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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ....

Planning committees are political. Don't let councillors tell you they aren't.

 

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

One person in the audience raised the issue of NIMBYs and how politicians are too scared of organised opposition to housing. This person made reference to a housing development in Shoreham-on-sea where hundreds of local protestors campaigned against a development because one – just one – tree would be cut down. A fellow panellist, Rabina Khan, leapt to the defence of planning committees because she’d sat on the committee in Tower Hamlets that refused a major housing development to save a single mulberry tree. Rabina Khan, the former councillor on the panel, set out to explain that, of course, planning committees listened to objectors, but they weren’t political. Khan explained that councillors sit on the committee in an impartial (she managed to avoid the commonly used but misleading term “quasi-judicial”) role free from all that nasty politics and guided only by planning rules. The inference we are supposed to take from Khan’s description of the planning committee is that councillors aren’t influenced by NIMBYs.

You will, when you’ve stopped laughing, have spotted the flaws in Khan’s claims of councillor impartiality. It is true that Blair’s local government reforms removed the political whip from planning and licensing committees – we can no longer do what we did when I was first elected and have a group meeting prior to the committee where we decided how we would vote. But the idea that politicians stop being political just because they sit on a committee in a personal capacity is obviously nonsense. And when several hundred folk from a councillor’s ward turn up to object to new housing, please don’t tell me that this doesn’t influence said councillor’s view on the development.

The entire planning process, from the designing of the local plan through to deciding what goes to committee and what doesn’t is entirely under political direction. Even when the decision of the local planning authority is appealed by the developer, the process is ultimately political – it is the secretary-of-state who decides the appeal and they can (and do) ignore the recommendations of the planning inspector. It is because the process is political that people would come to me as a councillor to get help with their planning – from trying (unsuccessfully) to get permission for a hay store in a horse field to supporting a new bungalow on a farmyard in the green belt, I’ve dealt with hundreds of planning applications where residents faced initial rejection from the planners.

The de facto politicisation of individual planning decisions created problems that the Blair local government reforms didn’t fix. These problems ranged from the worst sort of corruption through to using planning and licensing to create a sort of agency/client relationship between councillors and residents in urban inner cities. At the heart of this is the idea, almost unique to the UK, that every planning decision must go through this political process. Not only does this invite abuse, fussbucketry and jobsworthiness but is creates uncertainty and delay. Since, in theory, politicians must approve every dormer bedroom and conservatory, the planning system acts to prevent people from meeting need, from starting businesses and from improving their property especially in communities where people are uncertain of the actual powers available to councillors.

My father who was a councillor in London for 30-odd years always argued that planning decisions should not be made by councillors but, once the plan was agreed, by officers subject to the oversight of the courts. While this wouldn’t eliminate the arbitrariness of the current discretionary system, it would introduce a little more consistency and give applicants more confidence. Rabina Khan was wrong, planning committees are political, political considerations like votes influence planning decisions, and NIMBYs exploit these facts to prevent new housing, new infrastructure and new facilities.

 ....

New Suburbia 2: cities or families?

With the announcement of initial figures from the 2021 census there has been a little flurry of stories about housing policy plus, for perhaps the first time in decades, the national media has noticed that we stopped having quite so many babies.

The population of England and Wales aged 65 and over has finally surpassed the number of children aged under 15, according to the first results of the 2021 census, which provided a snapshot of an increasingly crowded island nation.

As a 20% surge in the number of people aged 65 and over in the past decade drove the population of England and Wales to a historic high of 59,597,300, the Office for National Statistics recorded 11.1 million people aged 65 and over compared with 10.4 million people aged under 15, tipping a balance that has favoured the young for decades.

Cue a little policy panic as people start asking whether this is a problem, why there are so many of us sixty-somethings, and how come we have so few children? Some commentary is dull and short-term – are there too many school places, what does this mean for the NHS and other technocratic questions. Among this there are, however, some people asking about this:

The number of infants aged four and under was one of the few categories where the population fell but the over-90 population broke through the half a million mark, rising to 527,900 people.

Not so much that, even with a pandemic, our over-90 population continues to grow (this is a good thing by the way) but how come we’ve so few pre-school kids. The first comments on this inevitably point to the obvious and proximate cause of low fertility rates – the cost of having a child. Most commonly people frame this cost in terms of how expensive it is to buy childcare. We’re told, for example, that Germany has lower childcare costs than the UK (it doesn’t, it just has a bigger state subsidy) but this observation is almost always made in the context of how the cost of childcare acts as a barrier to women returning to work. As a result, we ask what is best for the mother’s economic circumstances rather than what is best for the child.

But there’s little evidence that lower childcare costs result in higher fertility rates. The UK has a higher fertility rate than Germany (1.74 compared to 1.61) yet, as we have noted, German childcare costs are (to the parent) close to zero whereas UK rates are among the highest in the world. So, if we want a policy that leads to higher fertility rates, state-subsidised childcare isn’t the solution because its sole purpose is to get the woman back into the workforce in the shortest possible time.

