Why planning permissions lapse (and how Shelter should be ashamed for opposing planning reforms)

The former Denholme Velvets site

The analysis by Shelter and the House Builders Federation shows that 40% of homes granted planning permission in England go unbuilt. This equates to more than 380,000 homes between 2011 and 2019.

Sadly Shelter's Director, Polly Neate, goes on to say that this finding proves how the problem isn't planning but rather that government isn't giving her friends in the social housing sector billions with which to build houses. And, yes, there's an argument to be had about funding for social housing, but for the UK's biggest and most influential housing charity to be opposing planning reform is both shocking and unforgivable.

More interesting though is to understand why so many planning permissions lapse. I'm sure the anti-capitaist mob will be quick to point at the big housebuilders but this really isn't the case. We know there's an issue with build-out rates on larger housing sites but it's nonsense to say that companies who exist to make money from building houses are going to let expensively obtained planning permissions lapse. So the problem lies elsewhere.

Let me give you a couple of examples of sites that obtained planning permission but it subsequently lapsed leaving the houses unbuilt and the sites empty. And in doing this perhaps we'll remember that this is just another example of how our land market is distorted by the planning system.

Cullingworth used to have a railway station but the line closed in the late 1950s and the land and sidings at the station were sold off. The Cullingworth land was bought by a man called Billy Webb who proceeded to run his chicken slaughterhouse and pet food businesses from the land. In the 1990s the pet food business closed and the chicken factory was sold off leaving redundant buildings on the site of the old sidings. Eventually, the site was cleared and planning was sought and given for the development of 80 or so houses plus a care home. The applicant wasn't a developer and had no intention of building these houses - all they sought was a permission so as to make the site more attractive to a buyer. No buyer came forward (maybe the new owners wanted too much money) and the permission lapsed. And, of course, under the planning system that Shelter's director thinks isn't a problem, there's no guarantee that a new application will be granted permission.

This brings me to a second example. The A629 Keighley to Halifax road passes through the village of Denholme and, as you head out across the high moor from that village there's a site that used to be a textile mill owned by a company called Denholme Velvets. When the mill closed it's owners applied for permission to demolish the buildings and build some houses. This permission was granted, the owners demolished the mill, took away the valuable Yorkshire stone, and looked for a buyer. This was around the time of the financial crash so, surprise surprise, no buyer came forward, the site remained a derelict mess and the planning permission lapsed.

The mill site is in the green belt meaning that when Yorkshire Housing (one of those social housing companies Polly Neate likes) applied to build some affordable housing on the cleared space where the mill once was, they were refused - by the council, on appeal, and in a subsequent amended application. The refusal was because the new housing would spoil the openness of the green belt. The land (it's the picture at the head of this post) sits there growing buddleia and fire weed among piles of rubble while we're told there's a shortage of affordable housing.

Around Bradford you'll find dozens of sites with a similar history - old industrial land cleared of it's valuable stone and left to grow weeds because either the owner wants too much money or else building houses is simply not viable give expectations about decontamination, services and highways. I know of one social housing developer who, having built a mixed tenure estate in inner city Bradford, found that the market housing part of the development wouldn't sell. Despite zero land costs (the social housing company owned the land), the cost of building a family home was higher than similarly sized or even bigger homes in the area were priced on the market. Those homes are now rented out.

Time and time again assorted NIMBYs tell us that we should build on these 'brownfield' sites before a single turf of their precious green fields is dug. And shamefully, people like Polly Neate, indulge such NIMBYs by promising that houses for poor people would be built on these brownfield sites using lots of lovely government cash. The poor people don't get to live in nice suburban communities with good schools and great local amenities, just as before they get dumped in poorly serviced, over-dense inner city estates away from the nice places where the NIMBYs (and probably the executives of big charities like Shelter) live.

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The biggest transfer of wealth to the working class in our history - why right-to-buy is a great policy.

The first thing they did was change the front door, replacing the dour municipal plank with a bright new door. Shortly they replaced the old windows with clean, warn doubled glazed plastic units and maybe paved part of the front garden for a drive. You could walk round the estate and point to the houses that had be bought under right-to-buy and you'd hear just how happily excited were to join the home owning democracy.

Between 1979 and 1995, 2.1 million council homes were transferred from state ownership into private ownership under the 'right-to-buy'. One of the biggest transfers of wealth to the working class in English history, a welcome transfer opposed by the Labour Party and many within the state housing sector (municipal trade union NALGO tried to get its members not to process right-to-buy sales). After all the transfer of ownership didn't just usher millions of people into home ownership, it also reduced the power of councils, housing officials and councillors to control who lived where.

I recall a Labour councillor in Bradford bemoaning the changes to council housing allocations policies because they removed what he called "management discretion". What the councillor really meant was that him and housing officers couldn't sidestep the allocations process any more - part of the councillor's power was lost as he could no longer pay back a political favour by getting someone a council house. What these changes had done, rather as did right-to-buy, was mean that people were no longer dependent for housing on the largess of the state and the benevolence of its agents.

Today it is still, however, almost a requirement for people in the housing sector to believe that right-to-buy was a terrible policy even to the point of claiming that it is responsible for today's housing crisis. Housing waiting lists are too long? Blame right-to-buy. The rent's too damned high? Blame right-to-buy. House prices are through the roof? Blame right-to-buy.

While there are people who remain ideologically opposed to the idea of home ownership (or at least home ownership by the working classes), the more common criticisms of right-to-buy relate to the loss of social housing stock and the numbers of former council proporties that are now rented privately. There are (mostly unevidenced and unsubstantiated) further claims that investors are encouraging tenants to use right-to-buy so they can get the property for private renting - even to allegations that this results in former tenants becoming homeless.

When right-to-buy was introduced the expectation was that we wouldn't need large amounts of new social housing. After all the fact of a home transfering to the ownership of the former tenant didn't reduce the total amount of housing, it only reduced the stock of council housing. With a stable population the view taken was that new social housing (other than specialised provision of one sort of another) would not be needed. This expectation turned out to be wrong as, from the mid-1990s the UK population grew (largely as a result of immigration) significantly. Compounding this growth, the success of London as a city meant that after a long period of population decline that city began to grow rapidly.

The problems now laid at the door of right-to-buy (high rents, lack of social housing stock, waiting lists) were not, in reality, a consequence of the policy but rather a consequence of wider housing policies as well as a more liberal attitude to immigration. As population grew from 1995 onwards, the supply of housing didn't especially in London and the South East. The period from 1995-2010 saw some of the lowest rates of new housing provision since WW2 and, coupled with a national policy of low interest rates, this resulted in a house price boom. Because the provision of new social and affordable housing is largely tied into the planning system (a proportion, determined in the local plan, of new homes have to be affordable), the result was higher rents, increased homelessness and growing waiting lists. Horror stories about sub-letting, illegal rentals and living in sheds began to emerge as London simply couldn't meet the demand for housing that the success of the city's economy produced.

As anyone who has watched TV programmes like 'Homes Under The Hammer' will know, the private rental sector has transformed UK housing markets. The majority of the homes featured in these programmes are bought and refurbished for rental. In large part this trend reflects the problems with housing supply across all tenures, a problem largely created by unaffordable housing markets created by the lack of new supply. For young professionals in London, renting is now the norm whereas the previous genneration of young people were able to buy. It is a nonsensical idea that sorting out the social problems that flow from high density rented accommodation (most notably the delay in family formation) requires large amounts of essentially similar social housing featuring state-subsidised rents.

