Pundits are still getting it wrong about why we need planning reform. Here's Liam Halligan in the Telegraph:
The fundamental problem isn’t, though, as the Government suggests, “a lack of land with planning permissions” – for around 80pc of residential planning applications made are already being approved. The real issue is the ever-lengthening delays between permissions being granted and houses actually being built.This is, with added Sunday papers polemic, the position of the Local Government Association. It's not planning and the planning system but the 'oligopoly' of national house builders that are the problem. "We approve 90% of planning applications", say the LGA so it can't be down to us (missing the point that between 1 in 5 and 1in 10 of applications get refused - a huge argument for having a fall back location, a landbank, to develop).
The galling truth is that the big, powerful developers which hoover up most new planning permissions have long staged a deliberate go-slow, making higher profits overall by producing fewer homes so prices keep rising. Unless ministers acknowledge and tackle this massive market failure, our chronic housing shortage will remain – with all the social and political fallout that entails.
Halligan then recognises the actual problem (which isn't the big house builders):
We need to free-up parts of the greenbelt – much of which is urban scrub. Far from being “concreted over”, it has doubled in size since the Seventies – and now covers 13pc of England’s land mass while housing, including gardens, accounts for little more than 1pc. This white paper flunks that challenge too, preserving all greenbelt land.But then Halligan suggests that it's the influence of developers that has meant a half-baked set of planning reforms when it's the concern about the political effect of a major green belt reform that held back the government's radical instinct. When Halligan says a planning permission should be a "contract to build", all he does is create a situation where we get no planning applications because the risk of loss is too high. It's already true that thousands of potential homes don't survive intial contact with the planning system and never reach the point of applications, let alone permissions. And this situation disproportionately affects smaller developers because the system of allocations under local plans prefers large sites, the sort that have options for development from the big housebuilders.
Even the current reforms, which preserve much of the green belt, face objections from the usual set of NIMBYs - from local councils, from the CPRE, from MPs representing suburban England, and from the planning profession. The depressing thing is that we pretty much know the reason for England's unaffordable housing - urban containment or, in piece of gloriously bucolic branding, the green belt. Wherever in the world we look, we find that the restriction of land availability by urban containment results in unaffordable housing. We see this in California, in Sydney, in Auckland, in Barcelona and in London. Where there are looser restrictions (or none) - in France, in Germany (except for Berlin which is run by idiots) - housing is more affordable.
So long as we retain a system where the supply of land for housing is constrained by regulation and allocated through politically-driven local plans, we will have unaffordable housing, an oligopolistic development system and a lop-sided market. We have (and won't be getting rid of) a local plan system that, since its introduction in 2007, has favoured large allocations so as to reduce NIMBY objectors. Remember that every local planning authority is seeking to reduce the number of homes they need to build and to minimise the number of sites so as to limit the negative political impact of housing development. These decisions are wrapped around with nice words about infrastructure, sustainability and partnership but, in truth, if you can deliver your borough's housing needs through a dozen sites rather than 50 then you will do so because you'll have eliminated 80% of the NIMBY objections.
Instead of creating a bogeyman for the NIMBYs - "it's those wicked bad housing developers to blame" (how many times did I hear that during my 24 years as a local councillor) - folk like Liam Halligan should be urging support for the government's reforms. It's true they don;t go far enough, it's true they probably won't fully resolve the problem of build-out, but they are a big move in the right direction and represent the first baby steps towards a properly functioning land market, the first requirement for a housing market that meets needs.
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5 comments:
I just read Halligan's article in the ST as well, and was appalled that a supposed intelligent person could suggest that a grant of PP would be time limited in such a short manner. That would have terrible negative incentives, as you say for developers (and landowners) not to put in any application other than the very smallest they could. It would become impossible to plan large urban extensions of thousands of houses, because its just not feasible to build all the infrastructure for large numbers of houses, and the houses themselves inside a few years. Such projects take many years, maybe even decades to go from the grant of PP to final completion.
I'm afraid the basic thing is that we are a congested small island, and fitting large numbers of new homes with all the attendant infrastructure required is not something that can be done overnight any more. The current infrastructure has to be upgraded at the time of development, or even before, in order to prevent life becoming intolerable for existing residents due to the stress placed on the road network, State services and private utility supplies.
Much of the reason for delays in getting planning for housing sites is nothing to do with the question 'Can I build houses here?', the answer to that is usually yes, but. The question that takes a long time to answer is 'If you build houses here what else must you do (and not do) in order to make sure the development does not impose massive negative impacts on everyone else, and will not be a hellhole to live in once built?'
