Twenty-six years ago, my parents bought their first house for £84,000. It was two minutes away from a Tube station and surrounded by the good schools, handy amenities, and ‘community feel’ that grasping estate-agents and gullible first-time buyers adore. Today, if I and some unfortunate future Mrs W. Atkinson sought to buy the same property, it would cost us £510,000. Encapsulated, in that, is the dire state of Britain’s housing crisis. As Sajid Javid highlighted last weekend, average house prices are now nine times average earnings, up from 3.6 in 1997.
Now, I know the word ‘crisis’ is bandied around a lot these days. And I know there are a few readers who might be tired of hearing Tory commentators complain about high house prices, arrogant NIMBYs, and the existential threat that a property-owning democracy without any property poses to Conservative prospects. Nonetheless, when angry young YIMBYs like myself suggest to Truss and Sunak that the repeal of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and 7 per cent interest rates might be no bad thing, we don’t just do it out of out flippant youthful naivete. We do it because, if house prices don’t come down, the prospects of both my generation and the Conservative party are bleak indeed.
Hence why amendments like that of Theresa Villiers to the Government’s Levelling-Up Bill matter so much. Not only do they send entirely the wrong impression to those twenty and thirty somethings desperate to get on the housing ladder, but because by removing housing targets and strengthening the powers of local communities to prevent development, they are reversing one of our party’s few great successes since we returned to office in 2010. Quietly but crucially, like Matt Hancock winning over the public one kangaroo anus at a time, successive Conservative governments have got house-building up to a thirty-year high, notwithstanding Covid-related disruption.
Although we might not have followed Macmillan in actually hitting the 300,000 target we have set for ourselves, 232,820 additional dwelling were completed last year. That is almost up almost 100 per cent from the post-financial crisis slump of 124,720 in 2012-2013.These may not all be the little patches of Metro-Land of my Betjeman-fuelled fantasies, but a faintly distasteful two bedroom flat squashed above an old kebab shop is better than nothing. This raises two questions. How have successive Tory governments achieved this – and why has nobody noticed?
The failure of communication might be explained by the turnover in Ministers of State for Housing we have had since 2010. In twelve years, fourteen separate MPs have held the brief. With five this year alone, it is a position with an even-shorter life span than a Home Secretary, a Prime Minister, or Wales at the World Cup.
Yet this game of pass-the-Red-Box is not quite the ministerial merry-go-round it seems. At the Secretary of State level, Eric Pickles served as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government for five years. Greg Clark – the author of much of the important legislation – then held the brief for a year, before Sajid Javid did so for another two years. So despite the churn amongst their juniors, a great deal of continuity persisted. Thus was especially as Nick Boles served as Minister for Planning for two years between 2012 and 2014, taking over from Clark.
If all this seems like a blast from the Cameroon past – or, in my case, a reminder of what politics was like when I doing my GCSEs – then that is not unsurprising. It was during the Coalition years that the groundwork was laid for this boost to house-building.
Three pieces of policy were crucial. First, the 2011 Localism Act abolished Labour’s regional housing targets, and shifted the focus to local councils. Secondly, the Act allowed for the creation of Neighbourhood Plans for development. These required signing off from the planning inspectorate and a local referendum before being adopted. Since they were introduced, house-building has been both higher than before in areas with plans, and higher than in those areas without them.
The third prong was the introduction of the National Planning Policy Framework. Designed to remove Labour’s over-complicated and bureaucratic regional planning policies which had left house-building at its lowest level since the 1920s, these replaced 1,300 pages of central guidance with a framework document of just 52 pages. Although this has been tweaked subsequently, it remains the basis of today’s planning framework, introducing clarity and stability to the system for developers.
What these changes introduced were two fundamental shifts in the way our planning system works. The first was a presumption in favour of sustainable development. Where areas can be developed in a sustainable manner, the assumption is that it should go ahead. The second was forcing councils to create five-year plans for land supply. The quid pro quo with these was that councils would only have the ability to reject development if they had already worked out housing need and a plan of how to match it for their area. Without a plan, their rejection of a development could be overturned by the planning inspectorate.
As such, like a wrestler using the weight of his heavier opponent against him, this sought to use the NIMBYs opposition against them. Come up with a plan for homes, or have something worse foisted upon you. Subsequent reforms – like the housing infrastructure fund introduced by Javid – have been helpful in encouraging more building here and there. But it is the Pickles-Clark-Boles axis to whom most credit is due, since it is their approach which has quietly put pressure on councils to allow more development.
Perhaps too quietly. The question still remains. Long ago, we ran a series on Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher‘s crucial contributions to home ownership. That Pickles, Clark, or Boles have not yet – stranger things – ascended to high office cannot be the only reason why this success has not lodged itself in the imagination as a recent Tory triumph on the level of Gove’s school reforms, or…well, you get the picture. Why are we so quiet about it?
The answer to the conundrum lies in the prices and statistics I mentioned at the start. When the number of people in their thirties and forties renting is three times higher than it was two decades ago, it is clear that expanding the housing supply has not solved the affordability problem. People are hardly likely to give you the credit for building more houses if that has barely made a dent in their chance of owning one.
So what is still going wrong? Pick your poison. Clearly, low interest rates and easy finance have contributed to spiralling prices, and made purchasing a home as an asset all the more attractive for speculators. Similarly, adding a population the size of Nottingham annually through immigration has hardly contributed to falling demand. Add in cultural changes that mean more people are living alone, and the problem spirals beyond one that Kirsty Allsopp cannot solve through a few pointed references to Netflix subscriptions.
Thus the depressing conclusion we must reach is that, though Pickles, Clark, Boles, Javid et al should all receive their due credit for boosting house building, it has been nowhere near enough. Take that 230,000 figure and double it. Do the same for interest rates, and bring on a mortgage market Gotterdammerung. My comments to Truss and Sunak about repealing the Town and Country Planning Act and 7 per cent might have been jokes. But many an honest word said in jest, and all that.