It may well be the case that right-to-buy should have featured more new build social housing but remember that demand for social housing, especially in London, didn't take off until some 20 years after the right-to-buy policy was introduced. Similarly, the shift of property into the private rented sector didn't occur during the main period of right-to-buy sales but was a consequence of later dysfunctional housing markets. And even so, around 60% of homes sold under right-to-buy remain owner-occupied (very often by the people who bought them in the 1980s).

Right-to-buy was a huge transfer of wealth and that the use of discounts to incentivise transfer enabled that transfer. Given subsidised rents, this discount can be seen as, in effect, a net present value of that subsidy (I'd note that this doesn't hold up well in places where the margin between social and market rents is low). Some people have, however, done very well from right-to-buy (and that house price boom of the 2000s):

As north London security guard John Holland put it in an interview with the BBC: "There's no way we'd be property owners now if it wasn't for her. It was perfect, absolutely perfect." The discounted home he bought for £39,000 31 years ago is now worth around £600,000.

The principle that people should be able to own a stake in the nation remains a great principle, and right-to-buy enabled millions to do just that. Attacks on the policy come from those who think providing homes is the job of the state and its agents rather than the market, those with an interest in keeping lots of people dependent on local state housing management, and those who mistakenly blame the policy for the problems within today's housing markets.

We urgently need a new programme designed to get more people out of rented property and into home ownership. At the heart of this is a housebuilding programme only possible with significant reforms to the planning system but we should see programmes like right-to-buy as contributing to this process. Blaming right-to-buy for problems that arose twenty years after the policy was introduced is wrong. As is a sort of rosy-hued nostalgia for council housing and the belief that the only way to meet housing need is to create a new generation of state-dependent tenants.

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Sorry Network Homes, land seizure is not the solution to the lack of land supply

Well I guess it's a start that some people involved in housing are talking about land.

Land is becoming an ever-bigger barrier to new supply. Land makes up over 70% of the value of existing homes (up from 50% in 1995) and is a high input cost when building a new home.9 As the cost of construction varies relatively little across the country, when we talk about unaffordable market homes, in many ways we are discussing the high cost of land in some areas. This is at the heart of the housing crisis.

So we find asserted at the start of a report by Reuben Young and Kayleigh Pearse for Netwrok Homes. It really shouldn't come as a surprise to make this discovery or to see, as the authors do, that the operation of our land market is central to resolving the problems within our housing markets. The authors also recognise that land value is not evenly distributed because there are "...fewer homes in high demand areas than there are households who want to live in high demand areas..."

The demand for housing land is still determined largely by the market - land in Bradford city centre has low, even negative, value whereas land in suburban London and exurban Surrey is eye-wateringly expensive. Supply of the land, however, is not determined by the market but by the planning system. So it's curious that the authors, while acknowledging the impact of planning ("...large swathes of greenfield land around cities are politically determined undevelopable, and planning permissions everywhere are rationed by a political approval process...") then choose a solution that ignores supply constraints.

Allow local councils, Homes England, and the Greater London Authority to compulsorily purchase land at existing use value. This would be instead of the much higher ‘hope value’. This will let public bodies cheaply assemble land for housing which would be challenging for the private sector to do because of fragmented ownership or other difficulties. It would also deter speculation on land, because landowners would know that their land could be bought without consideration for making a future profit. The result would be more homes, and cheaper land for everyone.

It all sounds lovely doesn't it? The greedy landowner doesn't make huge gains from that "hope value" and benign local councils reap the benefit. Of course those public bodies would have to seize the land (let's describe compulsory purchase properly) in order to build the homes. Now, leaving aside the potential for all sorts of essentially corrupt political shenanigans, the whole process still requires that same local council to make housing land allocations through its local plan. Our authors glibly state that all this will give a "...greater incentive for landowners to bring forward land at lower values..." - essentially local councils wave a big stick at landowners with threats of seizure. Again the potential for political games and even corruption is legion but the fundamental problem - policy constraints on land supply - remains in place.

There is no need for these land seizure proposals. If you want to reduce the value of housing development land then the way to do it is to make more of it available, to resolve the problem with those "..large swathes of greenfield land..." in places where demand for housing is high. The proposal here simply dodges this problem - there's still the political issue of where housing goes regardless of whether or not you give the local council powers to seize the land. We are back to cramming more (affordable) houses onto land that doesn't have much value because its not where people want to live but is where it's politically possible to allow the houses to be built.

The resolution of the land price problem doesn't come by artificially making the land expensive then artificially making it cheap again, the resolution lies in taking from politicians the power to decide which land is or isn't available for development. And that power sits with the planning system not the market for land.

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Lockdown Living - in which the Resolution Foundation discover (and then ignore) London's housing crisis

 The Resolution Foundation has published some work looking at what they call "Lockdown Living", essentially a brief review of housing conditions in the UK:

We show that living conditions in lockdown have been determined by long-term housing trends such as tenure change, the failure to build sufficient social-housing stock and weak regulation of the private-rented sector. As we face the prospect of local lockdowns or even a second wave going into the winter months, both short- and long-term action to address the inequalities uncovered here is needed more than ever before.

What the Resolution Foundation find shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone with more than the passing appreciation of housing issues in the UK. We're told that poorer people live in less good, more overcrowded conditions and that older people tend to have more living space than younger people. Unsurprisingly, given the age and social profile of BAME communities - younger, poorer - these groups are more likely to be in poor homes (Resolution Foundation use damp as their test here) and more likely to be overcrowded.

The report makes few recommendations (suggesting, for example, that opening playgrounds, libraries and leisure centre especially in more deprived areas would ease pressures from lockdown) but points to several problems within our system such as changing tenures and how this impacts on health and well-being. The authors, however, remain stuck with the belief that the resolution to housing issues such as those they describe lie in more regulation and more state-controlled housing provision. At no point to they try to understand how it is that the well-being of owner occupiers is so much better than that of renters (both social and private sector).

It is notable too that no attmept is made by the authors to understand geographical factors in their findings. We read that BAME people are more likely to live in overcrowded conditions, less likely to have a garden, and more likely to live in a damp home. Clearly a concern but the Resolution Foundation should also have noted that 55% of the UK's BAME population lives in London which also has much higher levels of private renting, high rise living and poor quality social housing.

Similarly, having noted how over 55s have much more living space, the authors don't then also recognise that this is what might be called an "empty nest" effect brought about by young people leaving home for work or study rather than a direct consequence of intergenerational housing inequality. There's also a geographical issue here since London has a much younger age profile than the rest of the UK and further that the Resolution Foundation's use of unadjusted income skews the findings since average London incomes are much higher than much of the rest of the UK.

It's good that this work is done although the Resolution Foundation could be a lot less 'glass half empty' in its presentation. The problem, however, is simply not a function of PRS regulation or the lack of funding for social housing for all that some changes here would be desirable. The problem is London. Every single measure that the report uses reflects the crisis within London's housing - overcrowding reflects a (social and private) rental market dominated by flats, damp homes the overwhelming of environmental health enforcement by the sheer numbers of private rented properties, and the loss of wellbeing by the fact that 'thirtysomethings' in London stay renting because they can't afford to buy.

It's almost certainly the case that the young and less well-off have, in terms of day-to-day living, suffered worse under lockdown - the "lockdown is lovely" crowd were mostly well-heeled retirees outside London with nice homes and gardens in smart market towns not stressed immigrant families in a London high-rise or young professionals trying to work from home on a wobbly IKEA desk in the corner of a bedroom. But stripped of the emotive messaging, what we see from the report is further evidence that London does not begin to meet the housing needs of many of its residents and that the only way to meet these needs is to build more family housing. Enough that, over time, we can get back to the conditions of those 'thirtysomethings' parents and have family homes affordable to people on average pay.