I have just gone through (via a developer working on my behalf) such a process. Its taken them about 5 years for them to go from signing a deal with me to getting a PP passed, roughly speaking half of which was the preparatory work prior to submitting the application and and half in negotiations with the council to arrive at a permission the council were happy with. It will probably take another 6 months to a year to get a detailed PP for the first phase of the development and some digging can actually start. Bear in mind this is not one of the big housebuilders, its a small privately funded developer, as such time is of the essence to him, his investors want their money back as soon as possible. So there is zero incentive for him to draw this process out, the only way he gets his money back is when he has a PP to either implement, or sell on to someone else.
As a yard stick, my developer was recently told by the local planners that the 2.5 years it took for his application to be granted was the quickest they had ever done an application of that size (over 1500 homes). Normally it takes anything up to double that.
House building in the Uk is one of those pick 2 of 3 criteria problems. You can have any one of quick, quality and quantity. Generally speaking we tend to prioritise the latter 2 over the first. If we want lots of houses quick we will have to face a drastic drop in the quality of life for everyone both in and around a new development. All three is not possible any more, if it ever was.
The Tories might consider what it is that makes voters go for them in most Southern constituencies. One factor is the almost assured block on housing. The deal is this - in return for giving you potholes, poor quality schools and lousy care homes we will give you guaranteed house price rises - what is not to like.
But if Dommy relaxes the planning rules in any significant way there will be no particular reason to vote Tory, their unique selling point of selfishness has evaporated. Not even the Tories are that stupid, they have already noticed the outcome, so expect little - at least in the important South. No redundancy for Tory Councillors just yet.
Anyway, the only credible path forward is manufacturing and cheap services. That requires a low cost of housing - the dominant cost factor. Given the way the big builders work we might as well go for huge trailer parks. Cheap, quick and no worse than the stuff the builders put up.
«Halligan then recognises the actual problem (which isn't the big house builders): “We need to free-up parts of the greenbelt – much of which is urban scrub. Far from being “concreted over”, it has doubled in size since the Seventies – and now covers 13pc of England’s land mass while housing, including gardens, accounts for little more than 1pc”»
But that indicates that even the planning system is not the problem indeed: it is very easy to get planning permission in most of the UK, nearly all of it, but almost nobody wants to build there because there are no jobs, so there is no in-flow of new tenants and buyers. People want a CHEAP 3 bed semi with a large garden in the south-east because that's where they can find most of the smaller and smaller number of "good jobs".
If government policy wasn't to spend lots of taxpayer money to attract jobs to the south-east then jobs would be more uniformly spread across the UK, and the amount of green belt in the south-east or anywhere else would be pretty much irrelevant.
In the current situation, where the thatcherite governments of the past 40 years have discouraged jobs in the pushed-behind areas, and have "invested" enormous amounts of taxpayers funds to attract jobs to the core tory voting of the south-east, shrinking the green belt and relaxing planning permission without doing anything would just give enormous windfall capital gains to many landowners in the south-east letting them reap the value of that state spending in those areas.
«That requires a low cost of housing - the dominant cost factor. Given the way the big builders work we might as well go for huge trailer parks.»
I think that is unduly optimistic; while our blogger here has unjustified fantasies about "well priced" 3 bed semis with gardens, the reality gives most people who want to live in areas where they can find "good jobs" micro-flats and shoebox-houses with a lot of much-worse-then-soviet room-sharing (only the lucky get to share houses) because of the very high cost of rent and buying.
The future is more of that, more doubling up, rather than "luxury" level housing like trailers: those living 2 to a bedroom will live 4 to bedroom, etc., even if better paid workers may be able to afford their own bedsit in a House Of Multiple Occupancy (as doss houses are currently euphemistically called). The less lucky will end up sharing unheated garden sheds that often rent for £400-£600 a month "cash-in-hand".
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/28/london-the-city-that-ate-itself-rowan-moore
“Meanwhile, if you fly in a helicopter over suburban boroughs such as Hounslow or Newham, as council enforcers sometimes do, you will see ramshackle structures in back gardens, some of which will be housing uncounted numbers of migrants. Whereas iceberg houses are permitted by loopholes in the planning system (which some local authorities are now trying to close), these are unauthorised and try to evade detection. A Brazilian architect once asked me why there were no favelas in London. They are coming now – sheds in back gardens, small flats and houses appallingly overcrowded.”
As the article says, the future (and quite a bit of the present, especially as 5 years have passed) is not nice comfortable trailers, it is favelas (tenements/slums), like in pre-WW2 times
Is the consideration of how best to mitigate the impact of new developments on the surrounding area where measures such as Section 106 agreements come into play?
Obviously the Section 106 agreement typically involves the local council and the concerned property developer talking behind closed doors to come to an agreement as to how much money the developer will pay the council as compensation for the added stress that the new development and its hypothetical occupants will impose on local amenities, but I would imagine that is included as part of such a consideration.
Otherwise, I presume the developer / builder has to agree on certain standards with the local council in order to mitigate the added stress as best they can.
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