(English) September 06, 2012
Britain is desperately inefficient in its land use, and there are still no measures to bring empty property back on the market
The government’s learning curve on planning is like an ant climbing a mountain. Desperate for someone to blame for the lack of growth, David Cameron has fallen back on the Margaret Thatcher’s old bogey, local government, and the bugbear of planning control. Last year he tried to nationalise development control, in the most cack-handed fashion, and was beaten back. Thousands of landowners came close to pocketing random lucrative building permits, as in Ireland. A crude bid by lobbyists to de-activate local planning was stopped just in time.
Now the coalition is moving at least in the right direction. It is staying within the context of its revised framework and concentrating on tweaking the rules. It proposes a “planning holiday” on building extensions, to boost local construction. Intensifying the use of building plots, including back gardens, is sensible in a country whose suburbs have some of the lowest densities in Europe.
Dismantling Section 106 agreements – under which developers contribute to the costs of infrastructure – is more controversial. Labour requiring all new estates to have 30%-50% “affordable” housing was a clear constraint on building, and means that sometimes nothing is built at all. But to offer to bring all such deals to Whitehall rather than slashing the minimum percentage below, say, 20 is a sure recipe for chaos and delay. The Treasury’s Treasury secretary Danny Alexander asserted on Thursday that central government is the best judge of local markets, as he coolly nationalised yet another chunk of local government. To call this a localist government is laughable.
Britain today has thousands of acres of land awaiting development. Drive (or, more revealingly, fly) across middle England and everywhere you see post-industrial brownfield sites lying vacant, more, probably, than ever in history. The British are desperately inefficient in their use of land. Young people expect to buy rather than rent far sooner than in Germany or most other European countries. Older families hoard space merely to pass it on one day to their children. There are reportedly 25m unused bedrooms in England, up to 400,000 houses empty and the same number of building plots lying idle with permission granted for building. High street premises are vacant because of restrictions on use.
It is not planning but government regulation and subsidy that have distorted the property market for decades, helping neither rich nor poor. Cameron indulged last weekend in his ritual abuse of local councils and talked of putting planning departments into “special measures”. Most are merely trying to interpret his ever-changing rules. He seems unaware that it is central regulation that lies at the heart of the problem.
So where is the real de-regulation? There are no measures to bring empty property or empty sites back on to the market. There are no proposals to encourage subletting. There is no relief from the soaring cost of micro-regulation. Builders reckon Whitehall rules on building materials, wall thicknesses, health, energy, accessibility and safety have added some 30% to costs over the last 25 years, and are now a quarter more onerous than in Europe. It is not the lack of a meadow that holds back house-building in Britain, but government. Cameron should be inquiring into this, not dithering over Heathrow.
Housing is like health. Everyone in politics declares it to be “in crisis”. If house prices are soaring, they are in crisis; if falling, they are in crisis. But for those with an available downpayment, prices are falling, and a mortgage is cheaper than ever. It is not land supply that is “in crisis” but housing demand. Houses are no different from cars, holidays, consumer durables and private services. They are “unaffordable” because fewer people can afford them. Meanwhile, first-time buying is said to be picking up. Why? Because the government is splashing subsidy over it.
The temptation for politicians to blame others for their own failings is understandable – and now overwhelming. But the British economy is stuck in double-dip recession, not because it has too much countryside but because it is in a liquidity trap. The chancellor rejects Thatcherite monetarism – pumping real money into the real economy – in favour of socialist centralism. George Osborne is trying to nationalise both the planning system and the housing market, and he wants to initiate grand projects which he seems to regard as not public spending, largely because he says so. He is all for deficit finance, so long as it is on projects for which the government can claim credit.
The future prosperity of Britain does not lie in more power for the man in Whitehall. Shades of Silkingrad – what locals called Stevenage in 1946 in a fit of new-town blues – hover over every central planning “initiative”. Yet again this week ministers were murmuring of the need for new eco-cities, for something big and headline grabbing. The “Shard mentality” – that only something big and ordained by ministers can make a difference – is what enervated and impoverished urban Britain in the past half century. While Europe’s provincial cities raced ahead, Britain’s languished under the cosh of Westminster contempt.
There is no tiger of growth straining at the leash inside the depths of the planning system. It is a myth, a fiction, a silly excuse. There is, instead, a tedious inflation of central regulation, which the government seems reluctant to combat. And there is no money. The chancellor refuses the one sure remedy to all this: to put his credit on the line and reflate the economy.
Source: The Guardian
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