By next weekend Michael Gove, Housing Minister is due to publish his solution to 13 years of housing policy failure. White papers, green papers and over-subscribed consultations have spelt out the spatial, territorial, tenurial, generational, unaffordable, fluid time frames and Machiavellian facts of life that direct the housing market. . So at last we ought to hear some wisdom. What a shame institutional memories at the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and and Communities need this sort breast feeding. I wonder, for example, how many in that Ministry remember the lessons, both the spatial successes and design failures of the Commission for New Towns?
We can thank Boris Johnson. He placed the spot-light on housing, on affordability, on the lack of a national spatial plan, which he re-labelled levelling up, thinking that slogans produce homes.
Last week, anticipating publication, the Times wrote its own Leading article (Thursday, 14 December 2923) spelling out their housing policy Home Truths
‘Conservative governments continue to empower selfish opponents of the new homes Britain desperately needs. They will pay a steep price for their short-termism’.
Clearly they hit the nail on the head. Someone in the Ministry was disturbed enough to delay publication.
Far more interesting though were two other surprises. On the the same day the government issued a blog, (The Times on housebuilding,, 14 December 2023, https://dluhmedia.blog.gov.uk/2023/12/14/the-times-on-housebuilding ) rejecting the the Times leading article. The other surprise is what their spikey reply reveals-by omission, by selectivity, by blindness, and above all by zero leadership. It is the last indictment that matters above all. Myopic policy making is at least understandable in local councils. It is inexcusable in government. Who decides whose preferences takes priority when there is unavoidable conflict? To make homes affordable by building them, to distribute electricity with pylons, decisions are unavoidable. . It is a fact , we need homes in the open countryside in popular areas and distribution pylons too. Economic growth depends upon these changes. Locally whose agenda is paramount: when these needs clash, local vested interests or the wider community’s? Likewise, when there is national and local conflict, whose agenda is paramount, the national advocates of economic growth or local advocates opposing local change?
It will be interesting to see how sturdy this Conservative government will be after years of prevarication. The time to make fully grown decisions has arrived.
Ian Campbell
17 December 2023
