Strategic Housing Contradictions

The Government’s Housing Strategy released today is a curious curate’s egg of a document. Containing many strong ideas it also contains many contradictions. And it covers a huge range of issues.

Listening to Grant Shapps, the minister, unusually somewhat floundering on the Today programme this morning, I was struck by the difficulty politicians sometimes have in admitting that they cannot control the world.

It would be lovely if we built lots of nice and affordable homes quickly in the right places because a lot of people want them and because it would create jobs for people that don’t have them.

But it isn’t going to happen and Government can’t make it happen.

We will gradually start building more homes when confidence in the economy, availability of mortgage and development finance and public subsidy increases (as we have been and will continue to do unless the wheels fall off in Europe as banks and builders rebuild their balance sheets). Whether they are good houses in the right places is a whole other issue.

Lots of people are wrestling with these complex problems (the Communities Select Committee, RIBA as well as Government and many others) as many have before (the Brown Government and its various reports from Barker, Calcutt and others) but enabling or regulating the housing market to overcome the many inherent market and government failures is extremely challenging.

The current Government document brings together some ideas (previously announced, new and re-packaged) that will appeal to various vested interests and constituencies. Many of them are long term and will take a lot longer than the desire for immediate growth while others are more immediate including;

• Get Britain Building (the new version of Kickstart which is probably a good idea for the few remaining sites (presumably only in England?)) where developer finance is the only constraint
• The New Build Indemnity Scheme looks which like a better structure than FirstBuy/Homebuy as it ties up less house builder and Government cashand
• Custom Home Building support which flows with the current interest in this area from the house building industry

but overall the ‘strategy’ fails to set out a coherent and credible analysis of the problems or to link the various initiatives together in a mutually reinforcing (strategic) way.

Contradictions include;

• the need to achieve market stability while artificially increasing house prices by providing government guarantees to attract a limited pool of credit to the housing market. However regulation of the mortgage market is hinted at.
• the wish to achieve good design while abolishing standards without having a replacement (more on this below)
• the wish to increase the number of planning permissions while radically changing the planning system (a long term vs short term tension)
• the wish for institutional investment combined with an unwillingness to talk about the capital gains tax exemption for owner occupied housing that biases against investors
• the tension between the political need to support home ownership and the delivery need to support renting
• the political inability to admit that the lack of public subsidy for affordable housing and the application of CIL and s106 to brownfield sites with high current use values is a major factor in reduced viability and supply

It is good though to see that the rhetoric that labelled planners as the ‘enemies of enterprise’ seems to be being replaced with an acceptance of the planning system and the Government working with planners to make things happen and more importantly that the problems go far beyond the planning system. The distinction between the positive impacts of planning policies (e.g. restricting urban sprawl which according to some, saved us from the devastation seen in places like Ireland, Spain and the US not to mention mitigating climate change) and the bureaucracy and slowness of the application and plan making system isn’t yet being highlighted though.

There is still a fair bit of spin around and the vested interests continue to trot out misleading statistics on first time buyers (for the record the average age according to Halifax is 29, up just one year over the last 25 years or so which compares with the average age of first marriage which is up from 24 to 31 over the same period and the average life expectancy which is up from around 74 to around 79). This is not to downplay the issues for those whose parents and grandparents do not have equity to pass on but it does show that house price wealth does seem to be successfully moving between the generations where it exists.

The design issue is clearly problematic. Design Council gets a number of name checks as does the Bishop Review but the strategy action is to have a design summit. I suspect that is less about kicking the issue into the long grass and more about knocking some heads together which has not been possible in the short period in which the strategy has been produced. RIBA for one don’t yet seem able to show the leadership that their presidents have been hinting at by encouraging their members to undertake their civic duty as informed citizens in helping on design issues in their neighbourhoods. Happily very many individual architects are already doing this. We need more of the same and similar input from all built environment professionals (or citizens as I like to call them!).

The path on sustainability seems clearer and Andrew Stunnell’s dogged work on building regulations and the related Green Deal and banning of letting EPC F and G rated property after 2018 are key parts of the mix.

There is a lot in the Government document and there are signs of progressive thinking and a willingness to try and deal with the plethora of pressing problems in innovative ways as well as a welcome attempt to deal with some of the longer term issues. Worth a read!