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The Telegraph, 13th July 2024
Britain needs more houses – but Labour's plan won't work (telegraph.co.uk)
Scrapping the EU’s ‘nutrient neutrality’ rules the UK still clings on to could unleash a house building bonanza
Have you ever visited Welborne? A small town in the Home Counties, you might assume. Or perhaps it doesn’t sound familiar at all? In my part of the world on the south coast, Welborne has mythical status. For like Barchester or Casterbridge, Welborne doesn’t actually exist in the real world. But it is nonetheless the setting for a long and winding story. Not quite with the literary genius of Trollope or Hardy but with its own twists and turns.
The first public meeting about building the thousands of new homes on the edge of Fareham took place in November 2005. Fast forward to July 2024 and not one house has yet been built. Plans, examinations, appeals, reviews, Core Strategies and consultations have taken 20 years. Armies of planning lawyers and consultants have battled through the decades. Bats and Great Crested Newts were all thoroughly considered.
Local residents, now reconciled to Welborne’s arrival and working with the indefatigable local authority, focus on ensuring that vital transport infrastructure, a health centre, secondary school, 3 primary schools, employment space, open space all are delivered. The last thing anyone wants is traffic jams, overwhelmed GPs, blocked sewers or a ruined landscape.
Thankfully, designed by the award-winning architect Ben Pentreath, and taking lessons from the Edwardian town planning movement, the Welborne Garden Village promises the highest design standards.
But the fable of Welborne illustrates the challenge our country faces: we need to build more homes, more quickly. And our labyrinthine planning system has held back housebuilding for decades. From the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act forming the foundation of our planning system, there have been swings between Labour’s statist top-down targets and the Conservatives’ more locally-led planning.
Neighbourhood planning has been a real innovation in recent years to empower local communities to have more agency over how new homes are developed in their areas. Now Rachel Reeves’ restoration of the Whitehall targets is an attempt to increase the rate of housebuilding but I am far from convinced that this re-heating of the Prescott approach will actually deliver the homes we need.
Labour’s track record on house-building – both historic and current (one need only look at Sadiq Khan’s woeful failure to build the homes he promised as evidence of Labour failure) – does not bode well. Housebuilding starts fell by 45 per cent under Labour between 1997 and 2009. Granted the financial crisis played a large part in this fall, but under the Conservatives, the number of net additional dwellings in England hit a high point in 2019/2020.
However more must be done. During the decade from 2010, just 1.1 million homes were built, fewer than previous decades. Supply has fallen, inward migration has soared and prices have gone up, excluding many young adults from home ownership. Today, the majority of 18-34 year olds will not own their own home.
Home ownership is crucial for population growth, economic growth and indeed personal growth. “Settling down”, starting a family and investing in one’s future is a profound aspiration that young people possess but which has become a milestone outside the reach of too many people today. That many people are putting this off for longer is having detrimental impacts on our birth rate, for one, but also on productivity, as the construction sector is a key contributor to our economy.
So yes, the planning system is the bottleneck through which approvals must pass and it needs reform. But top down, centralised targets are not the key. They lead to more bureaucracy, more avenues for challenge, unpredictability, expense and delay.
House-building can be jump-started firstly by undoing the EU’s pernicious “nutrient neutrality” rules which paralysed house-building for years. In Hampshire, developers were hamstrung by draconian rulings from the European Court of Justice about mitigating the harmful effects of house-building. Based on flimsy scientific evidence and having disproportionate impact on permissions, the Conservative government attempted to scrap these rules – only to be obstructed by Labour – to ease house-building.
Secondly, state-owned land and brownfield land should be prioritised for house-building. As Liam Halligan has set out in his book about home ownership, 6 per cent of all freehold acreage across the country is owned by the state. Freeing up even a small proportion of this land, brownfield land in urban areas or other previously developed land through a fast-track process could lead to the delivery of millions of homes.
Next, our planning rules need to be simplified. There are too many avenues of appeal, the rules are too complicated and it is too easy to drag out the process via judicial review – providing a bonanza for lawyers – rendering the system expensive and slow.
A simpler and faster system would be a great boost for house-building. And lastly, too many developers are sitting on planning permissions before they actually get building the homes we need.
The Levelling Up and Regeneration Act made some changes designed to improve build-out rates including a penalty for those tardy developers. The Labour government would do well to move forward with those provisions now.
More rigour must be injected into the system to incentivise developers to get on and build more quickly once they have secured permission rather than allow these sagas to play out over years, or even decades, as we’ve seen at Welborne.
Years of hard work have been ploughed into making the mythical Welborne a reality. I hope, for the sake of the next generation and the communities directly affected, that this story has a happy ending.