This image was taken from the Geograph project collection. See this photograph’s page on the Geograph website for the photographer’s contact details. The copyright on this image is owned by Philip Halling and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
We’ve all seen them, haven’t we? The earth-shade painted, faux-timber-clad housing estates with their strips of fake grass, their crescents of executive homes in the best spots, and, overall, the dead, sterile look of a film set for the Stepford Wives. This pop-up townlet and its maze of little ‘streets’ boast dreamily bucolic names, often inspired by what has been destroyed to put them there: Woodland View, Meadowbrook (plenty of those!), Sawmills, The Orchard, The Old Dairy Farm…
They squat on the edges of our towns and villages, exposed and treeless and out on a limb. No shop. No bus stop (no buses!), not that the executive and second homers need them. Their Range Rovers and RVs stand charging on their paved aprons. No post office, which many older and less affluent people would use, but a post-box which almost nobody does. Who are these places for?
Here in the southwest, housing is a big issue. A cocktail of ingredients makes it a political hot potato – second homes, Airbnb, retirees’ purchasing power boosted by moving away from London and the southeast, a dearth of genuine rental properties (as opposed to holiday lets), low wages amongst the local population where employment is largely in tourism, public services or agriculture. Add to that the limits and protections (of which more, later) afforded by AONB, listed, SSI, and conservation status and the understandable anxiety people feel at the prospect of more holiday homes, more traffic or more pressures on already stretched infrastructure, and you can begin to see why it’s such a fraught subject.
It’s also a major political football, with Conservatives and Labour vying to be hailed as the housebuilding party. The Conservatives have consistently been seen as being in the pockets of the big developers and property companies – unsurprisingly given that it has been estimated that around 20 per cent of donations to party coffers came from property tycoons in the ten years to 2019. £11m came in the first 10 months of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and pay-to-play’ was in evidence in Jenrick’s interaction with Tory donor and property developer, Richard Desmond.
It was a reasonable hope that a Labour government represent a major improvement on the previous regime, under whose aegis identikit estates were built (shoddily, in many cases) in unsuitable locations, without any consideration for local infrastructure, future-proofing against climate change impact and, all too often, without the so-called affordable housing promised at the time planning was granted.
Building for profit, and not to create homes and communities, has been a persistent and growing blight right across the country, with objectors to ill-thought out schemes dismissed as nimbys and soundly-based refusals by local councils overruled by governments to please their developer patrons. And all the while, advocates trot out the lie that building more houses will reduce prices. It’s right up there with trickle-down economics as a busted myth which has been allowed to persist…oh, and the myth that private sector good, public sector bad when it comes to housebuilding and that deregulation is the answer to all problems.
Remember when the Conservatives claimed that they needed to do away with an EU law which blocked developments with a risk of water pollution to enable 100,000 homes to be built? And what about their delays to the implementation of required low-carbon standards?
“Over the past eight years [to September 2023] of Conservative government, housebuilders and property developers have gained billions of pounds in benefits due to delays in low-carbon building regulations.
“The delays could cause a substantial financial burden on homeowners and taxpayers, requiring tens of billions of pounds to retrofit newly constructed homes to meet low-carbon standards. They have also led to unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions and higher energy bills for residents.”
PBC Today
After the pervasive whiff of corruption, local councils and voters were, perhaps, hoping that Labour would be a breath of fresh air, ready to tackle the housing crisis in an inclusive, collaborative way and overlaying it all with a green, sustainable agenda.
This optimism looks to be misplaced.
“Cutting regulation and relaxing planning laws has never been good for the people who live there’ says a local councillor, wearily. ’All it means is a free for all for developers and profit before people or place. Developers always promise that they will build the necessary infrastructure when they pitch for planning consent, but, unsurprisingly, they don’t actually want to and don’t. Phase 1 is always for the lucrative higher end of the market – the big houses in the prime spots. They say that the roads, leisure centre, shops and school will come in later phases, but they don’t.
“Suddenly the building of affordable housing is ‘not viable’, not that it’s actually affordable in the first place. Ten per cent off the ‘normal’ price is still way out of the reach of people on salaries that are 16 per cent below the national average, while housing is amongst the most expensive in the UK. And the so-called affordable homes are only ten per cent cheaper and at least ten percent worse in terms of build quality.”
I am advised to take a look at Sherford, the ambitious development on the outskirts of Plymouth.
“A thousand homes have been built so far. Only a quarter have been sold. It’s been more than ten years since the project started but there still isn’t a single grocery shop, just a small coffee shop next to the primary school. The promised amenities just haven’t been delivered,” the councillor tells me.
