According to Housing Minister Gavin Barwell the new Neighbourhood Planning Bill will “…help speed up delivery of the further new homes our country needs and ensure our foot is still firmly on the pedal.”

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that the opposite is the case. Not only are Neighbourhood Plans tending to inhibit rather than promote development, they also favour well-heeled areas over poorer areas and have, in many cases, pre-empted and by-passed the Local Plan process.

Since their introduction in the Localism Act 2011 almost two thousand Neighbourhood Plans have been put in place across the country and there is no doubt that they have released an untapped enthusiasm for community engagement in the planning process. But a 2014 study by Turley planning consultants found that over half of published plans were designed solely to resist development, and that 73 percent were in areas with Conservative councils, and just 9 percent in Labour areas. Continue reading →

Housing and politics go together like Cannon and Ball or Gavin and Stacey. Like it or not, you cannot take politics out of housing. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not like politics, but politics likes you. Housing has been a political football since at least 1900 and even during the fragile political consensus of the post-war years you only have to read Hansard to realise that there were fierce political arguments about housing policy. That consensus ended, of course, on the 3rd May 1979 when ideology took over – home ownership good, social housing bad – and endured for 18 years. The last Labour government did some great things in housing, and John Healey was the best housing minister of the last twenty years by a country mile, but Labour failed to boost supply and to unpick the Right to Buy. Since last year’s election, ideology is back at full throttle, with home ownership now the only game in town. Regular readers of Inside Housing will know that this is doomed to fail. Continue reading →

“Britain is engulfed in a national housing crisis” says… The Daily Mail.

The “news” that home ownership has fallen to its lowest level for 30 years led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the right of centre popular press. The fall from 71 percent in 2003 to 64 percent today, with the biggest reductions in places like Manchester, Outer London and the West Midlands, violates their dream of a property-owning democracy.

But the question that these newspapers need to explore next is, how has this been allowed to happen? Readers of Inside Housing will know the answers – a lack of public investment, an over-reliance on a dysfunctional house-building industry, the unregulated growth of Buy-to-Let, NIMBY opposition to new homes, an obsession with the Green Belt, the failure of local authorities to put local plans in place. Continue reading →

Two weeks ago I drove fifty miles though the Suffolk countryside and in village after village there were dozens of Leave placards and not a single Remain placard. I had a gut feeling that Leave would be victorious and yesterday afternoon I wrote a tweet that I did not post because I thought it was too pessimistic: “I think Leave might win. I fear many people feel sneered at & lied to by the political classes/elites. It’s their chance to say Up Yours.”

“Up Yours” indeed. When the dust settles it will be interesting to see how much of the vote was accounted for by dislike of the EU, and migration in particular, and how much of it was down to both austerity and the growing disconnect between establishment politicians and the people who are struggling under this government’s policies. If you look at the detailed results it is white working class areas where the Leave vote was highest. Just to take the Bs, over two thirds of voters in Barnsley, Bassetlaw, Blackpool, Bolsover and Boston voted to Leave. The Leave vote in these places appears to be significantly higher than in well-off rural areas. In retrospect , it will be seen to be completely daft for any government to ask the people for their support when it’s been attacking their living standards for the past five years. Continue reading →