Why don't the social housing sector and housing campaigners support Green Belt reform?

Part of Britain's vital green belt

"During the 1930s most of Britain’s cities doubled their footprint by expanding into the countryside. After 1947 green belts stopped this sprawl, and concentrated the post-war housebuilding effort on existing cities and New Towns. Since then, green belt boundaries have constantly been reviewed and changed. The total area of green belt has doubled since 1997 to cover 13% of England, and a further 20% is protected in other ways such as national parks, while only 11% is classed as developed (half of which is parks and gardens)."

So states the preamble to housing campaign charity, Shelter's briefing on its policy in respect of Green Belts. The charity goes on to stress how useful and important green belts are - it points to how under the current system wicked dastardly developers tend to build "expensive, executive homes that make the highest returns" rather than the affordable homes that we need and how people might want to drive cars. Now, even if I leave aside that the folk buying those executive homes are moving out of a home somewhere else (do people at Shelter not understand the concept of a 'housing chain'), this conclusion fails to realise that the reason developers do this is also a consequence of green belt policies.

It is a source of disappointment that the social housing sector and charities like Shelter focus their efforts and lobbying on demands for huge dollops of taxpayers money to be used to subsidise the building of 'affordable' homes. Largely, of course, because the policies that mean at least 25% of England is barred from new development (and well over 50% in the places where people most want to live).

It gets worse if you head to the National Housing Federation, the representative body for the UK's social housing providers. Not only does their website fail to even mention planning as an area of policy concern but a search on their resources page, blogs and press releases reveals this:



Even a broader search on the subject 'planning' reveals some (not especially good) advice on getting planning permissions and a comment on the planning reform 'green paper' that doesn't mention substantive changes to any aspect of planning, just a preference for tinkering with rules on PDs, affordable housing allocations and the development control process. I may, of course, have missed something here but if the Nat Fed has a policy on planning reform and green belt, it's keeping very quiet about it. And hasn't said anything since October 2019.

Why is it that influential, well-resourced and active groups involved in housing campaigns and housing policy are so blind to the impact of urban containment on housing supply and housing affordability? Reading the Shelter position gives the impression that they prefer continued land supply constraint ("stopping sprawl" they call it) to actually meeting housing need through market mechanisms. And it starts with economically illiterate statements like this:

"...a blanket relaxation of green belt policy would allow far more piecemeal, unsustainable proposals to get planning permission – and would encourage developers and land traders to bid up the price of sites."

Yes folks, the experts at Shelter think that dramatically increasing the supply of land will result in higher land prices. Shelter go on to talk about 'windfall' profits from land and how this leaves no money for 'quality design' or infrastructure. As you've all worked out, the reverse is true - the windfall profits are largely the consequence of having an essentially arbitrary policy of limiting land supply to near (but not quite) zero in the places where housing demand is highest.

Like some centre-right lobby groups, Shelter want to continue having the state determine what land can and cannot be used for housing but to apply a punitive tax (backed up by compulsory purchse powers) to the value so as to pay for lots of supposed community goodies bundled under the heading infrastructure. Bear in mind that the developer isn't going to build without connection to actual infrastructure (gas, electricity, water, sewage, highways, broadband) so what Shelter mean by infrastructure isn't really infrastructure however much it might be socially valued.

Shelter's main argument (at least they have one unlike the wider social housing sector) appears to be a mix of that mealy-mouthed term, sustainability, and the inner urban snark word, 'sprawl'. In a blog post in 2015 Toby Lloyd, Sheter's policy guru, commented on how he sees it:

Fans of total planning deregulation tend to eulogise the 1930s – when we did build a lot of homes around cities. But would anyone really argue that our cities should double their footprint every ten years, as they did then? That only around 10% of England is urbanised is indeed a sign that a bit of greenfield loss would not be the end of the world. But it’s also a sign of the success of Green Belt policy in preventing infinite sprawl.