Given this finding, people start looking for other factors that lead to lower fertility – levels of female education and especially higher education, delayed start to family formation, and the status of women within the economy (if not within wider society). And all these things would feature in a full analysis of declining fertility and its relationship to society being more socially liberal and more economically successful. But, as Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson wrote in “Empty Planet”, the biggest reason for fertility decline is urbanisation. The best way to get reductions in fertility is to increase the numbers living in dense urban environments.

We have urbanised for the obvious and sensible reason that cities are, in proximate terms, very good for the economy. Even if you don’t accept the certainties urbanists apply to agglomeration theory, there’s no doubt that cities drive a great deal of the international economy. The problem is that, as I wrote a while ago, cities are also mankind’s dead end:

And who would - without necessity or accident - have children in a high-rise environment featuring fug-filled air that causes asthma, streets filled with rushing vehicles, public spaces designed for adults, and places dominated by strangers. In San Francisco and Berkeley over 70% of households are childless. And we're supposed to see dense urban living as a better model than the sprawl or the suburbs, the comfort of the small town or the community of the village?

The problem isn't just that the rural and small-town West has rebelled against the city but that the city is a failing model - at least the idea of the concentrated, centralised, mayor-led city. These things are parasites, sucking away all the good from small towns with the promise of riches, opportunities and better bars while giving little back when it comes to the long-term quality of our lives. Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.

Cities may be an economic success, but they are a sociological disaster. Higher rates of crime, poorer health, more road accidents, higher rates of mental distress, more loneliness and, as we’ve seen, lots fewer children.

So, what to do? One hundred and fifty years ago, people who lived in cities sought out a solution. Not through academic study but by, as their economic circumstances improved, moving a mile or two out of the city to live in a place more suited to family, good health, relaxation and family life. As the railways spread their fingers out from cites like London and New York, communities grew up filled with the families of workers in those cities. Later, as the car arrived, these places spread a little further. Just so long as the worker to get to his - we are talking about a man here - work within a reasonable time (and get home to see his family). Even for places built on industry, as those industrial wages grew, the same journey away from the cramped tenement or terrace took place. This was helped by the building of council houses and by the fact that, with few constraints on development, housing was affordable.

The suburb wasn’t the invention of a planner or some grand thinker. For all that people like Ebenezer Howard tried to picture a sort of utopian suburban place, all they really did was polish what had already been done by builders and the families who bought the homes they built. This laissez-faire development may explain why it is that planners, architect and the cultural elite dislike suburbia. As something that wasn’t designed by the great and good or funded by government spending other folks’ money, suburbia represented the triumph of the middle-class, a place built in their image and containing the things that made their lives good.

Today those suburbs are, in many places, dying. The families that once formed these places don’t exist. And, in large part, they don’t exist because why would anyone set out to have a family and a family life when there’s no prospect of being able to have the things that make that life good? The suburbs of big cities like London, New York, Sydney or Auckland are now filled with people who had a family once. All those fifty-, sixty- and seventy-somethings who once had growing families now live in suburban homes unaffordable for all but the most fortunate twenty- or thirty-something. These older folk like that the house they bought for less than thirty grand is now worth half-a-million or more, they like the golf course even if they don’t play golf, they enjoy the paddock with the horses but don’t ride, and they like that it is a moment’s drive out into a countryside of yellow rapeseed and wheat or barley making patterns as the wind blows. It doesn’t seem to them that it is their fault or their problem that so many people can no longer afford to do what they did – buy a suburban home and raise a family.

There is an urgent need to do something about the housing crisis, but we shouldn’t do this at the expense of family life. Record low numbers of young children should be a wake-up call for those who argue for ever more crowed cities, for technocratic fixes like subsidised childcare, who want to sustain the sociological disaster of a world directed entirely towards economic productivity. A world that gave us depressed adults, stressed children and now, a generation of people who have no real stake in the society that demands their productivity.

What we need to do is build that new suburbia, to provide places that aren’t focused on productivity and the momentary pleasure that makes this grind bearable. We need places that work for children, who can be afforded off one middle-class salary, and which provide an environment that tells us work isn’t everything. We need to compromise again with the Taylorist world of the technocrats by saying that we don’t work to make money for the sake of money or, god forbid, to pay the taxes so we can get cheaper childcare and thereby earn more money to pay more taxes.

A new suburbia is about a family being able to sit in their own garden, surrounded by good comfortable things and looking at the home they own. And as the sun shines, that family knows that the efforts they made was worthwhile. Mum and Dad can look at the kids larking about n a paddling pool or bouncing on a trampoline and take pleasure in knowing that life’s not all about work.