As explained in yesterday’s blog I point out why Burnham’s housing aspirations, welcome as they maybe, will fail. Here are my further thoughts about next steps Andy Burnham’s team of ministers must take to implement their aspirations.
There are two missing ingredients which will stop progress towards building the homes so desperately needed. They are.one, lack of local support for local change, and two, absence of political cross-party consensus to work together, not in opposition, to solve the problem. . The solution to both missing elements is simple:.It is sufficient time. Not because building houses is intrinsically a contentious issue, despite widespread belief this is the problem, but because the process of choosing specific locations for new building is flawed. As a result proposals for new homes seems to be contentious. But in fact it is the choice of locations, often sensible locations, identified through a process which fails to win local support that has destroyed the supply system.. Many people miss this distinction between new arrival of homes and the mechanism used to decide where they go. In other words they do not see the culprit is the absence of a long term spatial policy which reflects local wishes but wrongly exaggerate the opposition to new homes. This confusion has malign consequences for local areas and fatal consequences for national growth and productivity. It means incorrect diagnosed of the problem. And incorrect remedies are adopted.
This distinction is subtle but matters. So it needs to be stressed. So here is again, in different words. Homes are generally acceptable per se but the chosen locations, whether it is green fields in the open countryside, or re-building (gentle densification) in low density, car-dependant suburbia in urban areas, are always sensitive and frequently cause local opposition. Why? Because spatial decisions are made on a haphazard basis, and not as part of a big, long term spatial canvass looking two or more generations ahead.. So, as a result each selected location is unique. It is not part of a wide spatial canvas already thought about, debated and approved by the local community. Winning widespread local support for at scale, and therefore dramatic, land use change from host communities will take time and need both general policy justification and specific land use change justification. Just how much time depends on the upfront level of communication investment made.. So instead long term spatial plans must be introduced which, once accepted by local communities will loss the horrid characteristic fear of unknown changes breeds.
Persuading political parties to work together will also take time. There is in England a traditional of confrontational politics. This is based on the so-called Westminster model where even the chamber of the House of Commons is designed to have a governing party in power and an opposition party opposing the governing party. This formal confrontational style of hostile government does not work when seeking to provide a solution to the lack of new homes. Policy failure is because the housing and infrastructure solution required demands many years of political cooperation both at policy level i.e. at Westminster level, and also local level, i.e. land allocation provision or site specific level. It is this later menu of spatial decisions that causes so much trouble. It is exploited by local activists who create phoney divisions. Cooperation is a difficult and novel concept for English politicians and other political leaders, especially locally, and of course for the media too, who love reporting conflict but struggle reporting cooperation. Post war history shows us that our conflict based system of decision making is not a recognised as a governance weakness. But in fact it is probably the leading cause of the failure of our domestic political system to our provide the homes that are needed in this country since the second world war . Our confrontational based politics may have had a benefit for ruling the British empire but I suggest it has nothing but the opposite characteristic when we’re dealing with domestic policies needing long-term solutions and support both at policy level in Westminster and local level amongst local residents who will become the local hosts.
The process of winning support must start with the leaders of all political parities, as described in previous blogs.
The nub of the problem is resistance to change. How can the mind-set of untrusting local residents fear of land use change near them become the mind-set of a welcoming host or hostess? Think how you feel when inviting a guest into your house for a dinner party. How do you feel at the door as they arrive? Can this attitude of mind be turned into the attitude of mind that local residents adopt towards new building near them? Can this long established negative reaction be changed into a positive view of new building to these them? Or is this naive? I think not. But the opportunities that new building creates for the benefit of existing residence has to be thought through, and presented to local host communities in a way which is understandable to existing non-technical local people. This is the challenge. Recent decades of unattractive new housing development and substandard public space has destroyed the belief that new building can be a good news story and a community opportunity as well. This universal negative mindset has to be reversed. To do that will take time a few years at beast, and maybe a decade or two at worst.
Ian Campbell
26 August 2026