A quick trawl on the internet reveals that the strongest sense of community comes from those who feel they’ve been sold a pup and that the promises of a vibrant, sustainable environment with shops and businesses and leisure facilities have not amounted to a hill of beans.
Elsewhere, substandard, corner-cutting building practices have led to developments riddled with problems. In Totnes, four out of five new developments are covered in scaffolding and homes on the evocatively-named Baltic Wharf cannot be sold by their owners, so great are the issues with build quality. Pretty on the outside, dodgy beneath the façade.
Where has it all gone wrong and why does this councillor feel that Labour have made the situation ten times worse?
This is where I try to get my head round how the system works.
Councils have to have a local plan which identifies housing needs, and at least five years’ worth of sites ready for development. Easier said than done. To keep it simple, the council needs a steady stream of single landowners who want to sell, but let’s say that there’s a big farmer or a member of the landed gentry who fancies raising a bit of capital. They’re pretty glad to see the pressure councils are under to find sizeable sites. The prices for agricultural land and development land are, of course, way different: £10k an acre for farmland, £200k for development.
Developers look at the land allocated for development and may bid on it and then land bank it because the numbers don’t stack up for their shareholders. Remember, affordable housing isn’t really their thing.
It might also be the case that the council really cannot find suitable land on which to build.
Now the council has problems. The sites have not been found and/or the developer hasn’t built the houses with the result that the council’s targets have not been met. The council is punished and the developers have the whip hand. Local planning policies are overruled and national policies take precedence. Any site that could be considered remotely sustainable is now fair game and councils decisions can be overturned. There are consultancy businesses that have spung up to exploit this situation, explaining that:
“In some locations, it may be possible to secure planning permission for new homes on sites where it has not been possible in the past, or where there is no support from the council.
“The XYZ Group is a specialist land promoter and deals with situations just like this across the country. We work with landowners to deliver planning permission on their sites at our cost and risk. Our return is a share of the value of the site once it is sold, which means if we don’t succeed, it doesn’t cost you a penny.”
There’s always money to be made, isn’t there? And an imbalance in supply and demand really helps…the profiteer.
What that means is riding rough-shod over perfectly reasonable local concerns and anxieties about real impact on communities and existing infrastructure.
Woolwell, on the edge of Dartmoor and the biggest housing development in South Devon since Sherford, is a case in point. Developers are already trying to get out of delivering on infrastructure promises and on the percentage of affordable housing. Locals, meanwhile, are understandably hostile to the prospect of having 250 construction vehicles a day passing close to a primary school. This isn’t nimbyism…this is justified concern. Will the developers prioritise building an access road? What do you reckon? You can bet it will be used to legitimise further reductions to the already dwindling percentage of affordable homes.
Labour appear to be happy to grant developers even more powers to exploit the situation at the council’s and community’s expense. They appear to have concluded that the only barrier to achieving the goal of building 1.5m houses by the next election is nimbyism and an obsession with nature, opening up a new front on the culture wars.
The Guardian reported that
“Keir Starmer has warned local leaders that he will not hesitate to overrule them if they attempt to ‘dodge their responsibilities’ in approving new homes, amid growing concerns among wildlife groups and councils over his plans for a housing revolution.”
Angela Rayner told Sky News that
“the government will cut the number of ‘subjective’ reasons that people can use to object to house building, including objections made on environmental grounds.
“We can’t have a situation where a newt is more protected than people who desperately need housing,’ she told Sky. “Protect the nature and wildlife, but not at the expense of people who need housing.”
Rayner is reinstating mandatory housing targets and plans to overhaul local planning committees to speed up decisions. To be honest, it sounds like bulldozing through local concerns and kowtowing to developers – wholly buying-in to the religion of the free-market economy and the superiority of the private over the public sector. Doesn’t sound like a vote-winner at a local level (but then Labour are not strong in rural constituencies, I observe, cynically!). So much for democracy!
What’s the answer?
“Data!” replies the councillor. “We need to collect proper data on what is needed and where so that we don’t end up with white elephant sink estates, built where there was no rationale, no employment or where the developer twigged that it was only ever worth their while to build the expensive (second) homes. And we need to look again at retrofitting. It’s expensive, but the properties are where people are and where they need to be, with the infrastructure already in place.”
There are thousands of empty properties in this category. Developers aren’t interested. Of course, they aren’t – but councils ARE.
“Regulation and protections need to be restored. Food security and the features that make Devon attractive to the vital tourism industry have to be factored in. Once farmland or an area of outstanding natural beauty has been destroyed for development, there’s no going back. The damage can’t be reversed.
“We need to build for a future changed by climate. We need to stop conceding to developers’ demands and we need to be protected from bullying from developers AND central government. If we are going to build housing, let it be for those who really, really need it.“