Spending lots of money on new social housing (which is unlikely to be family housing in London) or badgering government into new rent regulations might seem like a good idea but, in reality, it's using an inadequate sticking plaster to cover over the damage done by the lack of housing land supply in the South East and London. Without the wholesale reform of our strategic planning system to free up five- or ten-times more land for housing, the problems found by the Resolution Foundation will persist.

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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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Unaffordable housing is not just down to low interest rates (whatever clever economists may claim)

For years supporters of urban containment policies like the green belt and enthusiasts for more "strategic planning" have argued that Britain's high house prices were simply a consequence of low interest rates:

Another paper, this time from the Bank of England written by former MPC member David Miles and Victoria Monro, shows that the rise in house prices we have experienced since 1985 is mainly the result of lower real interest rates. The other, less important, driver is household income. Those two effects together can account for all the increase in house prices relative to inflation. The increase in house prices is not the result of a shortage of new houses.

This is from Simon Wren-Lewis, who is reliably wrong about most things and particulary wrong here but he gets cover from other economists and from this influential work in 1984 which modelled housing as a financial asset. Those of us who are not economists are always hesitant to criticise these wise folk but it did seem to us that, regardless of such clever modelling, the rules of supply and demand must apply to housing just like everything else.

It seems us non-economists might just be right after all - there isn't a straightforward link between house prises and interest rates:

In the decade from 1990 to 2000, UK house prices rose by just 30% while rates more than halved, falling from 11% to 5%. Then from 2000 to the start of the financial crisis in 2008, house prices doubled while rates barely budged. Since the crisis rates have fallen to just above zero and house prices have risen by a further 20%. They have remained flat in real terms on average.

So at the level of the whole nation there's a pretty weak link between interest rates and prices. This link gets weaker when regional variations are considered where the 'interest rates only' model underestimates the changes in prices in London and the South-East while overestimating price changes in the North of England. The real killer, however, is when we look at international comparisons:

We input actual data on average rents and interest rates for each economy and hold all other factors constant over time...for countries like Germany, Italy and the US, the model predicts house prices of more than double the actual level in the latest data.

The research finds that, while other asset classes like equities show remarkable international consistency, this is not true for housing suggesting that the financial model of housing markets (even a modified version of the original interest rates only model) is not reliable. The UK (and other places like Spain) with tightly constrained urban housing markets has a system that responds poorly to rising demand. Put more simply, more blame needs attaching to policies designed to constrain land supply, that require a long and risky approval process, and which place substantial additional costs on development. In short, the planning system.

The article from which these findings comes still wants to model housing as a financial asset but at least the matter of supply has become a real issue rather than being dismissed as "bad ideas, like ...house building is the answer to high house prices". Wherever we look, from the UK and Spain to Auckland or San Francisco, we see that artifically constrained land supply acts to drive up housing costs, in some cases to the point of extreme unaffordability.

In the Demographia Survey, virtually all of the major housing markets that are “severely unaffordable” have urban containment (such as urban growth boundaries and other policies that severely limit or prohibit new development on the urban fringe). Research in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States has found comparable land values spiking 10 times and more across urban growth boundaries.

It really is time to reform strategic planning, put an end to urban containment as a policy, to scrap the green belt, so as to allow the housing market to function properly.

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Let's build some prefabs and call them "Homes for Heroes" (Boondogglers gonna boondoggle)

Hey, let's build some prefabs

Nothing like a good boondoggle is there!? And right now the best way to get your boondoggle off the ground is to play the "Essential Workers are Heroes" card:

An alliance of housing associations, offsite manufacturing firms and many others across the property sector has launched a call to the private, public and charitable sectors to join together to build low cost Homes for Heroes, to thank our heroic essential workers who’ve kept Britain going during the coronavirus outbreak.

The proposal, from G15 (part of a group of housing associations and construction businesses who plan on solving the housing crisis without changing planning policy), is to build 100,000 prefabricated homes for the "NHS staff...care workers, teachers, refuse collectors, delivery workers and many more" who have helped us through the pandemic. Splendid stuff.

So what's wrong here? Well the first thing is (as wise readers will have spotted), those "essential workers" (we'll use the official boondoggle term from now on - "heroes") are already living somewhere and are in work. These, for all their heroism, are not society's destitute.

So what's going on here? What is this coalition of housing landlords, construction companies and consultants trying to achieve? For sure we need more houses - homes for all sort sof people not just heroes. Since 1997 we've had a planning and housing policy run by NIMBYs with the result that, particularly in London, the sort of professional and managerial folk who 30 years ago stood a fighting chance of buying a house can't do so any more. And let's be clear, this isn't a result of the market failing but entirely down to the stupidity of government.

Between 1997 and 2010 the area of England covered in 'green belt' doubled and, even worse, new national parks, world heritage protections, environmental protections and wildlife desigantions arrived. Couple this with cheap money and governments prepared to pander to relatively wealthy potential buyers and you get the situation where most graduate, professional, hard-working folk look at the housing market and retreat in despair to paying an inflated rent to a private landlord.

Into this space gallop our "Homes for Heroes" champions - "we'll stick lots of prefabs on land owned by local councils and rent them to you cheaper". And that's great until you realise that all this is only possible because the taxpayer is coughing up the subsidy tht allows for cheap social rents. Those heroes get to live in "good quality affordable homes which are well designed, energy efficient and digitally connected". Even better the homes will be "equipped with private outside areas and access to high quality green spaces". Elysium-on-Thames (except for the fact that this all reads like the sales blurb from a park homes company).

This is a boondoggle, a proposal designed by businesses that make money from rents or building homes with the express purpose of securing government grant to secure those rents and that building business. And, to achieve this, the group making the pitch has made a specific appeal to public sympathy for "heroes", those essential workers who've helped us through the coronavirus pandemic. Forgive me for finding this exploitative and unjustified.

If these organisations really want to do something about getting more and better housing, maybe they should ask how we got here in the first place. How the indulgance of suburban NIMBYs by politicians has resulted in one of the world's tightest urban containment tourniquets, the London Green Belt. We hear nothing from these supposed housing campaigners about making it easier for anyone - not just big housing companies with fat government grants - to build houses. I guess we shouldn't be surprised - that would kill the "suck up to government" business model after all.

So forgive me if I don't cheer for these "Homes for Heroes". It's a boondoggle, a bald attempt to exploit the current crisis to extract grant from government made by organisations with an interest in either building or managing the resultant housing.

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Urban densification is bad for the planet

We're told, aren't we, that building more densely in our cities will be great for the environment. Cramming everybody into a smaller space means more bikes, more walking, more public transport and fewer of those terrible, evil cars. With the result that, hey presto, all our carbon footprints are ever so much smaller.

Hang on a minute though...



Hmmm. This graph comes from a study by the Australian Conservation Foundation and, echoing similar studies from Chicago and elsewhere, it shows that transport - all those cars - isn't the bad boy you think it is when it comes to our carbon footprint. High-rise, apartment living itself generates a per capita carbon footprint 50% higher than is the case for suburban living. Even with a higher impact from using the car, suburbs are less environmentally damaging than dense urban environments. And this is without us even trying to reduce its footprint.

