Housing and Planning Bills

Two big pieces of legislation made progress today - the Planning Bill was published, and the Housing & Regeneration Bill started its journey through the House of Commons. Both have some real plus points, but there are some risks with each as well. Here's a quick rundown...

1. Housing Bill: This should bring in a more joined-up and strategic approach to housing. Until now, funding streams have been too fragmented, housing hasn't been linked up enough with the wider economic growth agenda, and infrastructure has been too much of an afterthought.

The new Homes & Communities Agency is getting all the headlines - it aims to combine housing and regeneration more effectively than English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation ever did, and should aim to facilitate better housing delivery by councils and private developers. Sheffield chief exec, Bob Kerslake, has been seen as the frontrunner for heading up the new Agency - but there's been no announcement yet.

I see three possible risks in implementing the Bill:

(a) The Agency's remit will be very wide, and its efforts will necessarily be focused on priority areas like eco towns and new Growth Points. Other, lower-profile, areas might not get the same level of attention.

(b) There could be tensions between a top-down approach and the need to ensure that local players have enough freedom to deliver their own housing offer. The Bill gives more local freedoms (e.g. councils can retain rents from the council housing they build), but the new Agency will be very powerful (e.g. with CPO powers).

(c) The Agency doesn't go live until April 2009. Before then, existing players will need to keep up the momentum of house-building. The risk is that things slow down while the new Agency is set up.

2. Planning Bill: This should streamline and speed up the planning system, and support housing growth. And the new Planning Charge should provide greater certainty on infrastructure investment. But there are some risks here, too:

(a) The Infrastructure Planning Commission aims to speed up delivery over strategic sites - but it could end up cutting across individual local authorities, so relations there will need to be handled carefully.

(b) Too many local councils still face below-par planning skills and capacity. And the Growth Areas still face an infrastructure funding gap of around £300m. These issues will need to be addressed, if the step-change in housing delivery is to be realised.

(c) The new Planning Charge is better than the original Planning Gain Supplement proposal - but it's not totally clear yet how it will work on brownfield land.

The All-Party Urban Development Group is looking at these issues in its latest inquiry on Housing. Next Monday 3 December, the Group will hear from a range of housing experts on delivery issues like the new Agency, and how new funding streams and delivery tools might work.    

Comments

[AlanWenban-Smith]

The Housing Green Paper assumes that fitting future households to housing is like pouring water into rigid containers. Too few houses (containers) and they (households) overflow. The reality is a good deal more complex - more like soaking foam into a sponge. For example:

only about 10% of our housing needs each year are met through new build, but 90% from the turnover ('churn') of existing stock (rising to nearly all in the case of new households and first-time buyers). This makes additional housebuilding a quite extraordinarily ineffective way of lowering prices. The National Housing & Planning Advisory Unit estimates that even with the achievement of the 3 million target, and these building rates continued to 2026 (ie 4.7 million), affordability will still decline (present lower quartile prices are 7.1 times average earnings; projected would be 9.5 times).

as with houses, so with households: churn dominates. There is no such thing as a 'net household' (or a 'net migrant' come to that). There are large flows of people in and out of households and areas, and while it is convenient to deal in net terms this obscures important realities. For example a major part of the increase in household numbers is very elderly people living alone: these are not new households!

Getting a better relationship between housing needs and supply requires a much more holistic approach. On the supply side, making much better use of the housing we have is crucial: far too much is unattractive because as a nation we have failed to deal with either regional disparities (which continue to widen) or urban decline (where we lag far behind continental equivalents). Housing in less favoured areas of the country and parts of our cities is often not meeting needs because of the social and economic context, rather than because of fundamental defects in the housing itself (look at a property website and compare prices similar house types in 'good' and 'bad' areas of a city you know). Knocking houses down and rebuilding is no answer unless the economic and social context (local, city and subregional) is also addressed.

On the demand side housing is treated as an investment as much as a roof, and ever-rising prices (symptomatic of this) are seen as a key to well-being (and votes). Compounding this, over the last 30 years income inequality has increased much faster in the UK than in other OECD countries. Those that are in are fine, but those who are out are losing ground, so it is hardly surprising that families on the margin have such a hard time. Our urban and regional problems in large measure reflect this underlying reality.

I have worked as a planner for the last 40 years, almost exclusively in major cities, and they are the focus of my concern. Throwing land at housebuilders (as currently proposed), so far from improving affordability, will undermine the housing prospects of those who depend on the cheaper end of the existing stock. This is because the increased interest builders have shown in brownfield development since 1997 will quickly evaporate when they can pick and choose sites. The increases the Gpovernment proposes in social and intermediate housing are welcome but inadequate, barely making up for the ravages of Right to Buy. If the government is really bothered about the needs of poorer families they should also tackle the unbalanced state of housing finance and make urban and regional regeneration a top priority. They should, in addition, have a more sensible and humane answer to the growth in numbers of very elderly single people than building vast numbers of single cells.

The debate so far seems to have been conducted in terms of NIMBYs vs the homeless. But (adapting the headline of George Monbiot's piece in th Guardian on 27 Nov) it is entirely possible "to build 3 million homes and leave these families in Dickensian misery" unless we start debating it in rather broader terms.