COMMENT The backhanded compliment “Your heart is in the right place, Jackie” often comes my way. Implying my head is in the wrong place. Sod that. We have a housing crisis: a crisis of quality and a crisis of quantity. And, seemingly, nobody has the answers. The better-off can buy better. I want to see changes to regulations so that developers can only build homes that are big enough for everybody to actually live in.
Working for the last year on a book on the housing crisis with former EG editor Peter Bill, we concluded that Mrs May might have screwed up Brexit. But, my goodness, did she get it right when it came to housing. She finished one of her last speeches as PM with this: “I want to see an end to the era of too-small homes that keep the housing numbers ticking over but are barely fit for modern family life. It will be up to my successor in Downing Street to deal with this.”
No place like home
Come along, Boris. You practically invented the Parker Morris +10% rules when running London by railing against ‘homes for Hobbits’. How hard can it be when ruling Britain to impose Parker Morris +25% on the rest of the country? Just lock the door of No 10 to land speculators and do it. While you are there being Churchillian, impose a grid of maximum densities for new homes.
If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the full meaning of the words spoken by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. A tearful Dorothy stood in the balloon and clicked the heels of her magic red shoes together three times, and wished herself back in Kansas with the words, “There is no place like home.”
On that note, just time to change into my pink ‘good witch’ gown and grab my wand. Now, over what shall I wave it? My wand would be waved over the 49 garden communities in which the government hopes 400,000 new homes will be built. Actually, a wand is not what’s needed. A gigantic boot up the backside needs administering, seeing how few have been built.
Setting an example
Former No 10 housing advisor Toby Lloyd suggests a gentler solution. Take a few of these moribund schemes and make them exemplars. Could that include insisting on 25% bigger homes at lower densities? Toby isn’t so sure on density. But – hell yes; the government has the power. ‘That is precisely how I would change the world: not by trying to change every single development from the centre, but by leading with some exemplar developments. It is absolutely within the government’s power to say, ‘this is how we change the world’.
Well said, Toby. Happily, the government may have inadvertently allowed councils to change their local world as well. My mentor and friend Sir Stuart Lipton is one of the great and good advising the government on Planning for the Future, the green-ish white paper that heralds the upending of the planning system in order to produce more homes. It won’t, of course. You might as well say rodding the drains will produce more effluent – it won’t, but it will speed the flow.
I digress. My co-author, Peter Bill, asked Sir Stuart if the proposals to devolve power to councils to define the ‘quality’ of homes in their area, might include the power to define quality in quantitative terms. In other words, to insist on local space and density standards. Mr Bill mentioned our book contained examples of new homes that are only 12 feet wide and surrounded by a sea of parked cars. Can councils stop that happening? Here is the great man’s reply: “If the council wants every home to have three parking spaces and be 22-feet wide, that’s it. It’s important that communities feel they are participating in planning.” Is that a housebuilder howling that I hear?
Peter Bill and Jackie Sadek are co-authors of “Broken Homes: Britain’s Housing Crisis, Faults, Factoids and Fixes” (220 pages, £20.00) to be published in October by Troubador. Forward order here.
Jackie Sadek is chief operating officer at UK Regeneration
