🏆 The #Planoraks 2020 🏆: U-turn of the year
The strange death of a mutant algorithm
There I was promising the last post of 2020, and then the year that never stops giving had one last headline in store. A big enough surprise to warrant the final #planorak award of 2020. Gather round the tree, friends. For the biggest planning u-turn of 2020.
Let’s start at the very beginning. England needs new homes. Lots of them. But new homes are like new year’s resolutions: we like them in principle. The problem is following through.
Since 2017, our Government’s aimed to deliver 300,000 new homes a year in England. It wanted the right homes in the right places. But the difficult question is who gets to decide where the right places actually are.
In 2010, as part of its “people power” localism agenda, the Government handed the baton to local authorities to work out how many homes to deliver, district by district. How did we make sure the district-wide numbers added up to 300,000 nation-wide? Well, we didn’t. Since 2010, England’s averaged well under 175,000 new homes a year. And that’s even after a certain “radical” change in national policy in 2012 which was supposed to substantially boost housing supply. Year after year the housing crisis deteriorates. The shortage isn’t in the thousands, or the hundreds of thousands. It’s in the millions.
So. What happened next. Government re-entered the fray in 2018 with a new 3-step formula to calculate local housing need. It isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even an algorithm, still less a mutant one. And here’s the point: it isn’t mandatory. The formula gives Councils a starting point to work out how many homes they need, but not an end point. That is because it doesn’t account for constraints to new development, like the Green Belt, National Parks or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty where new building is restricted. So Councils can – and regularly do – plan to under-shoot their need figure by hundreds or thousands of homes.
In August, the Government suggested changing this formula. Why? Because we aren’t reaching anything like 300,000 new homes a year. Because the household projections on which the formula is based are historic, artificially low, and they project past trends of suppressed supply into the future.
The tweaks would have raised housing targets across swathes of the Home Counties. Which was partly the point. Counties like Surrey, Hampshire and Buckinghamshire contain fantastically sustainable places to live with easy access into London. But they’re very unaffordable, and designations like the Metropolitan Green Belt allow year after year of depressed housing delivery. They are also Conservative strongholds. So it was predictable that the proposals became so unpopular with Tory back-benchers. Many of whom support the idea of new housing in general. Just not in any particular place, and certainly not in their own constituencies.
Some objections (especially those of our previous award winners) made basic errors. A common mistake was that the algorithm would “require” building in the Cotswolds (or wherever) to “double” or (or whatever). Another shade of that error is that the formula “demanded that every community in England build a precise number of houses dictated by Whitehall, irrespective of local wishes”.
All wrong. Under our current system, whatever the formula says, local authorities have the final say on how many homes to put where. The formula set a starting point, not the end point. The Cotswolds is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty which – for better or worse – we can expect to come nowhere close to meeting its real needs for new housing.
Still, in the end, this was one battle too many for the Government. In November, Robert Jenrick announced a retreat. Last week, he gave us the revised formula. Which isn’t actually revised very much. It’s business as usual for the shires. The shortfall is, we’re told, now to be made up by massive increases in delivery in England’s 20 largest cities. And in particular, by tens of thousands more homes in London.
A good idea? Aren’t cities exactly where we’re supposed to be encouraging new homes? Well indeed. Even if after Covid, lots of us are fleeing city life. But there are 3 big challenges.
First, some of these new targets for our cities are pie-in-the-sky. London’s target is boosted to over 93,500 homes a year (albeit that number won’t actually kick in for 5 years, because the new London Plan which will soon come into effect aims at around 52,000 homes a year). But London’s recent delivery has been under 40,000 homes a year. Brighton and Hove delivered 542 homes last year (which was a good year). Its new target? Over 1,200. Bristol delivered 1,666. Its new target? 3,196. You get the picture. If these new numbers are simply undeliverable – and particularly the massive numbers in London, which don’t even kick in for 5 years – then the shires may be safe, but England is not going to come any closer to delivering 300,000 homes a year.
Second, if the Government really wants to facilitate this kind of massive increase in new homes in our cities, we’d need to do two things: reintroduce strategic planning across local authority boundaries and have a frank conversation about the future of the Green Belt.
Third, this episode has been controversial. But really, it’s just the appetiser. Because the Government is currently trawling through the 44,000 responses to its Planning White Paper. Buried in that paper is a genuinely radical idea. An idea which will make the mutant algorithm furore seem quaint. That idea is for Central Government to “take back control” of decisions about which homes go where. And those decisions will not be advisory anymore. They’ll bind local authorities. Not the product of mutant algorithms, but of ministerial judgments handed down from Westminster about the value of your local area, including its green spaces, and how many houses it should accommodate. From a Government which didn’t use to like top-down housing targets very much.
Some have – incorrectly – called the housing formula U-turn a “win for localism”. Well. Imagine what they’ll say when they read the Planning White Paper. If the Government’s current thinking continues then, for better or for worse, the days of local decisions about how many houses go where are numbered.
Have a lovely festive break, #planoraks. Stay well. And see you in 2021.
