Yes we need more council houses. But fix the planning system first.

 

This is the second in a series of posts responding to questions and issues raised at my recent Battle of Ideas debate about the housing crisis. These posts will touch on how planning committees work (and whether they are political), why we need council housing, but it won’t solve the housing crisis and the old chestnuts of empty homes, brownfield sites and food supply. I’ll also try to set out why beauty is a good idea but looking good doesn’t stop NIMBYs and how urban sprawl is what people want.

Council houses, we need lots of new council houses. So went the mantra from two of my fellow panellists at a recent Battle of Idea debate on the housing crisis. For one of these panellists the reasoning was that building council housing between 1945 and 1975 created, for the first time, a period when everyone was well-housed. There were no more slums, we were told – which may be a surprise to the people in back-to-back terraces in Harehills and tenements in Easterhouse.

The other panellist, from a right-of-centre think tank - saw council housing as solving a different problem. Because the rents are cheaper, we would be able to reduce a housing benefit bill that is pushing £70 billion every year.

And this all sounds great but raises a whole load of questions that say to me that saying “build lots of council houses” is different from building those houses. People say that, of course, council houses are a rent-producing asset so we will get the investment in building them back over time, won’t we? Mostly, since three-quarters of social housing tenants are on housing benefit, by the good offices of the benefits system. The logic of this is sound until we ask some questions about the management and maintenance of the assets.

A couple of years ago a young social housing resident called Kwajo Tweneboa started a campaign about housing conditions:

Kwajo’s own experiences with disrepair are still at the heart of everything he does. He and his two sisters cared for his terminally ill father Kwaku Robert Tweneboa in a squalid housing association flat infested with files, cockroaches, and mice on the Eastfields estate in Mitcham, south London, before his dad died in January 2020. 

Kwajo says he complained to landlord Clarion about the disrepair for more than a year with no success before he tried a different approach. 

On May 21 last year Kwajo tweeted out pictures of his home in a bid to name and shame Clarion. It went viral and Kwajo was able to get his home fixed. 

This is social housing. The people running Clarion are managing a social business, they don’t see themselves as capitalist landlords, I’m sure that, like the social housing business I was a director of for several years, Clarion will use terms like “profit for a purpose” to position the business away from the private landlord. We should, perhaps, ask why it is that a social enterprise was so bad at managing its precious assets? And provides such lousy customer service?

There are many reasons but, if you’ve ever looked at a large social housing company’s budget, you’ll know how hard it is to maintain a surplus (not go bust), deliver responsive repairs to thousands of houses, and make sure over a reasonable period those homes are improved and modernised. All of this assumes the housing business doesn’t have a development programme and there are no sudden, expensive programmes driven by government or the regulator. Plus, of course, lots of the council housing was thrown up in that 1960s and 1970s slum clearance boom and doesn’t have good insulation, modern windows, or efficient heating. When I was first elected in the 1990s, council houses on the Cottingley estate in my ward still had the single-glazed metal frame windows put in when the homes were built in the 1950s.

Even assuming we can deal with the inherent shortfall in income that comes with controlled rents, where we are going to build these council houses? When it comes to land, the tenure of the homes is irrelevant. When the Local Government Association or Shelter call for government to stump up billions for new council houses, they never respond to the obvious next question – where are you going to build those houses? Council houses are subject to the same planning controls and constraints as market housing, NIMBYs will make the same objections about cars, schools, doctors, and wildlife as they make when the applicant is Barratts or Redrow. Councils in suburban areas will still fail to allocate sufficient land to meet housing need, regardless of that housing’s tenure. Building council housing might be a great idea but you need to start by actually allocating some land on which to build that housing. I recall an application for fifty new social houses in a little Yorkshire village where one common objection was that we have too much affordable housing and (not quite said this way) we don’t want any more of “those sort of people”.

Plus, of course, the cost of the land in London’s outer suburbia is eye-watering. It’s crazy everywhere because government rations the supply of development land, but the South-East is especially bad. There are some who tell us government should simply repeal the Land Compensation Act 1961 (the act that stopped government and government agencies compulsory purchasing land at agricultural land values and then benefitting from the additional value as a housing or industrial development) but wouldn’t it be less inequitable to simply move away from a planning system based on the rationing of development? Furthermore, any change would require changes to compulsory purchase rules because councils can’t simply seize land without good reason – and building some houses isn’t in most circumstances a ‘good reason’.

None of this makes it a bad idea to build new council housing. But the tenure of housing is not the central contributor to the housing crisis, the problem is we have about 4 million too few homes across every tenure. And the lack of affordable market housing means that people who in times past were able to move out of social rent into owner occupation are not now able to do so. The UK still has, by European standards, a lot of social housing (17% of homes in England), the big change has been the increase in private rented housing, up from below 10% in 1995 to nearly 20% today. And this increase is driven more by the decline in owner occupation than by a decline in social renting (in the same way that the decline in social renting from 1980 to 1995 was largely down to increases in owner occupation, during that period private renting levels fell).

Council houses are part of the answer just as new towns – a new suburbia as I’d prefer – are part of the answer. But before we can agree on which tenure best meets people’s needs, we need to agree that building millions of homes requires that we identify the land on which to build those homes. And dismissing planning reform, even saying we don’t need it as one of my fellow panellists argued, is the worst response to the housing crisis. You don’t need to agree with me about scrapping the green belt to appreciate that building 4 million homes needs a lot of land, that people don’t all want to live in flats, and that the planning system currently prevents that land being identified and allocated. If we built all the 4 million homes we need on the English green belt – all of them – we would need about 5% of that green belt (this assumes a density slightly higher than current preferred suburban densities – 50/ha rather than 35/ha). If a fifth of these new homes were council houses that would be 800,000 new social homes, close to the number that organisations like Shelter tell us we will need.

A development market free from the current planning system would, as we saw in the 1930s, build at the scale we need to resolve the housing crisis – not instantly but over 15 to 20 years we’d begin to see price stability within the housing system rather than the rampant inflation that successive governments have fuelled. This stability would mean social rents could reliably return the build costs while keeping up the quality of the homes provided to the most vulnerable in society.

By all means call for more council houses. But fix the planning system first.

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