Build, build, build (just not in our back yard, obviously)

Create Streets

Build, build, build was the cry. Another one of those incontrovertible three word slogans beloved of political copyriters:

Boris Johnson has announced the most radical reforms to our planning system since the Second World War, making it easier to build better homes where people want to live.

Such exciting times. After all, where people want to live is easy to discover - look at Zoopla or Right Move and track those places with the highest house prices. All those lovely, clean, safe Home Counties market towns, the Cotswold villages nestling in that glorious countryside, spa towns like Harrogate and Bath. These are the places where people "want to live" and planning reform will take away the barriers to people being able to do just that - hallelujah!

Then, in what passes for detail, we see the truth, "build, build, build" isn't about houses in places people want to live, it's about cramming more houses into places where people don't want to live. The "most radical planning reforms since the Second World War" amount to just four things, none of which add anything to development land supply let alone housing land in the home counties or rural Wessex:

1. Changing use classes so you can switch from being a shop to a cafe without needing planning permission (with a long list of exclusions obviously)

2. Extending 'permitted development' rights to more commercial and industrial buildings allowing them to be turned into housing (adding to the office-resi rights that are helping create a new generation of high rise slums)

3. Allowing commecial propery to be demolished for housing without needing planning permission (which is fine but you do wonder where the commercial premises will be when every business park in Surrey is housing)

4. Letting us build an extra storey on our house so long as the neighbours don't object

We're promised, in addition, a pile of government cash to "free up brownfield sites", "to deliver affordable homes" and to cover up the reality that when it boils down to it the rent's too damned high. Plus a 'policy paper' on further unspecified planning reform (it was going to be a White Paper, then a Green Paper, now a Policy Paper - next week it'll be a consultation).

This is, to put it mildly, rather underwhelming - even the £12 billion for affordable homes only gets us 180,000 (say the government - at current build costs I make it 100-120,000 but there you go) new houses. A whole load of sound and fury accompanied with frissons of PR joy from the think tanks and housing organisations that stand to benefit from some of this government largess.

We aren't getting meaningful planning reform because (read the Tweets and press releases of Conservtive MPs, regional mayors and council leaders) to do so means facing up to the barriers that this system presents. For the MPs it's a simple matter, they can march their local residents up to the top of the hill crying "save the green belt" knowing that, when the housing gets approved, it won't be their fault. A moment's thought and honesty from those MPs and they'd have told residents that we need the housing, the land is allocated for houses and that's what you'll get.

You can't reform planning because there are 150 Tory MPs who will oppose any reform that threatens the precious green belt (the same goes for all the other parties by the way this isn't just a Tory fixation). And any planning reform intended to deliver "better homes where people want to live" has to put an end to at least some of the urban constraint that the green belt represents.

So "build, build, build" will spend a lot of money, will tinker with the rules so it looks like "radical reform", and will oil the wheels of a planning and housing system that doesn't work. Young people in London, Bristol, Bath and Brighton still won't be able to buy a nice home with a garden like their parents and grandparents. Worse, their employer now expects them to work half time from home when that means balancing a lap top and some paperwork on a cheap IKEA side table shoved in the corner of a bedroom in a shared flat.

In a recent survey over half of working age residents of California's Bay Area said they were thinking about leaving the area (probably the world's least affordable housing market). Without meaningful planning reform this is where London is headed. If build, build, build means 'OK build some houses but over there on that crappy industrial site not near me' then it's not planning reform and we'll still have a housing crisis when the cash pot's empty.

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