The Housing Secretary Michael Give has endorsed a proposal from Policy Exchange (A School of Place) to set up a new professional training centre to boost architectural and urban design skills. Remembering the 40,000+ responses to Boris Johnson’s two white papers in 2020 it could be well subscribed. He reflects the deep, widespread disappointment with the external, visual appearance of most speculative, new homes built since the 1960’s on the one hand and the haphazard, unexpected and uncoordinated results of non-existent spatial policies on the other. Funnily these are two distinct, almost unrelated problems in timescale, strategic and levelling up terms. The latter is the important one, needed to boost growth, regional parity and win support of the right wing of the Conservative Party obsessed with market freedom. It is spatial policy, ie. governance options for resolving local v. centre policy conflicts. Put in a word: sustainability.
Fortunately A School of Place says it will not be ‘ the school of place’s remit to resolve the structural flaws of the planning system’. Which immediately poses a pivotal question to Gove. First, what is he going to do about solving the lack of sustainability in the government’s current approach to unaffordable homes? Specifically persuading the next generation of job creators to go north (key to long term levelling up); replacing haphazard market driven spatial housing outcomes in the south with council controlled community spatial agendas built on place stewardship timescales; and land value capture delivery policies needed to build all the infrastructure without spending from the public purse?
Post WW2 history and experience shows there are deliverable solutions to each of these three points. It is good that Gove sees he has a problem. But not so good he continues to avoid facing the hard realities that four or five decades of housing policy failure have created. Large segments of the electorate are disillusioned with planning. They have to be told about reality, to understand threats of change are also opportunities too- perhaps walking and roaming local access to areas now subject to the laws of trespass is one?
Ian Campbell
14 January 2023
