Promising article in the Guardian, (Sunday, 16 September 2016, Kiran Stacey) about local support for more new homes. If true, it is the best planning news since the general election. According to YouGov polling fewer than one in five voters are “hard nimbys”, essentially those who oppose local house building under almost any circumstances. Jack Shaw, described as a senior adviser for a so called Starmerite think tank, Labour Together is quoted as saying
”Although the voices against housebuilding are vocal, our analysis is clear-only a small proportion of voters are wholly hostile to housebuilding. While the specific details of local of local housebuilding projects will be contested, principled support for housebuilding should give the confidence to pursue a laser-like focus on building 1.5m new homes over the parliament”. (Source; MRP/Yougov polls of 12,000 and 2000 persons).
. Interestingly the argument people found persuasive of new developments for the young was they needed help to get on the housing ladder. Stacey says the report notes if a minority are hard nimbys, few are ‘hard yimbys’, ie those who support local housebuilding under almost all circumstances. The most likely nimbys will live around but not in London, and as widely suspected tend to be older, often over 65 years.
Based on their findings, the director of research at Labour Together, Christabel Cooper then jumps to this conclusion:
“The housing debate is usually portrayed as a conflict between a majority of people who don’t want to build housing in their local area and a minority who do. Our new research moves us beyond this binary framing and clearly shows that there is a large majority in every single constituency who are open to local housebuilding under the right circumstances”.
The research is great. The findings are interesting and very encouraging too. But sorry to say, this conclusion taken literally and relied on, will explode in the face of the government, to the delight of local vested interests; the delight of local residents convinced that the particular site they oppose is wrong for reasons 1-100 (choose which suits); the delight of local councillors who are scared of Labour because it is in their DNA; the delight of most Conservative and Liberal Democrat MP’s; the delight of local political activists who hate Labour because new housing has become a weaponised political issue for them. .
To build the homes needed, reflect upon the nonsense this means. Think about the warped attitudes of mind it creates. Perhaps first take a cold shower! Divided political ideologies are in reality totally irrelevant to spatial decisions. (Political ideologies matter for policies of tenure allocations only. That decision comes later). But spatial issues about where growth should go, where the focus of new housing supply should be, have nothing to do with political ideologies. So weaponising housing supply policies is daft. And widespread blindness to this lunacy explains why so many thinktanks and other groups get their analysis of the housing market wrong. They ignore the passion of localism; the anger of conservationism; believing rational arguments put clearly will suffice to win the day. They won’t. . There are in fact few rational arguments against housebuilding, so the majority in a poll can feel comfortable agreeing the need for housing locally exists. That is an intellectual response. But they will feel differently, and they will passionately object to actual local housing project for 1/100 reasons if their deeply held sceptical instincts are aroused. Arousal of doubt will be directly driven by the spatial characteristics of the projects, above all where the residents live and where the project will be built if it wins consent. Their reaction is not intellectual. It is not principled. But it is dressed up to be. It is gut fear, disguised (see 1/100 reasons) as rational opposition. I saw it personally in 2014 from residents living in a Labour supporting area of Reading. It explains why so much first response reactions to new housing projects initially condemns developers as crude profiteers. I was labelled thus in 2014. And is why write this blog.
I repeat. Sorry, but the promising findings published by Labour Together are dynamite waiting to be ignited.There are no soft options remaining. Once again there is no easy way forward except on a shared political basis. This means longer term parliamentary and long term local housing policies must be aligned and endorsed across the Westminster and the local councils sprectrums if we are to provide lots of new homes with local support, which meets the standards of sustainable building in the decades ahead. There is no one party short-cut. This is the reality Labour must accept as they start their spatial revolution. Again I wish they well, with grave worries too.
Ian Campbell
17 September 2024
