Housing Crisis vs Party Politics:

"We need all of their solutions and more. And we need them now"

The rather tiresome slanging match around the housing debate continues with Labour promising to build 200,000 houses a year (although that is still 50,000 short of what we need) and the Conservatives half that number by a slightly earlier date. Oh and the Liberals have thrown in half a dozen Garden Cities for good measure to annoy their Coalition partners who came out strongly against them after the recent Garden City Competition. Does anybody really believe any of them will deliver the numbers?

All sides have been careful not to specify how they would actually build these extra homes and since everyone knows that no Government has built the quantity (or quality) of housing we need since we abandoned the new towns programme and flogged off the council housing in the 1980's, these proposals would barely scratch the surface of the problem anyway. But some people are bucking the trend - for example Birmingham City Council are developing their own Council housing as well as carefully planning a new urban extension of 6000 homes, and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets is currently planning to build 150 much needed affordable council homes supported by the London Mayor.

So what to do?

We need to get away from the debate about brownfield or greenfield, about urban extensions versus urban regeneration, about Garden Cities being better than New Towns – the simple fact is that we probably need all of these solutions and more, and we need them now. However the issue is not as simplistic as it is painted: well designed low carbon housing in a sustainable well-connected greenfield location out of the flood plain might be preferable to poor quality Noddy boxes on brownfield land in a badly connected location.  Mayfair was once green fields.


We need to find new ways of building much more, decent, housing which is fit for purpose in the 21st century. To do this we will need to train up a whole new generation of skilled craftspeople. The debate needs to be taken away from central government and from party politics, and devolved to local areas. “People in Birmingham and Manchester know the real needs of their areas far better than those in Whitehall, but beyond our major cities there needs to be a return to regional housing targets.” The recent Lyons report contains a multitude of suggestions, but it will be interesting to see how many of these ideas see the light of day.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is such a vast and all-embracing term that it suffers from the great disadvantage that most people, including politicians, don’t really have much idea of its importance or what it means. But it is none the less important for that, and it creates real jobs and lasting value. Infrastructure isn't just about the grand engineering projects for roads, railways and runways beloved of headline-grabbing politicians, it’s also about softer elements such as green infrastructure, natural flood relief, biodiversity and healthy living corridors.

The abandonment of regional spatial planning has been nothing short of a disaster, because it has reinforced the already massively over-centralised UK economy. And the irony is that this is from a coalition government which has trumpeted the ‘New Localism’ as being the solution to all our urban and rural ills, while in fact it has just reinforced NIMBYism.
It is manifestly daft to have separate public inquiries into High Speed Rail 2 and the future of London’s air transport – they are intimately connected and they need to be considered together along with other regional spatial issues such as housing and economic growth areas. 


The need for joined-up thinking between transport, city renewal and urban growth is so obvious it shouldn't need to be stated. This is such an import issue it needs further discussion.

John Phillipps, 

Consultant, Masterplanning

T: 020 7016 0726 

E: john.phillipps@carterjonas.co.uk

An HS2 update

HS2 - the rail infrastructure project which will provide direct, high capacity, high speed links between London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. With the exception of London, these city destinations and the route of HS2 are nowhere near the eastern region.

Yet, apparently in furore and froth with which KPMG’s report was greeted by the media across a recent weekend after the BBC made its Freedom of Information (FoI) request, HS2 means we might lose out in the whole of Cambridgeshire to the tune of £253 million according to some local press reports and south Essex by £151 million. In Cambridge city alone, it could be as much as £127 million.

Further north but still in the east; in fact the UK’s most northerly eastern city, Aberdeen – dubbed Europe’s renewable energy capital – can expect a drop in economic output by £220 million because of HS2.

Really? I doubt businesses in the granite city are concerned as the city’s residential and commercial property markets are buzzing as the year draws to its close.

Those unfamiliar with the sophistry of accountancy have no reason to doubt the statistical robustness of the reported figures. It’s the linguistic rigour that’s bothersome. Because those cities, towns and locations were ‘set to lose’ ‘could lose out’ ‘potentially reaching losses’.

It’s bothersome because it’s just distracting and sensational. It’s doubtful that commercial interests considering investing in our region are not going to do so now because of the open publication of the KPMG report. But it is possible that HS2 deflects future investment from the eastern region to the Midlands and the North West.

Possible but unlikely.

It’s hard to argue that investment interests here already or those which will come to this region can find what they are looking for in Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester. If they could they’d be there already, surely? And if they do head west and north, others are sure to fill the void because success attracts and breeds further success.

I should’ve been upfront at the outset: my firm has been awarded a place on HS2 Ltd's framework agreement for professional services relating to land and property. But I have yet to be snubbed for this by peers and clients in the east of the country since the KPMG report went public and, with the round of year end social dos in the horizon, I anticipate as full a diary as ever.

Will Mooney MRICS
Partner
Commercial, Cambridge