All this reminds us that, far from eating beef and driving cars being the biggest culprits in terms of energy use, heating or cooling our homes is the baddie. And not only is our individual footprint bigger (largely as a result of unshared accommodation and the lack of families in dense urban environments) there's also that huge additional cost dubbed "operational" - everything from street lighting and traffic management through to lifts and managing communal areas in apartment blocks. The idea that cramming us all together is good for the planet doesn't stack up.

Despite this (and despite denisification being bad for health, congestion and housing affordability) we are still wedded to the idea of ever more dense cities and to the denigration of suburbs as ugly, planet-killing, car-choked hell holes. Time to change.

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If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'

Some of that vital, precious 'green belt'

Last night was shockingly cold and damp in Leeds yet, as usual, the streets of the city centre were dotted with the homeless. Most seemed almost too busy not freezing to death to hold out that familiar battered coffee cup in the hope of a little change. There were, to be fair, rather fewer aggressive drunks than normal but, for all the buzz of a city in the last few days before Christmas, it is sobering that we still have so many people camped out on the street without a home or even the hope of a home.

There are good people, far better and kinder than me, who help these homeless people - providing them with hot food, running hostels and pointing them towards places that can help with problems other than simply not having a home. But this work is just a sicking plaster over a seeping gash in our civilised society. In a world were we say we care too many argue for and support policies that would, for all their apparent goodness, just act to make things worse. We see calls for rent controls without seeing that big US cities with those controls - San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles - are homelessness crises far worse than the ones we have in Britain. And we see people pointing to a host of other problems, from addiction and mental health to the jobs market or bad landlords - almost never housing supply let alone the planning system.

But in the end the main reason for homelessness - whether its an ex-serviceman with PTSD bunking down in a Leeds shop doorway or a family crammed into a damp and mouldy B&B - is the simple fact of not having a home. Yes it's true that sometimes the actions of the homeless have contributed to their circumstances - financial crisis, debt, drugs and booze, violence - but it's also true that, in the end, the way to stop people being homeless is to get them a home. So the fact that there aren't enough homes doesn't just matter because Zeke and Jocasta can't afford to buy a house, it matters because if we don't get more homes we aren't going to stand a chance of finding a home for those sad men and women on our streets, for the family huddled in a bedsit or the young couple in South London cooped up in Mum's back bedroom because there's nowhere they can find to rent.

Lots of words have been poured our describing how we might resolve the problem - not everywhere but certainly in London, Bristol, Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester - of there simply not being enough housing supply to meet the demand for housing. And remember that this isn't about shortages in one or other tenure (not enough social housing, too few hostel places, no affordable homes to buy) but about the whole supply, all the homes. Turning some of those homes from one tenure to another or taking up scarce housing land for new council housing simply doesn't solve the problem it just shifts it to another part of the market.

Everyone with their brain switched who looks seriously at the problem comes to the same conclusion. The problem lies with our planning system. Sometimes this results in things that increase supply but at a horrible cost in civilized living while in other places we get a new generation of soul-destroying, anti-family high-rise living. We see people saying we can meet the need without changing how we draw up plans - essentially by getting the houses built somewhere else. Usually this refers to a mystical thing called "brownfield land" - acres of previously developed land across our cities on which giant skyscrapers can be built into which all the poor peons and saps of city living can be crammed. All this so a fortunate few can look across a dull piece of agricultural monoculture devoid of most of its historic wildlife and utterly lacking in any amenity value beyond being there and being a field.

"Save the Green Belt" proclaim the leaflets of candidates from every political party. "Brownfield first" scream politicians from left and right. Even the housing "sector", dominated by local council officers and folk from social housing businesses, doesn't mention planning reform - just give us billions of other people's money, say Shelter, the Chartered Institute of Housing and the National Housing Federation, and we'll solve the housing crisis. But they won't because all they'll do is take housing land that's already allocated out of the market and build homes for social rent. Without more land all we do is move the problem about. For sure we might fix the problem for the poorest and most vulnerable (a good thing) but at the cost of making it even less likely that young people with good education and good jobs can do what their parents did and buy a house.

I don't hold out much hope that government will come to its senses and reform the planning system but let me give them a way to do it. We'll start by accepting that all those MPs and councillors elected on the back of "saving the green belt" aren't going to roll over and agree to scrapping our disastrous policy of urban containment. So let's reform it. And the simplest way to do this is to change what 'green belt' means - not the five purposes (three of which are essentially the same thing) but the manner in which we treat applications on that green belt. Right now a 'green belt' designation comes with a presumption against development (or a presumption that the 'openness of the green belt' will be preserved) - if we removed that presumption and treated 'green belt' as a significant material consideration instead then it would be possible to prevent unnecessary sprawl, avoid the merging of communities, protect important environments and encourage the reuse of redundant developed land but not at the cost of constraining land supply to the point where it creates a housing crisis.

If you want - and I do - to live in a society that values everyone and where we can house the homeless so as to support them into a better life, then you can't be a NIMBY, you can't go to the barricades to prevent Barratts or Wimpy building a few hundred houses on the fields over the back. If you want to house the homeless, you'll have to reform the 'green belt'.

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Why do we indulge suburban NIMBYs? A rant about housing policy.

The precious green belt that we must preserve at all cost

I was thinking about doing a careful analysis of the different political parties' proposals on housing. After all, it's one of the biggest things out there and, as Jimmy McMillan said, the rent's too damned high. Not only the rent but the price of housing and the price of land.

Anyway I'm not going to bother with the careful analysis because every party's housing policy is stupid. It's fair to say that, if you want a forced choice, the Conservative's ideas are the least stupid and Labour's are utterly deranged. Out there we've got rent controls, assorted unspecified reforms to tenancy laws, 'tenants unions' (whatever they are when they're at home), commitments to build oodles of housing without making any changes to the supply of land, subsidies for mortgages and a rate fixed by the government for those mortgages which, when you think about it, is just rent control for rich people.

Everyone - other than planners and planning academics - knows full well that most of the problem with high rents and high prices goes away when you stop limiting the supply of land on which people can build houses. But those planners and planning academics invest their time telling us that 'oh no, it's not like that at all, planning is vital' - mostly by denying the basic economic premise of a relationship between price and supply.

I had an brief interchange on Twitter with a chap from a housing association about Labour's plans for zillions of new council houses. The chap (his name was Murtha) thought this an absolutely splendid idea because of inequality and vulnerable people and "evil tories". I asked a couple of questions about how it would work given Labour absolutely insist that they can build 150,000 new council and social homes every year without increasing the supply of land on which houses can be built. Just like the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats they believe in this mystic and wonderful thing called "brownfield sites" on which all the houses can go meaning that nice middle class people on the margins of the big cities (who might be tempted to vote Labour to stop Brexit or something) won't have to have smelly council estate sorts on their doorstep lowering the tone of the area.

I lose count of the number of times I see councillors who not so long ago were voting for local plans that called for thousands of new homes popping up in the papers alongside local NIMBYs waving banners opposing a few new houses in those councillors' wards. Earlier this year lots of liberal democrats, independents and groups with names like "Badford And District Residents against Overdevelopment" found themselves running district councils previously Tory-controlled having spent the campaign saying they'd stop development. These new leaderships' are finding that, despite promising the NIMBY voters there'd be no development, they are going to have to agree local plans they said were headed for the bin.

