New homes must have local support. This cannot be achieved by one party in isolation, nor can it be done within a five year Parliament and it cannot happen if landowners are treated, as they see it, unfairly. 50 years of housing policy failure is proof.
On Friday 23 May 2023) the Financial Times published a letter from me which was given the bye-line, Let’s take the politics out of house building. The flag was one view of the letter. Here is the full published version.
Understanding the need for local support, and then identifying the solution to the housing under supply problem which can be delivered with local support is a struggle to embrace for the media too. Housing has so many separate facets, but media commentary must address one or two facets, not several. And so must I too. Here is another example of simplification that I adopted in a letter the Times published on the 18th May 2023.
Lack of housing in England is a domestic policy failure. The failure cannot be blamed on Brussels for example. Limited supply of house building land was first seen by builders and developers in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, say fifty years ago. Over the decades the scarcity of building land has steadily grown, although of course the land area of England today remains precisely the same as it was fifty years ago. The cause must therefore be policy failure, either local or in Westminster. And it it is plain that the policy failure is shared across the political divide. No political party has found and delivered a solution, since the Commission for New Towns was wound up in 2009. This being true, it is likely a solution based on political divisions will fail again. Instead a successful policy must be constructed on a policy ignored to date. It will be one built on local spatial priorities on the one hand, and duty to local future generations on the other. . Here is a simple example. We all know where not build: not in areas of outstanding natural beauty, so we now know where it is possible to build! In other locations preferably those that are not protected by other long established and valued protection policies. Why is this spatial understanding so difficult?
Ian Campbell
25 June 2023
