What housing crisis?

On Monday the rising star Shadow Minister of Housing, Emma Reynolds, enthusiastically briefed a full-house at NHBC about emerging Labour Party plans to deal with the housing crisis.  She talked about ‘Build First’ to encourage SMEs to make up the numbers to 200,000 homes a year using smaller public sector sites which they paid for later, hence Build First.  Little definite beyond that as Sir Michael Lyons’ Housing Commission is not due to report till later in the year and the election isn’t till 2015. But she went some way to answer some of the questions raised by James Meek’s excellent review of the recent past ‘Where will we live?’published in the London Review of Books. 

For Reynolds the issues are numbers, affordability and quality, including size, none of which is helped by the Coalition’s ‘Help to Buy’ programme supporting re-mortgaging and houses up to £600k, unaffordable to most first time buyers.  Garden Cities are part of the programme as trailed by the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls at the NHBC Annual Lunch in November but the question is where?  She batted aside the idea that these would be warmed-up eco-towns but declined to name any locations; the difficulties to be overcome include the free market price of land and the difficulty many Local Authority planners now have finding the necessary resource for strategic planning.

I asked her about this since the Coalition has abolished Regional Planning, encouraged  nimbyism in the South-East through the National Planning Policy Framework and seen the Local Authority planning community decimated by financial cuts; I suggested that, as a result, planners were back to (battling the lawyers with) development control.  In reply to another question she talked about the ‘Right to Grow’ (beyond the Authority’s boundaries) for towns like Stevenage, Luton and Oxford and the ability to swap green belt land.  This is like the expansion of Cambridge redrawing the City boundaries, following extensive community engagement.

She was warmly received, answering most questions confidently but I felt that her reliance on homes ‘being more attractive’ as a means of winning over the nimbies was a tad optimistic!