Were I starting out in the world of work today, I don’t know how I would afford to buy my home – at least not while I was 26, the age at which I managed to clamber onto the housing ladder. Decades of house price inflation, fuelled in part by low interest rates, and by a shortage of supply, have squashed the home-owning dreams of millions of hard-working people.
The Prime Minister is quite right to want to put this right. Unaffordable house prices are the biggest block on aspiration in Britain today. And sometimes, as Keir Starmer suggested yesterday, homes for people have to take priority over preserving habitats for animals – not that the two have to be in conflict, if developments are built wisely.
But Government ministers, and Angela Rayner in particular, are being too gung-ho in their self-declared war on Nimbys (Not in My Back Yard), deriving just a little too much pleasure from the prospect of plastering Conservative constituencies in the green belt with new developments.
Nimbys do exist. I have lived in the English countryside long enough to know that there is virtually no project you could propose which would not stimulate a noisy campaign trying to block it. Never mind new homes, roads or pylons – around where I live, we have had people protesting against the creation of a nature reserve.
But I am also well aware of how seldom such protests succeed in blocking development.
Somehow, planners and developers between them tend to get what they want. In spite of Nimbys, planning permission has been granted for more than three million new homes in England over the past decade.
But here is a remarkable statistic: of those planned homes, a third of them – 1.2 million in total – have yet to be built. The planning system, in other words, is not the only thing that is thwarting the supply of new homes.
For one thing, developers stand accused of sitting on sites with planning permission while they wait for house prices to rise. There is certainly an element of that – housebuilders like to release new developments at a pace which keeps prices inflated.
But that is far from the whole story. There is a shortage of skilled workers to build new homes. Too many young people have been enticed onto university courses of little value when far better employment opportunities would come from learning a trade.
Building new homes has become a lot more bureaucratic in recent years. Energy-efficiency requirements have become ever stricter. Councils have become ever more greedy in demanding that housing developers build new infrastructure and community facilities like schools, parks and bypasses – some of which have nothing to do with the development itself but which will be used by the local community as a whole.
All this adds layers of cost and contributes to delays in building new homes. Then, of course, are the environmental demands. If you are a developer it is hard enough to convince planners that your new homes will not be compromising the habitat of a few newts, but that is just the beginning.
Developers often have to manage the relocation of species, which might only be possible at a certain time of year, causing yet more delays. Then there are the nitrate neutrality rules inherited from our time in the European Community which demand, almost impossibly, that new developments will add zero to nitrate levels in local streams. When the last government proposed to make these rules just a little more flexible, Labour bitterly opposed it.
The green belt was a Labour achievement – the original Town and Country Planning Act which imposed it was passed by the Atlee government in 1947. It has saved the South East of England from becoming one giant sprawl, but it has also choked development. It would be better if London was surrounded with green wedges rather than a green belt, allowing development along well-connected corridors.
So, yes, the Government is right not to regard all this land as sacrosanct. But at the same time, if we want affordable housing the answers don’t lie entirely with planning reforms. Controlling migration would help enormously. It is little wonder we have a housing shortage when we had net migration of nearly a million people last year. Not even Labour’s ambitious target of 300,000 new homes a year could catch up with that.
We also need housing associations which are far more energetic. Currently they are only building around a quarter of the new homes which councils were building in the 1970s. The Government must also look at the cost and bureaucracy of constructing new homes.
It shouldn’t be impossible to take us back to the home-owning democracy which Mrs Thatcher championed in the 1980s. But it will require reforms on many fronts, not just waving spades at Nimbys.