Again there's a silly polemic in here - 'infinite sprawl' - that reveals a lack of thought on the subject. Increasing England's urban area from 10% to 15% (including gardens, parks, playgrounds and assorted other open and public spaces) would not represent anything like infinity. Worse though, Lloyd and Shelter suffer an error of geometry - to double the land area doesn't double the radius. So extending London by 5 miles at its outer edge would provide for, even at the population densities in Bromley, around 4 million more people, and that's adding in an assumption there's a hidden homelessness right now of about 500,000.

And this also supposes that demand will be entirely met at the urban fringe with none of it on repurposing listed warehouses and old churches or by building swanky riverside apartments in the centre of town. It seems clear that the sort of value judgements made by defenders of urban containment (sprawl is bad, a 'free-for-all' favours developers, look at all those cars) are more important than the simpler truth that these policies make it too expensive for many to afford a home, let alone the manner in which the policy almost creates a new feudalism by debarring the urban workforce from property ownership.

I doubt anything will change, the housing sector is too wedded to demanding grant funding, but we need that change if we are to have a better housing policy and the chance of meeting the needs of millions in Britain - not just those wanting affordable rented accommodation but the millions who want the same societal deal their parents got - get educated, get a good job, work hard and, in return, get a real stake in the nation, a house they own. That the social housing sector takes such a narrow view - give us more cash, let's have more government - is at best a disappointment and at worst a missed opportunity to make the case that restrictive land supply policies like green belts are anti-poor and anti-equality ideas that should be scrapped.



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Yes we need to build a million homes but we don't need £146 billion in public subsidy to do so

Some of the beautiful 'green belt' that CPRE want to save

It beggars belief really. The National Housing Federation along with Shelter, the CPRE and the Chartered Institute of Housing propose, as their solution to the housing crisis, a programme costing £146 billion over ten years to build 1.45 million homes - that's a public subsidy of over £100,000 per house. These self-serving institutions have not specified where they'll build these homes but you can bet your bottom dollar that, with the involvement of those NIMBYs-in-chief, CPRE, the homes won't be troubling the residents of nice leafy suburbs very much.

I'm guessing that the target for developing these homes will be all that brownfield land in inner cities - where else would we put all the poor people, eh? You know the former industrial land that requires millions in decontamination, the scraggy bits of wasteland inside industrial estates and other sites currently languishing in deriliction because nobody can develop them viably.

It's not that there's no case for new social housing but rather that these proposals, by including intermediate market solutions, will act to further screw up a housing market already made sclerotic and inefficient by the worst ravages of our strategic planning system.

There are two models for delivering homes in volume - the 1930s models and the 1950s model. This bunch of self-interested organisations want the latter approach - massive government investment - because it suits their business model and expands their power and influence in the housing market. Back in the 1950s, in a war ravaged nation with millions of destroyed and bomb-damaged homes, there was a justification for that government action. Right now there is no justification beyond the self-harm inflicted on our housing markets by government regulation and the planning system.

The involvement of the CPRE in these proposals tells us that the main aim isn't to solve the housing crisis but rather to preserve the green belts that represent 13% of England's land - mostly in the very places where people would like to settle down and raise a family. Rather than pleasant suburbs close to the countryside and linked by good public transport to city and town centres, we're going to get high rise blocks on constrained sites in inner cities, unpopular housing crammed into hard-to-access sites and maybe a couple of high profile whole estate developments that will merely repeat the mistakes of the 1970s by putting the least well off far away from the snug middle classes.

The housing crisis is, in large part, a crisis caused by the inability of the emerging young middle class - all those millennial professionals in good London jobs - to afford a home with a garden like the ones they were raised in. The only way to resolve this problem affordably is to significantly increase the supply of land in places where those millennial professionals want to live. And this is not in a shared ownership development in Lambeth.

It is perfectly possible - the 1930s prove this - to build the homes we need without extensive public subsidy. What's required is that we make major reforms to our planning system - returning green belt to it's original purpose of preventing ribbon development, doubling the supply of sites with potential for housing and scrapping 'community infrastructure levy' as it is simply a tax on building houses. If there's a case for spending £14 billion then its on providing the schools, railway stations, bus routes and road improvements those new homes will need.

For most rural - exurban really - places with 2,000 of more homes, a 20% increase in this supply will not destroy them or the countryside in which they nestle. Rather that increase will improve the chances of them keeping the post office, a good local store, the chemist, a couple of pubs and the local primary school. And with this provision safeguarded these places remain communities (especially if some of the new housing is social housing) rather than dormitories for the urban wealthy.

