LIKE everyone who loves the English countryside, I shuddered when I heard the Prime Minister vow to “take the brakes off” the planning system to allow 1.5million homes to be built over the next five years.
Some of them will be raised on land to be released from the green belt.
2
2
On our overcrowded island there is little more depressing than to think of flower-flecked meadows and shady woodlands being gobbled up for new housing estates.
But, really, I don’t have the right to oppose an acceleration in housebuilding — and nor does anyone else who was fortunate enough to buy themselves a home before prices rocketed.
I left home for my own flat when I was 23. By 26 I had bought my first house.
That is something of which many young people now can only dream.
In 1996, more than half of 25 to 34-year-olds owned their own property.
Underlying shortage
That figure is now down to 41 per cent, and it is lower still in London and many parts of the South East.
Many young people — including those with good jobs — can’t even afford anywhere decent to rent.
Just over half of 23-year-olds are still living with their parents.
Even among 34-year-olds, one in 16 is still living in their family home.
There is one over-riding reason for the unaffordability of housing.
For years governments have been artificially constraining the supply of housing through the planning system.
In the 12 months to the middle of 2023, the population of England and Wales grew by 610,000. Yet we built just 180,000 homes.
At the same time as restricting supply governments have done little to control demand.
Even where new homes have managed to get built, large numbers have been sold to overseas investors — often without even being advertised to local would-be buyers.
You don’t have to be an economics professor to understand the inevitable result — soaring prices and first-time buyers being priced out of a decent home.
It is easy to blame migration, which accounted for almost all the growth in population last year.
We should build on brownfield land
Net migration certainly needs to fall, and illegal migration tackled much more strongly than it has been in recent years.
But whatever we do to stop the boats, it is not going to solve an underlying shortage of housing, which has been several decades in the making.
Of course, where we can we should build on brownfield land.
That might be an option in some parts of the country where deindustrialisation has left behind disused factories.
But there simply aren’t enough of these, and certainly not in London and the South East, where housing demand is greatest.
That is why the Government is quite right to identify what it calls “greybelt” land — sites in the green belt which are far from the bluebell woods of the imagination.
There are even waste tips and disused car parks around the M25 where developers would like to build but where they are not currently allowed to.
What we need to do is to swap green belts, which strangle cities by preventing them from expanding, for green wedges, which preserve the best of the countryside while still leaving corridors for growth.
Planners, too, need to increase the quality of housing design and improve access to open spaces.
If new towns looked a little more like Bath and a little less like concrete jungles there would be a lot less objection to them.
It would also help to mitigate the housing crisis if we did what other countries do when they have a lot of pressure on their housing stock.
Excessive ‘green tape’
You can’t just turn up in Switzerland and Jersey and buy a property — most homes there can only be bought by people with a local connection, and who need somewhere to live.
We should not be allowing our housing stock to be used as a global asset class for foreign speculators, many of whom leave the properties empty for most of the year.
If the Government is going to tackle the housing crisis, declaring war on Nimbys is not going to be enough.
It needs to recognise that another big part of the problem is excessive environmental regulations — or “green tape”.
One of the things which has been holding up new homes is EU-era laws demanding that developers prove their new properties will make zero contribution to nitrate pollution in waterways.
Last year the Conservative government wanted to relax the rules for new homes, while tackling nitrate pollution in other ways.
That could have unlocked 100,000 homes, yet the Labour Party opposed it.
We don’t need to sacrifice the England of John Constable, but we do need to set the bulldozers loose on the drearier parts of the countryside.
We all deserve a say in where new housing should be built and what they should look like — but none of us have the right to deny a home to the many people currently frozen out of the market.
