The government has delayed the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, either due to lack of time, or more likely due to a group of 50 Conservative MP’s signing an amendment removing the Whitehall imposed housing targets on local councils. Simon Clarke, who was a former levelling up secretary has issued a balanced response, saying “There is no question that this amendment would be very wrong. I understand how inappropriate development has poisoned the debate on new homes in constituencies like Chipping Barnett (Theresa Villars, MP promoter of the amendment constituency), but I do not believe the abandonment of all housing targets is the right response”.
Paul Brocklehurst, who is chair of the Land Promoters and Developers Federation, is more blunt in his response saying “It is clear that many of us do not care about the generations now excluded from owning their own home due to its unaffordability-or the 3.7 million living in overcrowded accommodation or on the growing housing waiting lists……The views of the haves prevail over the have nots. It is our collective responsibility as an industry to mobilise the have nots and we as a federation, working with others, will help to do this”.
Taken together these sentiments go some way to illuminating the dilemma and spelling out the consequences of myopic, uncaring opposition to lack of new housing common on the parliamentary back benches. One of the 50, an MP in a prosperous high growth area for over 30 years and fully aware of the transfer of wealth from the have nots to the haves shows limited interest in finding housing land supply solutions fair to both groups. Local leadership which wants local autonomy but declines to accept its share of local responsibility will not come from lords and masters with this mind-set. Recognition that local leaders have a duty to future generations, the children and grandchildren of their constituents is forgotten. This exclusion is not good enough.
Can this attitude be changed? Unfortunately my experience is not encouraging. From 2014 I spent about eight years briefing Sir John Redwood, MP for Wokingham, a constituency which has thrived since the nineteen eighties on the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time, on the spatial opportunities and spatial threats areas of above average popularity like his face. Regrettably it is easier to turn away.
If existing local leaders will not lead, can champions for the next generation be found elsewhere? Creating new places can be an opportunity. Their tasks will be exciting and fulfilling: finding and taking control of unprotected land suitable for future building; supplying the land to builders according to a master plan; supplying infrastructure which removes the appeal of car ownership; making sure there is enough of it to stop inflationary house price rises; protecting the local environment and enhancing access to it; stopping unnecessary emissions; and channeling the massive land value created in the process back to the community. Maybe each area now needs its own landed estate, a new generation of Grosvenor, Grosvenor, Cadogan or Crown Estates modelled on the financially successful post war Commission for New Towns with their commitments to creating premium values in places people want to visit and live. Local governance accountability will be essential and the champions must first win local trust. Finding the seed-corn capital and people who have expertise in place stewardship principles is possible: look at investors who professionally plan for generations but live in these much loved, at risk areas.
Ian Campbell
23 November 2022
