Industry | 2008.12.26
Tristram Hunt: Let good sense be no barrier to concreting the countryside
Two headlines this week destroyed the house-builders\' corporate mantra of the last 10 years. The first was the news that construction was at its lowest since 1924, with just 135,000 housing starts this year. The second was the prediction by Barclays chief executive John Varley that property prices could fall by a total of 30% from their peak to the end of 2009. At a stroke, the old argument from the Home Builders Federation that freeing up planning was the only solution to affordable housing has been disproved. It is a reversal in thinking which makes the government\'s recent decisions on greenbelt development all the more perverse.
For what has been so remarkable about the credit crunch is the collapse of house prices without the tsunami of concrete the builders\' lobbyists and pet economists said was necessary. If prices drop Varley\'s full 30%, that constitutes something approaching a £60,000 write-down in the value of the average home, a significant readjustment by any standard. The tragedy is that at the same time as prices have fallen, home purchases have been made more arduous by banks withdrawing mortgage deals and failing to pass on interest rate cuts. A perfect market for first-time buyers has been wrenched away by banks overcompensating for their previous irresponsibility.
But what the price collapse does prove is that the property bubble of the last 15 years was the product of an over-supply of easy credit, rather than an under-supply of prime sites for Wimpey, Bovis and Persimmon. It was the 125% mortgages, the banks\' reckless lending and the buy-to-let mania that sent house prices rocketing, not our reputedly restrictive and anti-competitive planning laws.
Add to which we have the scandal of more than 750,000 empty homes in England and 78,000 in Scotland. While homeless families fester on local authority lists, hundreds of streets are pock-marked by deserted properties. According to David Ireland of the Empty Homes Agency: "There are now enough vacant homes in England to house almost two million people, yet far more attention is paid to building new ones."
But for reasons that are unclear, the government remains in thrall to the construction industry group-think belief that only by dismantling our planning safeguards can we promote affordability. When Gordon Brown took over as prime minister he told MPs that the government would "continue robustly to protect the land designated as green belt". But last month\'s publication of the Regional Spatial Strategies for England stands at variance with such ambition.
The RSS lays out Labour\'s planning for the regions, and it is not pretty reading. The party founded alongside the National Trust, and which endowed the London greenbelt, the national parks, and the visionary 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, seems set to erode Britain\'s rural-urban divide. That vital difference, unique to the rural and civic fabric, seems destined to be undone at the stroke of a bureaucrat\'s pen.
Housing minister Margaret Beckett has decided the greenbelt around York, Warrington and Leeds is all up for grabs. Similarly, the greenbelt around Coventry and Redditch is being divvied up for the diggers, while the residents of Guildford, Woking and Oxford would be wise to enjoy their encircling countryside sooner rather than later.
However, it is the east of England and the south-west that are likely to turn a shade of grey. The Hertfordshire lanes and fields around Stevenage - the setting for EM Forster\'s Howard\'s End, with its wistful idea of a deep, undisturbed England - are primed for executive estates, roundabouts and strip malls stretching towards St Albans, which itself is destined to sprawl towards the M1.
Along the south coast, the Dorset heathlands are to be abandoned to allow Bournemouth to join Poole. And the cities of Bath and Bristol are to combine into one conurbation as the greenbelt between them is deleted. This at a time when the latter is successfully infilling on the back of high density brownfield development and mixed-use urbanism - a strategy that communities minister Iain Wright recently dismissed as "rigid and old-fashioned". The idea of an urban renaissance now seems very 1990s as the hard grind of regeneration is exchanged for a thoughtless exurbia of McMansions and M4 retail parks. What is particularly depressing is how much of this greenbelt destruction is being driven by airport expansion. Leaving aside Heathrow, the government has allocated greenbelt land for more shopping terminals at Bristol, Manchester and Bournemouth. Why bother with planning inquiries?
Even as house prices plummet, repossessions accelerate and the case for planning liberalisation is lost, the construction lobbyists have won the day. Rather than addressing the fiscal incentives that accelerated debt and the buy-to-let splurge, or the iniquity of VAT on brownfield but not greenfield development, or land-banking by developers, ministers want to unpick the postwar planning settlement that has prevented cities being bled dry by unending exurbia. Family homes, social housing and mixed-income developments are all desperately needed, and there is ample space to do it. But what the credit crunch has proved beyond measure is that proper planning is not the enemy of affordability.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]stram-hunt-green-belt-planning
