Harry Kane took responsibility for his fateful penalty miss, but the government has glossed over years of missed housing targets. This, argues Gareth Belsham, director of Building Consultancy at national surveying firm Naismiths, needs to change
There was a grim inevitability to it all. No, not England’s agonising exit from the World Cup, but the government’s abandoning of housebuilding targets.
Last week, the Housing secretary Michael Gove wrote to MPs to inform them that the housebuilding targets set out in the government’s 2019 election manifesto would now be “advisory” and a “starting point”. Translation: they’re no longer targets at all.
In truth the headline target – to get 300,000 new homes a year built in England – has been meaningless for a while. It has never once been met, and in May, Gove’s predecessor, Robert Jenrick, admitted it would be missed “by a country mile”.
I don’t doubt the government’s desire to kickstart housebuilding. Boosting levels of home-ownership is a central Conservative tenet, and building more homes of all kinds is essential, both for tackling the housing crisis and firing up broader economic growth.
Both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss championed planning reforms that would make it easier for developers to build. But politics has once again triumphed over planning reform.
Faced with a rebellion of nearly 60 backbench Tory MPs, Rishi Sunak opted to ditch the housebuilding target rather than have to beg for Labour support to get it enshrined in the forthcoming Levelling up and Regeneration Bill.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the rebels mostly represent seats in southern England where building new homes, especially on green-belt land, is deeply unpopular.
These are ‘Blue Wall’ heartlands, where well-organised residents are adept at using the current tortuous planning system to block proposed developments – and where the Nimby vote can make or break a Conservative MP’s re-election prospects.
With the Tories trailing badly in the polls, the chances of meaningful planning reform during the remainder of this parliament are slim to nil.
Politics and planning seldom mix
But the real issue here isn’t a party-political one. Planning reform is a challenge for parties of all stripes, because in large swathes of the country allowing more houses to be built is a proven vote loser.
And then there’s the mismatch between politicians’ horizons – which seldom exceed the current parliamentary term – and the long-termism required for a successful housing policy.
The current housing crisis has been years in the making, and it will take years to fix, but it requires bold and potentially unpopular action to be taken now.
That’s why the best hope ultimately lies in taking politics out of planning as much as possible.
“With the Tories trailing badly in the polls, the chances of meaningful planning reform during the remainder of this parliament are slim to nil”
At a micro-level, this may mean encouraging local authorities to make more use of their delegated powers – perhaps by widening the range of planning applications that can be determined by planning officers without recourse to the council planning committee.
But at a macro-level, this should include the creation of a housing equivalent to the National Infrastructure Commission, the executive agency that provides ‘impartial, expert advice’ to the government of the day on ‘long-term infrastructure challenges’.
Critics once branded such quangos as undemocratic, but surely democracy would be enhanced if the politicians elected to act on our behalf did so informed by the sort of big picture, apolitical analysis that a National Housing Commission would bring?
The future’s brown
Nimbys often profess to be in favour of more homes being built, “just not here.”
Objections tend to be strongest to development on the green belts that girdle England’s major cities. But the conversion of derelict buildings into homes, or the building of new homes on brownfield land, attracts much less opposition.
And if there are any positives to emerge from the decades-long withering of high street businesses, it is that it has created lots of empty units in the heart of our communities.
The trend, which began with emergence of out-of-town retail parks and was turbocharged by the pandemic, sky-high business rates and the remorseless rise of e-commerce, has left hundreds of high streets dotted with empty shops that could be transformed into homes.
Making it easier for developers to do so need not be a political hot potato. Even voters willing to march on Westminster to protect a dozen newts from a planned greenfield development are unlikely to want derelict town centres.
The simplest way to speed up this sort of regeneration would be to make it easier for developers to change a non-domestic building to residential use under permitted development rights.
At present this happens far too rarely. Government data shows that in 2021-22, well under half the 22,700 additional dwellings created in England by the change of use of a building did so through permitted development. Compared with the previous year, the figure increased by a paltry 313.
Speeding the transformation of empty shops and offices into homes of all kinds – including affordable and social housing – may even prove a vote winner, so this is one planning reform even the most anxious politician should be able to get behind.
All hands to the planning pump
Politics alone can’t be blamed for Britain’s continued failure to build enough homes. Our Byzantine planning system is made worse by inadequate staffing in local authority planning departments.
Many councils are having to make painful austerity savings even as their planning officers wade through the huge backlog produced by the post-pandemic boom in applications.
Rather than just throwing more taxpayer money at this problem, the government may consider a more radical solution – by outsourcing the work to the private sector.
Clearly, this is likely to prove controversial, but under-resourced local authority planners are the one part of the planning system voters are likely to have direct contact with – and it’s safe to say planners don’t enjoy the same level of public popularity as NHS nurses.
Of course no single white paper, nor government for that matter, will be able to fix a housing crisis that has been decades in the making.
But for as long as the short-termism imposed by our political system tramples over our broken planning system, nothing will change, and Nimbyism will continue to prevent the country from building the homes it needs.
Image: Gareth Belsham, director of Building Consultancy, Naismiths
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