The lack of government policy on housing supply does need more consideration. It is good to see in today’s edition of the The Times (House-building Blight, leading article) support for an agenda ‘to meet its future housing need that crosses party lines and carries over between parliaments’.
Proceeding along these lines is a radical step forward and shows some insight. But alone it overlooks a singular bone of contention. Housing, unlike other domestic policy challenges, has a for sure spatial feature. It is this solitary facet of the housing debate that drives the 50+ Tory refuseniks to act with passion from the heart. After all their constituents will live with the decisions, good or bad, for a long time.
Unless the consequences of this uncontrollable, democratically toxic local dimension are taken captive, with well received cross-border spatial housing supply policies in local areas, new supply will always lag far behind need.
Can such policies be well received? If the opportunities they create locally and the threats they prevent locally are understood and these outcomes are communicated locally in my opinion the answer is yes. Implicit in these radical policy switches are changes in the process of local governance. The benefits for future generations be may be more obvious than for our own. But there will be short term wins too: new economic activity; breaking the log-jam of blocked land; and local debates about opportunities in the future, not simply about stopping new local proposals today. Local sentiment must move from the negative mind-set of the elderly to the positive mind-set of the young.
Ian Campbell
7 December 2022