More than any other area of policy, housing is dominated by this sort of abject stupidity. It's not that we don't need new social housing (even council housing) but that, if you say that you'll do this without increasing the supply of land, your policy will result in two things - more of the sort of high rise council flats that causes so many problems in the 1970s (and are being demolished because nobody wants to live in them) and more expensive private housing because you've taken up all the land building council houses. And, just to be even handed, the same goes if you create artificially cheap mortgages with subsidised deposits - without new land supply this just increases house prices.

Meanwhile local councils - or rather their national body, the LGA - are telling everyone that it isn't the fault of the planning system that no houses are getting built but the wicked developers who get planning permissions and don't build. Nobody points out to those councils that it doesn't work to grant planning permissions for speculative developments in the wrong location (where the landowner vainly believes doing so will get him more value) while actively blocking developments by actual housebuilders in places where people actually want to live.

Just today a planning academic (this makes me cry, really it does) said this after I'd mentioned that we had more housebuilding when we didn't have a planning system:

We had mass suburbanisation and huge loss of countryside. Planning system if not continually interfered with by govt would have social justice at its heart. That is why it came into being in the first place.

Seriously - mass suburbanisation and huge loss of countryside? Here's the reality:

The urban landscape accounts for 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales.

Put another way, that means almost 93% of the UK is not urban. But even that isn't the end of the story because urban is not the same as built on.

In urban England, for example, the researchers found that just over half the land (54%) in our towns and cities is greenspace - parks, allotments, sports pitches and so on.

Furthermore, domestic gardens account for another 18% of urban land use; rivers, canals, lakes and reservoirs an additional 6.6%.

Their conclusion?

In England, "78.6% of urban areas is designated as natural rather than built". Since urban only covers a tenth of the country, this means that the proportion of England's landscape which is built on is…2.27%.

Yet a huge amount of political capital is invested in stopping that 2.27% of England becoming 3%. This is the stark reality of housing and planning policies, urged on by decades of anti-suburbia snark. Politicians, local and national, are terrified by a tiny minority of suburban NIMBYs who think its more important to preserve golf courses, redundant airfields, derelict greenhouses, former race tracks and tumbledown industrial sites than to have homes for the next generation in places where that generation want to live and can afford.

Right now, in different ways, all our political parties are proposing to solve the nation's housing problems through the use of public subsidy of one sort of another just because they're frightened of these NIMBYs. Billions in taxpayers cash splurged on housing simply because politicians haven't got the guts to tell people that, if they want more affordable housing, the way to get it is to reform the planning system, end the absolutism of green belt and dump the idea of detailed local plans. And then let the private sector build new suburbs.

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In which some architects discover some reasons people object to housing development

 At a time of housing crisis, at least in some parts of the UK, it is amazing that groups of planners and architects can still find time to argue against building houses, or in this case building them too fast:

Eurocell says although homes are being built quickly in response to the housing crisis, there is 'almost no consideration' for the infrastructure needed to support them.

 The basis for this claim is a survey:

 ...it found two thirds of people felt there was too much focus on construction of 'homes rather than communities', and seven in 10 thought there was not enough provision of educational, health and sports facilities

 Colour me surprised. People always argue against new housing on the basis of pressure on or lack of social infrastructure: "the school's full", "there's no playground in the park", "you can't get a doctors appointment". The system we have largely mitigates these effects - in the past through s106 payments and now via Community Infrastructure Levy. Moreover, the impact on existing social infrastructure is almost always over stated even with very large developments.

The right response to the argument here isn't to slow down development but rather to direct land release and development towards existing communities with established social and transport infrastructure. Indeed, increasing housing numbers in smaller communities could make the differences between these places losing or keeping their post office, chemist, pub or local shop. The dominant obsession with 'new towns' and 'garden villages' should be challenged for the obvious reason that it is easier, cheaper and more efficient to develop existing infrastructure than it is to build new infrastructure. This is the core benefit of suburbia - it is iterative allowing for communities to absorb development rather than trying to create community spirit in an entirely new place.

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Opposition to urban sprawl is as much about snobbery as self-interest

The standard narrative about urban containment - the "green belt" as we call it in England - is that is persists because of the economic self-interests of homeowners in communities at the margins of urban conurbations. These are the NIMBYs and they have driven the policy of containment to the extent that large, growing cities - San Francisco, London, Barcelona, Sydney, Auckland - have their economies hobbled by the growing unaffordability of housing in these places. And its true that the politicised planning system - government telling people what they can and cannot do with their property - is too often captured by these NIMBYs. But there's a second bunch of people who are just as important, especially where the setting of national policy is concerned. Let's call them "urban snobs". Here's one of them quoted by Joel Kotkin:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I’m happy for them,” snarks Elizabeth Farrelly, urban and architecture critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. “Even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

What we're told we need is high rise living, a sort of urban wonderment of pokey little flats inhabited by the childless young (and increasingly not-so-young). Except for the fact that, contrary to the snobs argument, cities are not an environmental blessing:

Suburban detached houses, according to one Australian study, use less energy per capita than those of inner-city urbanites. California, the hotbed of climate lunacy and forced densification, has reduced its greenhouse gases between 2007 and 2016 at a rate 40th per capita among the 50 states. It has succeeded, however, in driving up energy and housing prices well above the rest of the country; the world capital of the elite tech economy also suffers the highest cost adjusted poverty rate in the nation.

So we have a rootless, childless, kidult population flitting around the big city doing achingly exciting jobs in tech or politics or law and pretending that this is the good life, far better than suburbia's boring, plain and predictable world. We will soon reach a point of confrontation between suburbia and the big city as those suburbs realise they have political power and can challenge the anti-car, anti-family agenda of the urban snobs.

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NIMBYs are destroying California. They'll do the same to London if we don't stop them.

California, the golden land of promise, blessed by sunshine, fertility and the fruits of liberty. It's in a mess, you might even say dying. For the first time in its history the Golden State has more people leaving than arriving. And the reasons? As Jimmy McMillan once said "the rent's too damned high". California has an acute, almost terminal, housing problem:

The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.

Four out of ten Californians pay more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage, the worst in the USA. And the reason is pretty simple. Californians have voted, agitated, campaigned, petitioned and marched against building new homes - again and again. NIMBYs are destroying California.

This being America, the finger is pointed at the zoning system used by town planners over there and, specifically, zoning only for single family homes. Worse than this, these zones don't just say "you can only build single detached homes here" they also dictate the size of individual plots. And in places where agricultural land sells for $1m per acre, limiting density to at low as 10 homes per acre makes for expensive homes. But it's not just this rather crazy system but that it is made worse by having 90% of the land in the state excluded from development and by having a set of NIMBY-inspired environmental, heritage and ecological policies the main effect of which is to prevent development.

Bob Tilman has spent best part of six years trying to get permission to redevelop his laudromat in San Francisco into an apartment block. There's still no permission and opponents - yes opponents of housing is a city with a huge crisis - have used political pressure, environmental regulations and heritage rules to try and prevent the scheme. Elsewhere in the city the same anti-housing campaigners have stopped the development of a homeless shelter.

We can, from the comfort of civilised England, smile and laugh at California's problems. We can point at the gross hypocrisy of progressive, left-of-centre politicians working with wealthy residents to stop affordable housing. We can even boggle as politicians elected on supposedly pro-housing platforms then spend half their campaigning on stopping housing. But we need to pause for a minute and consider whether, in our 'world city' the same problems are brewing.

