The Housing Question No 10: A big offering on housing

A Damascene conversion for Brandon Lewis, a warning from Wales and Scotland, some Christmas hints for 2024 and Fixing Britain

Sir Brandon gets an eye test

Former housing minister Brandon Lewis has recently reinvented himself as a champion of new homes.

Now a patron of the Adam Smith Institute, Sir Brandon argues that there is a ‘real risk’ that the Conservatives will lose a generation of voters over lack of housebuilding.

Writing in Conservative Home this week, he argues that ‘the core culprit is our sclerotic, expensive, and unstable planning system’. Controversially for a Tory, he argues that centrally planned targets have become necessary and building on the green belt would be popular.

He concludes that:

‘Until the Conservative party can offer a truly bold housing offer, we risk passing over something which could boost both our electoral chances and our sluggish economic growth. We should not run scared of planning. We should instead shape it to deliver for the communities we serve and for our economy, as well as our future electoral chances. There is still time left to seize this chance.’

Quite so. But that made me think back ten years to the Wolfson Economics Prize in 2014 and a winning entry that was one of the boldest ideas proposed on housing during this century.

The prize went to the entrant who could best answer the question ‘how would you deliver a new Garden City which is visionary, economically viable, and popular?’

The winner was Uxcester Garden City, a plan by the urban design consultancy URBED to double the size of an imaginary existing city by adding three urban extensions.

David Rudlin, one of the co-authors, argued that the housing crisis could be largely solved by applying the idea to the real world and doubling the size of 40 existing towns and cities including Oxford, Norwich, Reading and Exeter by taking ‘a confident bite out of the green belt’.

Seen from 2024 it sounds remarkably like Michael Gove’s plans for Cambridge. Back in 2014 no sooner had the winner been announced than the housing minister at the time (no prizes) was flatly rejecting it out of hand.

‘We are committed to protecting the green belt from development as an important protection against urban sprawl,’ said Brandon Lewis. ‘Today’s proposal from Lord Wolfson’s competition is not government policy and will not be taken up.’

The speed of the rejection was noteworthy even at the time and I assumed it reflected the sacrosanct status of the green belt for Tories.

However, Dr Nicholas Falk, the other co-author of the entry, offers another explanation in a letter to The Guardian last week:

‘Our Wolfson prize-winning plan for Uxcester Garden City showed how mid-sized cities such as Oxford or York could be doubled in size through a visionary spatial plan. Yet the proposal was blocked by a previous housing minister, apparently because it would extend a tightly bounded city into Tory strongholds.’

What seemed short-sighted in terms of housing even at the time now looks politically myopic too.

A warning from Holyrood and Cardiff Bay

If anyone needed a warning about the potential for severe austerity in the wake of an Autumn Statement that shunted fiscal problems into the years after the next election, look at what’s happening in Scotland and Wales.

Both of the other UK nations published draft budgets for 2024/25 shortly before Christmas. The Scottish Government cut its Affordable Housing Supply Programme by 26 per cent compared to this year and scrapped a fuel insecurity fund for social tenants. The Welsh Government protected its housing capital programme, although it’s very hard to see it generating close to the 20,000 social homes originally envisaged. However, Housing Support Grant, a crucial source of funding, was again frozen despite a campaign by housing and homelessness organisations that highlighted the dire consequences for services of successive cuts in real terms. In both countries, the governments blame reductions in block grant from Westminster.

Or look at what’s happening in local government in England: this Twitter thread by researcher Jack Shaw lays out the financial problems facing more than a dozen councils in addition to those which have already issued a Section 114 notice. A combination of reductions in government grants, inflation and the rising costs of statutory services (including homelessness) are to blame.

For central government programmes in England the decisions may only have been postponed: the Autumn Statement pencilled in unfeasibly large cuts in public services and a freeze in capital spending for after the election.

A big offering on housing

Those decisions and who gets to make them are the focus of my column for Inside Housing this week.

Interviews with housing secretary Michael Gove in The Times and shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook in the Financial Times provide some more hints about what will be on offer from the Conservatives and Labour.

For the Conservatives, the search for ‘a big offering on housing’ is becoming more urgent, not to mention desperate.

The options so far are said to include longer fixed rate mortgages, reform or abolition of stamp duty and a revival of Help to Buy.

Labour has resisted pressure to follow Scotland and Wales by abolishing the Right to Buy in England. However, Pennycook says that it will reduce the discounts to what they were before the Tories increased them in 2012.

That would almost certainly lead to a big decline in sales, though not before a surge in applications to beat the deadline, and would also make it easier to achieve Labour’s minimalist pledge to stop the net loss of social rent homes.

He also reveals some more details about the supply side of the Labour agenda, with plans for a task force on new towns to start work on day one of a Labour government and report back within six months.

That plus plans to reform compulsory purchase orders and restore planning targets have real promise. Whether they can deliver 1.5 million new homes in a Labour first term is much more doubtful.

Well worth a listen

I’m finding Louise Casey’s Radio 4 series on Fixing Britain a very good listen. As the former tsar for more or less everything under governments from both parties, she knows what she is talking about. Whether it’s homelessness, hunger (and benefits) or the care system (the three episodes so far), she brings great insight into the issues and the way that government works (or doesn’t) and compassion for people experiencing the problems at the sharp end. She also focusses on what too often gets lost in the rush to launch initiatives and pass legislation: implementation.

The first episode deals with and opens with Everyone In, the remarkable programme that managed to accommodate most rough sleepers during the pandemic. But it also looks further back to the Rough Sleepers Initiative launched by the Conservative government in the early 1990s and the work of the Rough Sleepers Unit under Labour in the late 1990s. All three show what can be achieved with the right political backing, especially if it comes from the prime minister (Tony Blair is an interviewee).  

Unfortunately they also show what can happen without that backing and when attention turns elsewhere. The rise of rough sleeping and homelessness in the wake of the austerity of the early 2010s and again more recently are grim reminders of how quickly success can again become failure.