Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve heard from government this week. A cash bonanza for ordinary people as families buying modest priced houses see stamp duty rates slashed. No new commitment to social housing other than a meagre extension of the affordable homes programme. Barely touching the fringes of the housing crisis, this leaves housing associations and councils to invent or borrow their own way out.
Meanwhile, Danny Alexander’s promised £100m for “shovel-ready” housing schemes transpired as a vague recommitment to a pre-announced garden cities project, a small development based on a transport project in Barking plus 10,000 new homes at a former RAF base in Northstowe. This location is important: it sent out the signal the government will step into the housebuilding business if the commercial sector fails to do its job.
“If you don’t build them, we will,” Alexander is understood to have said. He wants to see government make better use of public land for development and take a leading role in deciding how this is done. Northstowe represents a pilot scheme to see how well this approach works.
Agreeing to one scheme at Northstowe does not make it clear whether this is now official government policy or the whim of the Liberal Democrats, determined to stand out in an attempt to sidestep electoral devastation next year. But what happened to localism? It was the policy on which all parties could agree, with no advocate more effusive than the prime minister himself. Under the coalition, he promised, communities must decide for themselves.
Since then communities secretary Eric Pickles has personally presided over the blocking of 19 onshore windfarms and government has announced five new garden cities in areas of their own choosing.
Just a week earlier, a legal case signed the last rites of localism under this administration. Though it pertained to a disagreement over whether a few back gardens in Lewisham could be built upon, the case of the secretary of state for communities and local government vs Venn found (in extreme summary) in favour of the government’s appeal against the terms of a pre-agreed local plan. Louise Venn told me that she believes the judgement confirms that “local plans are not worth the paper they are written on, as they cannot be upheld equally for poor and rich”. “Localism and policy-led planning have both been undermined to a level unheard of anywhere else in Europe,” she added.
I would welcome significant government intervention on housebuilding and – as I have previously argued – would be happy to see the appointment of a strategic commissioner to get homes built. Despite all the warm words from Westminster, development rates are still far too slow to keep up with demand for housing, and there’s too little creativity from profit-hungry developers in response to perfectly sensible questions about the future of our communities: where will we live, and how?
Nevertheless what we have arrived at is a devastating worst of both worlds. Government promises localism, ignores its commitments and instead decides to operate under a half-hearted centralism that lacks the guts to do the job properly. There’s no local control where need is concentrated and (at least sometimes) understood, and there’s no confident injection of capital and capacity into building the minimum of 250,000 homes a year that we need to keep pace with our growing and changing population.
When a new government is elected, or formed, in 2015 it needs to take sides. Will it build for itself, or will it delegate and live with the consequences? It’s impossible to attempt to do both.
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