Spend even a little bit of time looking into London's housing issues and you'll quickly find all the same conditions we see in California. Not just rising homelessness, sofa-surfing and exploitative, often illegal rentals, but politicians (commonly those progressive left-of-centre politicians like we see in California) saying that the impossible is possible, that we can meet housing need in a growing city without making a lot more land available for housing. There are nice warm words about 'brownfield' sites, talk of increased density and affordable housing provisions, but when the chance comes to get one of those dense development with lots of affordable housing, reasons are quickly found to refuse the development. "It's too tall". "What about heritage". "Ooo Kew Gardens".

This pattern is repeated everywhere as council planning committees indulge loud NIMBY lobbies by drawing up the most restrictive local plan possible with the least amount of housing land allocated they can get away with. And then those same Councils lobby for billions in public money to "solve the housing crisis" - the housing crisis their planning decisions have contributed to. Just about every home counties planning authority is squirming about trying to reduce the self-evident need for them to play a bigger part in meeting the housing demand that a massively successful London brings.

The planning system has a sclerotic local plan process, is obsessed with protecting the 'green belt' at all cost, and is vulnerable to loud, organised anti-housing minorities. We should look at California and take the warning - get the system changed, allow more housing development and put the NIMBYs back in the box. Most people support more housing for families, more affordable housing and a fairer planning system, it's time politicians - nationally and locally - had the balls to face down the anti-housing campaigners and get a nation where the rent's not too damned high.

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Whose beauty is it? If you want housing people like and want to live in you have to reform the 'green belt'

Jack Airey the housing expert from Policy Exchange has a piece on Conservative Home about how the prime minister has said that we should “emphasise the need, the duty, to build beautiful homes that people actually want to live in, and being sensitive to local concerns.”

Hard to take any issue with this except in that, as ever, it is difficult to say what is or isn't 'beautiful'. Airey argues that:

Despite existing to enhance public welfare, we seem to have created a planning system that sucks in money and productive energy at exactly the wrong points of the development process. Instead of being spent on beautiful design and good quality construction materials, huge amounts of money is spent by developers on consultants who can navigate the statutory thicket of our planning framework and on the acquisition of land at prices that are artificially inflated by local authorities rationing developable land.

There's no doubt that the cost of land - a direct consequence of planning rules that constrain its supply - has a profound impact on what gets built. Not only does it drive greater densities resulting in a less pleasing environment with narrower streets, smaller gardens and more hard surfaces but it affects the willingness of developers to build more attractive housing. And Airey is also right that the entire planning process gives little attention to aesthetics. Furthermore the nature of our planned system supports the dominant "buy-build-sell" development model rather than the idea of stewardship. The relationship between the developer and the buyer ends once the snagging list is complete.

My concern in all of this is mostly whose idea of beauty we are using? The urban design and architecture professions are filled with people who have a sneering, bien pensant attitude to suburbs - sprawl as they like to call it. At the same time the likes of the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA), true to their Howardian roots, argue for new towns and new villages rather than the modest expansion of the towns and villages we already have. And at the back of all this sit the NIMBYs, most starkly typified by the CPRE and their argument we should "build more densely on old industrial land in the city".

The essays in Policy Exchange's work on "The Duty to Build Beautiful" include some interesting discussion of the role for communities in determining what is appropriate for their places. There's one essay suggesting that (as most communities faced with new housing would confirm) a lot of so-called community consultation is a sham - the developer has already agreed with planners how many houses there'll be and what they will look like. The problem is, however, in most cases - given almost all the most desirable development land has a 'green belt' designation - the very principle of development is contested. Even where that community has set out a neighbourhood plan this will often duck the issue of housing or propose unrealistic (and too dense) developments with the objective of minimising land release from that 'green belt'. In one of my neighbouring villages the Parish Council is consulting on whether people want large houses built - the PC's view is that big houses are a bad idea despite this being precisely what developers want to build.

Airey's article welcomes the proposed "total review" of planning regulations but I'm probably not alone in suspecting that this won't extend to considering the huge economic and social damage that is done by the urban containment policy we call 'green belt'. This isn't to say we should throw out all of the principles enshrined in the 'green belt' idea - recycling land, avoiding the merger of communities, environmental protection - but rather to argue that a blanket urban containment is the most damaging way to achieve these admirable aims. Moreover, the 'green belt' strategy doesn't, in most peoples' minds, perform that function but instead institutionalises 'not-in-my-backyard'. This acts to create, through regulation, artificially expensive housing in places where people want to live - I look with interest at proposals for land value capture but don't see anyone proposing to tax the main beneficiaries of urban containment, the people who live at the urban fringes or within the 'green belt'.

If we don't reform the supply of land and then insist on beautiful homes, we will struggle to meet the real aspiration of most people to own a house with a garden. Instead we will return to the planners' and architects' dream:

The way in which building design evolved in the 20th century led us to this place. It is driven by the manner in which Le Corbusier and others took an entirely functional view of humanity - folk to be stored, moved smoothly from workspace to homespace. The aesthetic wasn't scaled at a personal level but with reference to masses - how do we house millions efficiently, how do we make workplaces for thousands, not how do we make great homes for Mr & Mrs Smith. The result of this is our obsession - straight from Le Corbusier's soulless authoritarianism - with density and the sacredness of the countryside.

In the end, as I've written before, we need to reform the 'green belt' - make it smaller, allow greater weight to housing where need is clear, and exclude previously developed land from the category. Without this sort of change as well as a recognising the importance of space, especially garden space, we will continue failing to meet housing demand and, even if they look a little better, what homes we do build will satisfy planners not people, fund managers not families and investors not individuals.

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The planning system is a big reason for Britain's sluggish economy - reform it

This can't be said to often - we have a dysfunctional planning system that sits right at the heart of our economy's sclerosis and underperformance. If you want places to grow and succeed you need to sort out the planning system, especially for housing.

From Sam Bowman and Stian Westlake:

The undersupply of housing, whose root cause is a dysfunctional land use planning system, is the UK’s biggest problem. It slows productivity growth by preventing people from moving to get better jobs, forces them to spend more on housing costs than they need to, and to have fewer children than they would like, at a later age than they would like. It creates a brain drain from deprived parts of the country, because only the most talented people can afford to move to prosperous cities, exacerbating regional inequality, and means that many of the income gains from the slower productivity growth we do get accrue to existing landowners in the form of higher rents and housing costs, instead of higher living standards for everyone.

Despite this, every political party is proposing housing policies that at best change none of the fundamentals and at worst will completely destroy the last vestiges of a functioning housing market. The Labour Party talks about rent controls, right-to-buy for private rentals and more vaguely about building lots of council houses. While the latter might help a little, it doesn't address the real issue which is that younger people in productive cities cannot afford to buy a house - or, for that matter, a converted airing cupboard pretending to be a studio flat. Labour's policies would see the complete collapse of the private rented market, a massive increase in homelessness and no increase in the rate of build for market housing and they remain completely wedded to a 'plan and provide' approach that simply doesn't work however much you tinker with it.

For the Conservatives, wedded as we are to the ideas of classical liberal economics, it ought to be simple - make lots more land available in places like Surrey, Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire for people to build homes on. Instead we're either (and Bowman & Westlake fall into this trap) proposing massive densification as the solution - huge blocks of flats near to suburban railway stations - or else using false incentives like Help to Buy. Think-tanks like Onward have engaged in massive contortions to come up with housing policies that don't change the fundamentals of our planning system - indeed while they mention planning they hide behind opinion polling showing planning reform is unpopular to ignore the damage it is doing.

