A strong contender for the nadir of the first of last year’s leadership elections – a crowded field, admittedly – was the hustings in London.
Speaking in a city in the grip of a renting crisis, Liz Truss didn’t mention the subject of housing once; Iain Duncan Smith, her warm-up man, did so only when he paused his peroration to urge the gathered activists to join his local campaigns against new developments.
This was not entirely her fault. Presumably it was Nick Ferrari’s choice to throw such a question to Rishi Sunak whilst instead pressing the then-Foreign Secretary on such urgent questions as which country ministerial cars should be manufactured in.
But the fact that proceedings bore such scant relation to the actual political situation in the capital rather obviated the decision to hold a dedicated event there.
It also betrayed a certain obliviousness. The Conservatives’ position in London is collapsing: several seats they either held or fought close in 2010 now have five-figure Labour majorities.
On its own, this might be survivable; the Tories could certainly win a comfortable overall majority without their remaining handful of London marginals.
But the problem is not confined to the capital. The very same cost-of-living and housing pressures are pushing more and more of its residents out into the surrounding counties. As Dr Patrick English of YouGov explained on this site, this has led the so-called blue wall to get younger even as Britain ages; the dry demographic data is stalked by the spectres of future Brightons, future Canterburys.
Nationally, the Party is in a fearful bind on housing. If it is to have a future, it needs younger voters – a category which now extends to people in their 40s – to be able to acquire homes and start families. But wherever demand is highest, the Party plays Renfield to an electorally-dominant cohort bitterly opposed to change. “More homes yes – but not here.”
Thus, the embarrassing efforts of too many Tory MPs to pretend that the solution to what is mostly a London-and-the-South-East housing crisis can be solved by building lots of houses in the North – even if that involves trying to command young people to move there as well.
What makes this hell-or-Connaught approach especially ridiculous is that there is an alternative; a land where the Conservatives are politically weak, which they don’t need for a national majority, and which could comfortably absorb a vast share of the accumulated housing deficit, generating huge wealth in the process.
That land, of course, is London.
To date, the backbench NIMBY “local patriot” caucus have stuck together to an extent which has taken even government strategists by surprise; previous efforts at housing reform fell in part because even MPs with safe seats revolted.
Such commitment to what is, in the long view, a social and political suicide pact is lamentable. But that being what it is, it is up to the Government to split the opposition.
Dr English’s research, above-linked, is the key to doing that. His summary of the implications of it for a swathe of comfortable Home Counties seats ought to be giving MPs nightmares:
“One consequence of their short-term political success could be a longer-term unravelling of Conservative majorities in commuter belts across the country as more and more Labour and (tactical) Liberal Democrat voters are pushed in their direction.”
CCHQ could presumably commission as much additional gory detail about specific seats as it cared to pay for. The Government could then offer those MPs a grand bargain: any national framework is kicked into the long grass, in exchange for a free hand in London.
A handful of the highest-profile NIMBYs would hit the roof – including, awkwardly, Greg Hands, who might even forget to tweet about Liam Byrne’s letter for a whole half-hour, maybe longer.
But are scores of Tory MPs really prepared to risk the politically-fatal demographic transformation of their constituencies so that Duncan Smith (majority: 1,262) or Theresa Villiers (1,212), two of the noisiest opponents of housebuilding, can stave of the inevitable for one more cycle?
Obviously asking this caucus to actually vote for a pro-active housebuilding measure might be a bridge too far, even as the chill wind of demographic change starts claiming fingers.
Happily, there would be no need to. For a government with sufficient political will, the planning system is actually largely optional.
Specifically, Section 59 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 allows the Secretary of State to issue development orders. And development orders can, on a straight reading of the text, do almost anything. The two most important for our purposes are:
Taken together, the above seems to allow the Government to Year Zero the planning system wherever it chooses. A London Development Order could set out an entirely new set of rules, and grant automatic consent to proposed developments which met the criteria (basically the much more sensible zoning system used by almost every other comparable jurisdiction).
At a stroke, the accumulated cruft of the existing system (the Government is in the process, apparently on auto-pilot, making sundry features of desirable period properties illegal on new-builds) would be swept away, and the power of the town-hall vetocrats broken.
Many London Conservatives would shriek their heads off, of course. Who will think of the car parks? But mostly it would upset Labour MPs, Labour councils, and Sadiq Khan; if the Government can’t live with that, what is the point of it.
(Worried about green space? The City of London safeguards Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest, and scores of parks; give it the rest and exempt it.)
And the dividends for the wider party, and the nation, could be huge. Lots of new (and if the LDO is well-drafted, good-quality) housing; a big drop in the pressure driving resentful voters into leafy commuter seats; more disposable income to stimulate the economy; an actual reason for urban voters to back the Government in 2024.
And if you do have some room to legislate, whack a one-off Robin Hood tax on a percentage of the value uplift (which will be substantial) when land is sold for development and spend it on levelling up, however that is being defined that week.
Some Conservatives are starting to sniff around this sort of agenda: there is talk of “building a lot in a few places”, especially inner London. But that is not a solution, for a few reasons.
Firstly, because absent wider reform making the centre more residential actively militates against the survival of entertainment districts and the night economy. If you install hallowed local residents over the capitals remaining bars and clubs, those bars and clubs will shut. “More fun yes – but not here.”
Secondly, because as much as it might irritate policymakers that not everyone wants to live in high-density flats, plenty still want a house and a garden. If they can’t get one in London, they will continue to move to the shires, eat the long commute, and vote against the party that forced them to do so.
Which is absurd when there are plenty of Underground stations surrounded by green fields, and other areas of outer London with plenty of space for the sort of low-density family homes the people, unheeding of their betters, insist on wanting.
Who knows, perhaps hundreds of thousands of city-dwellers who owed their comfortable living situation to the landmark act of a Conservative government might even start voting Conservative. It can’t hurt to give them a reason.