants more to be built – has delayed construction of new homes west of London. Then there are the nitrate neutrality rules, a hangover from Britain’s membership of the EU, and whose relaxation Labour opposed while in opposition.
At the same time, housing associations have proved remarkably unambitious at building new homes. Actually, private developers are building as many homes as they were in the 1970s; it is construction of social housing which has plummeted. During the 1970s, councils were building upwards of 150,000 new homes in some years. Even with a slight boost over the last couple of years housing associations are only managing 40,000 a year.
So no, don’t blame the Nimbys for the lack of housing. Labour’s focus on them reminds me of what one of Tony Blair’s aides, Andrew Neather, said of his boss’ policy on migration after he left office: that the borders were opened to migrants from Eastern Europe “in order to rub the right’s nose in diversity”. It looks as if something similar may be going on with planning: picking on Nimbys is a way of punishing people for voting Conservative – the green belt being one of the few Tory heartlands left. As Rayner herself might say: “Take that, Tory scum. Have a housing estate on your doorstep. And if you don’t like that, I’ll build a prison there instead.”
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