There are 118 golf courses in Surrey each of which could provide between 2,000 and 3,000 homes at suburban densities - just having 98 courses would allow for 60,000 new homes. We can then consider redundant airfields and other previously developed land as well as stopping the ridiculous block on what got called 'garden grabbing' where houses on huge single plots (something there's plenty of in the Home Counties) get redeveloped at more normal suburban densities of 20-25 homes per acre. To achieve this you don't need to scrap the 'green belt' you just change the rules to mean that previously-developed land (including those golf courses, gardens and airfields) falls outside those green belt protections unless there are exceptional reasons otherwise.

The second change to planning would be to alter the basis on which assessments of housing need are made. These "objective assessments of housing need" (OANs) are a core reason for our delivery problems. Supposedly these assessments are made on the basis of projected population growth adjusted to acknowledge economic factors (these are always upwards - nowhere admits to their local economy shrinking). The problem is that OANs point to a precise number for housing need - 43,500 for Bradford - and planners therefore identify and allocate a similarly precise acreage of land on which those homes will be built. In areas with growing demand, all of this will be developed meaning that there is no market for development land and the constrained supply - just the bits the planners have shaded in - results in higher land prices than would be the case if, for example, planners identifed land to meet twice the OAN housing number.

Finally we need to review the basis for green belt policy. If we hold to the five reasons set out in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) there is no reason why the scale of Britain's green belts cannot be substantially reduced while still preventing the merging of communities, discouraging unmanaged sprawl, protecting the environment and encouraging the re-use of previously-developed land. We also need to get away from the foolish and expensive obsession with building new towns and new villages rather than extending the towns and villages we already have. Existing places already have the physical and social infrastructure of highways, hospitals, schools, water, sewage treatment and things like pubs, post offices, shops and parks. These existing places are also linked into existing rail, bus and urban transit networks.

I recall listening to the Leader of Lincolnshire County Council explaining how the main barrier to delivering some of the county's big sites was that the service undertakers (electricity, gas, water, etc.) didn't have the resource or investment finance to get the new towns 'wired up'. If, instead of this, the focus was on smaller urban extensions most of these problems would be managed more easily.

The UK's housing policy is a mess and this is entirely the consequence of policy-makers ignoring the simple fact that it is the planning system that causes most of the problem. This isn't to say we shouldn't have more social housing or that there aren't arguments for reforms to how the private rental sector operates but most of Britain's housing problem is people who want what their parents had - a nice house and garden is a decent suburb connected to 'town' where they can raise a family.

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Councillors and MPs objecting to housing developments? Don't be the Grand Old Duke of York

Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

The Duke of York in question is most commonly said to be Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany who wasn't a very successful military commander:

When war broke out between Britain and France in 1793, York was put in charge of a military expedition to Flanders. He took control of the port of Dunkirk but was then pushed back in a battle at Hondschoote on 6 September. His troops – a mixture of British and Hanoverian forces – performed well but were outnumbered three to one, losing their siege guns during the retreat.

Over the following months, he marched his army back and forth between ineffective minor actions, inspiring the nursery rhyme. Meanwhile, Britain and her allies lost control of Flanders, and in July 1794 York and his troops were evacuated.

The futility of the action is what we remember hence the nursery rhyme. And, for me, the lesson for us all is not to offer a community great victories then march them up and down, backwards and forwards before admitting defeat. In this spirit, I'm offering some advice - based on 24 years experience - on responding to unpopular housing development proposals.

What happens in too many cases is that local politicians (and MPs - often the worst offenders), faced with opposition to a development from residents, do precisely what the Grand Old Duke did and march randomly from one possible objection to the next. And its wrong to march a community, banners waving, up to the top of the hill when you know you'll just march them back down, banners furled and defeated, in a week or so. Too many politicians, having got the votes nicely parcelled away, fall back on "well I tried but the planners and developers you know..."

So lets look at what you should do.

The first question you should ask is whether the site for the proposed housing is allocated for this purpose in the development plan (there are various iterations of these but these days we're mostly talking about the local plan). If the planning authority has allocated the site for housing, they have already accepted the principle that new houses will be built on the site. Trying to overturn this principle is futile and local politicians should be honest enough to tell concerned residents the truth - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

If it's not an allocated housing site, you need to look at whether it has some other designation - green belt*, employment land, flood plain or a variety of environmental, ecological and heritage protections. If it doesn't have any other designation and protection, it's just a piece of 'white land' on the local plan map, then, again, you tell the community - 'you're going to get houses built here and we can't stop this - so our job is minimise the harm from the development and maximise the community benefit'.

Where it does have protections or other designations then the principle of building housing isn't established allowing you to say that the designation or protection in the plan outweighs the need for housing. It's worth remembering that the only sustainable basis for a refusal is to demonstrate that the principle of housing is not established, any other basis for refusal can be mitigated by a developer (whether they want to afford this is a different issue).

Residents will raise a consistent set of objections to housing development, the more common being:

1. It will negatively affect house prices (or 'we already have too many houses')

2. The schools are full

3. You can't get an appointment at the doctors

4. It will remove our views of something

5. Bats or badgers or rare orchids or unusual amphibia inhabit the site

6. There are too many cars and this will make it worse - children will be killed

7. The site is crossed by ancient footpaths or bridleways

8. Seasonal flooding affects the site

9. There's all sorts of significant historical or archaeological stuff on the site

10. Trees

It's worth noting that some of these will never be used for a refusal. This includes school places, doctors, house prices or numbers, views and footpaths. We have a long established system through s106 agreements and Community Infrastructure Levy to mitigate impact on things like education, heath and community facilities, and house prices or your view are not the concern of the planning system. For flora and fauna there are very few circumstances under which, on a large site, these can't be mitigated, either through relocation or specific protections. It's great that you can get bats, trees and rare blue butterflies protected through the planning system but you're not going to get the housing stopped on this basis. The same goes for archaeology since, if the site is known to be important it will already be protected (see designations and protections above), and most developers are content to allow archaeological work given that they're going to dig up the site anyhow.

This leaves us with highways and flooding. And yes, you'll be pleased to know, developments on designated housing sites do get refused because of how they impact on road safety, congestion, drainage or flooding. But this only happens when the developer ignores highways advice and the expectations of water and environment authorities (whose responses to consultations will, in most cases, carry greater weight than what local residents say).

For highways the system as a whole has the capacity to accommodate the traffic generated by your development (I know you don't believe this but it is what the planning system assumes so you're stuck with it) so you have to focus on specific pinch points, junctions and stretches of road. Highways planners have standard measures for assessing junctions, the need for crossings and whether parking restrictions or other traffic controls are required. Remember that, if you're stood by the side of the road with traffic passing, 30mph is very fast meaning that, when residents tell you about the awful speeding, the chances are there's a lot less of it than you think. In the end, if a highways development control officer says a junction has the capacity and is safe, then the planning committee is likely to take this assessment as true even if your residents think it's a joke. In these circumstances you are better looking for mitigation - yellow lines, warning signs, pedestrian crossings - than trying to stop the development.

Fields (especially here in the glorious South Pennines with our topography and copious amount of boulder clay) suffer from seasonal floods. If you drive around during the winter months you'll see low lying parts of fields filled with water, often with ducks, too! It's standard for residents to point at a proposed development site and say; 'look it floods, you can't build on it'. Again it doesn't really work like this because, if it really is flood plain, then it's unlikely the principle of housing would be sustained (see designations and protections above). Your site probably isn't flood plan so the principle, in very simple terms, is that the development should not have a negative impact on drainage. This pretty much means that the flow of water through the site has to be the same (or better) after development as it was before development. There are a lot of rules about sustainable urban drainage (delightfully shortened to SUDS) and the developer will want to resolve the issues with areas subject to seasonal flooding but if the overall drainage through the site is unaffected then you've not really any grounds for refusal.