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Dear Mr Dromey, making houses more expensive doesn't solve your housing crisis.

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The utter lunacy of Labour's emerging housing policies become more apparent with each passing day. We have seen how Labour MPs are backing policies that charge landlords up to £800 per property just for the happy privilege of being allowed to rent those properties. Apparently this deals with the tiny minority of "rogue" landlords. And now we see Jack Dromey, uber-stalinist Labour housing spokesman advocating huge imposts on housing development:

Mr Dromey attacked the government for allowing section 106 agreements, which require developers to include affordable housing in developments, to be waived where schemes are unviable.

Now, dear reader, not the stupidity here. If the scheme is unviable because of the s106 agreement it doesn't really matter how much you shout and scream about fairness or the "residualisation of social housing" those houses won't be built. And we either need the houses - whatever their tenure - or we don't need the houses. If it's the former then we have to adjust the externalities (such as contributions to or provision of "affordable" housing) so as to make the scheme viable.

And while we're on the subject of nonsense here's Mervyn Jones from Yorkshire Housing banging the drum for wealthy housing associations like his to get more government subsidy:

...Mervyn Jones, chief executive of Yorkshire Housing, warned that revenue models that raise rents to increase capacity of associations ‘in the end always cost more to the public purse and of course help us reach our capacity quicker.’

Two quick points: the extra cost is only because three-quarters of Mervyn's tenants are on housing benefit. And the subsidy is the subsidy - it may fall better for the housing association if it is from higher rents but it is not higher.

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So the solution to a dysfunctional housing market is to make it more dysfucntional?

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It seems that the housing sector has been captured by people whose grasp of economics and understanding of markets is diminishingly small. The Labour Party - under the direction of that old Stalinist, Jack Dromey, has had an enquiry. And the solution is:

A cross party inquiry led by a Labour peer is today calling for £5 billion of quantitative easing cash to be used to build homes across England, and for a £3 billion increase in funding for social housing.

Other ‘emergency measures’ demanded in the Housing Voice report include making the housing minister a cabinet position, and deferring the merging of housing benefit payments into universal credit.

In the medium and longer term the group wants to see the affordable housing budget raised to £4.75 billion a year, and for a national commission on affordable housing to be set up to report before the 2015 general election.

These people are serious about this you know. They really do want to print £8 billion and give it to housing developers. To build social housing - that's subsidised housing to you and me. Because there's a housing crisis don't you know?

Well yes there is a housing crisis but not the one you're thinking of. The crisis is that the social housing 'sector' isn't able to develop as much as it used to develop because the government isn't bunging in enough subsidy. This enquiry and its 'solutions' seems to be good old-fashioned grant-farming. Give us lots of subsidy and we'll build lots of houses in places where people don't want to live. Meaning that we won't have to answer the big question of how we get more houses in the places where people do want to live and where there's work for those people that mean they can afford those houses.

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David Orr knows this is nonsense. Most people in social housing aren't working.

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Perhaps it's just doing a favour for his pals in the Labour Party but David Orr from the National Housing Federation shouldn't be saying things he knows aren't true:

“However, the idea of selling off social housing in 'high value’ areas to build more in cheaper areas is fundamentally flawed.

“It could effectively cleanse many towns of hard-working people who simply can’t afford the high prices of buying or renting privately.” 

I know this statement is nonsense because the houses of Nat Fed members are filled mostly with people who aren't working. I've sat in meeting after meeting where I've heard the words "most of our tenants live on benefits".  Take a look:

Not only does this show how things changed from 1981 but it also reveals the lie in David Orr's statement. Three-quarters of social housing tenants (in 2006 but I can't believe much has changed since) are not working. So selling off social housing in high value areas clearly won't "cleanse many towns of hard-working people". It might mean fewer old people, fewer single mums and fewer folk who are too ill to work but it won't mean fewer hard-workers. For those hard working people are living in private rented housing since the allocations system gives preference to those with particular vulnerabilities. And David Orr knows this.

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