There are other things that might result in objections (from loss of agricultural land or lack of affordable homes through to arcane discussions of who owns the land) but these describe the majority of reasons local people will raise in objecting to new housing.

It's easy politics to oppose housing development and it's easy to whip up opposition, to march the community up to the top of the hill. But the honourable course is to look the community in the eye, as I did when we had an application for 250 new houses in Cullingworth, and say "these houses will get built, we should screw as much benefit for the village as we can from the development". We got a new village hall and pre-school.

*Following a suggestion on Twitter here's a note setting out the difference between 'green belt' and 'greenfield'. Green Belt is a planning designation designed to prevent what is perjoratively called 'urban sprawl' it doesn't mean that the land with this designation is actually green. Greenfield simply describes a site that has not been developed previously. A site being greenfield doesn't provide any protection at all. For completeness, 'brownfield' simply refers to a site that has been previously developed. There are lots of brownfield sites that are Green Belt.

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Housing should be a national priority but we don't need loads more council houses.

Council housing is 100 years old. Well actually it's quite a lot older than that and social housing provision goes back to the middle ages but let's stick with the anniversary of the Housing and Town Planning Act, 1919 which provided subsidy to local councils wanting to build houses - the original "Homes for Heroes". Local councils quite rightly celebrate their contribution to better homes for working people - from Bradford's Chain Street, built for Irish labourers to the massive Beacontree estate in outer East London.

People point to later actions such as the decision by the 1950s Conservative government to build new houses at a time when, despite its promises and commitment to socialism, Attlee's Labour government had failed to respond to an acute post-war housing shortage. Our 1950 manifesto proclaimed:

Housing is the first of the social services. It is also one of the keys to increased productivity. Work, family life, health and education are all undermined by crowded houses. Therefore, a Conservative and Unionist Government will give housing a priority second only to national defence.

It was a great achievement to oversee the building of more than 300,000 homes each year from 1952-55 and it met the post-war need and the related desire to use the opportunity to build new towns - better places to live in the manner of Ebeneezer Howard's 'garden city' ideal. So it's understandable that, looking back into this history, people cry out for a new generation of council homes to meet today's housing need - even down to a fêted TV architect going back to his roots with a campaign for these new council homes. After all the market hasn't provided these homes so government must step in again and spend billions on new homes - £146 billion according to the Chartered Institute of Housing and housing charity, Shelter.

The two examples above were driven by the consequences - and the economic disruption - of war. The 1950s housing crisis was largely caused by the Luftwaffe but was captured early on by social engineers who saw it as a chance to end what they saw as the tyranny of private rental and provide working class people with those 'homes for heroes'. The passion of these social engineers continued into the 1960s and 1970s as 'slums' were cleared to be replaced with grand cities in the sky - rows of walk-up blocks interspersed with huge tower blocks. Millions of people changed tenure from private rented property to council housing. And millions of kids - like George Clarke, our TV architect - were brought up on these estates.

But while George and others were growing up something else happened - more people began, despite the limitations of mortgage finance, to buy their own homes. Why move from one rented tenure to another when you could buy your own home. Alongside those newly built council estates, people saw rows of private homes being built, each filling with clerks, supervisors and administrators, with the growing lower middle class of an expanding service economy. Home ownership became the aspiration of most people, an aspiration that those living in council housing felt cut off from. In twenty years from 1958 to 1978, UK home ownership levels doubled leaving Britain as a country with two tenures - council housing and owner occupation.

The widespread view in the 1970s was that the next generation would not need council housing as rising incomes would enable them to buy their own home. The problem was that over a third of the UK's housing stock was council housing and, if future families weren't going to need those council houses, what would become of them? In London the GLC and some boroughs like Bromley and Hillingdon began to look at selling council homes to their tenants (this has been Labour Party policy in 1959) both as an effective political pitch and to begin resolving the mismatch in supply between councils housing and private housing. Right-to-buy was born and quickly became the Conservative Party's flagship housing policy - over 2 million people switched from being council tenants to living in a home they owned, as Michael Heseltine remarked, "no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people".

Councils - or most of them - hated right-to-buy and hated the mission to remove government from the provision of housing for a mass population. During the 1980s and 1990s Councils dragged their feet, finding ever more creative means to delay right-to-buy sales. Despite this, right-to-buy was a huge success - by 1987 over 1 million homes had been sold to their tenants, billions in state assets transferred to the people.

With other legislation encouraging councils to transfer all their housing into new associations, there was a further reduction in council housing stock as housing associations became the government's preferred means of providing social housing. While some authorities retained their housing, by the 1990s the age of council housing as a monolithic tenure - the only alternative to buying a home - had finished. Councils could concentrate on their strategic housing role - making sure land is available for new housing, providing services and support to the homeless, and working to ensure that the quality of the overall housing stock remained good.

So what has changed? Why do we now have people advocating another massive splurge of council housing building - 300,000 a year for ten years is George Clarke's campaign target? It's not that, as many tenants in my experience could attest, councils were brilliant landlords, quite the opposite. And council housing seems to be a step backwards from a world of home ownership especially given the scale of economic betterment since the 1950s. The answer lies in those numbers, in the fact that from the end of the 1990s to today we have built fewer homes than we needed as a nation with the result that, from 1997, house prices rocketed and people whose parents bought a home no longer feel able to do so. Once again we have a large and problematic private rented sector with the same exploitative practices ended by a combination of regulation and council house building in the 1960s and 1970s.

The problem here is that, for all that we could build nicer council housing than the flats thrown up in the 1970s, people want to buy their own house. The shortage, in most places, isn't a shortage of social housing but a shortage of affordable homes for families to buy. Building lots and lots of council houses reduces the pressures but doesn't resolve the problem especially if, as Clarke and his fellow campaigners want, right-to-buy is abolished. A more interesting argument might be to call for councils to build on an explicit rent-to-buy basis but this wouldn't suit the municipal authoritarians who dominate public housing policy in the UK.

This isn't to say that councils shouldn't build new homes but it is to argue that if there's £146 billion in public subsidy knocking about, using it to buy already overpriced land so as to build homes to let as subsidised rents isn't a great strategy. Indeed, if councils want to contribute to solving the housing supply problem they have the ability to do so now through their local plan process. Land prices are high because there isn't enough housing land to meet demand - a dramatic increase in housing land supply would reduce those land prices and have a beneficial effect on housing costs all without the government having to cough up a penny in subsidy. As we've seen in Sydney, once the poster child of inflated housing costs, once you allow development at scale, you get development at scale - and housing costs fall.

The nostalgia for council housing is understandable but the reality for many who lived in it wasn't the idyll that some make it out to be and it featured poor, slow maintenance, lengthy waiting lists with obscure points systems, management 'discretion' allowing councillors to deliver political favours through queue jumping, and rising levels of crime and disorder as the more successful moved into the private sector. To suggest that the only way to resolve our current housing problems is the mass building of council homes is to acknowledge that councils - and councillors - don't have the balls to face down the NIMBYs, put a rocket under the planners and apply some creativity to meeting housing need. It's so much easier to simply say; "here's billions of taxpayers cash, go build some houses" and then build homes that people don't want (they'd rather buy), in places isolated from work and where folk would rather not live.

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