HOW TO MAKE
PLANNING FOR HOUSING
A VOTE-WINNER

Hadleigh Castle, the finest historic monument in the borough of Castle Point, was extended by Edward III to repel a potential French attack. In May 2022, the Essex authority’s residents voted out the 20-year-old Conservative administration, at least partly because many of them considered the Tories’ emerging local plan to be responsible for another attack – by housebuilders on their green belt. Dave Blackwell, leader of the independent coalition that now runs the authority, told local media: “I don’t know of any resident in favour of building thousands of homes across the green belt.” Castle Point’s emerging local plan, which had envisaged 220 hectares of green belt release, was withdrawn a month after the election.

It is probably no coincidence that 82 per cent of homes in Castle Point are owner-occupied, the highest proportion of any borough in England (the national average is 62 per cent). It seems likely that many of these homeowners feared that thousands of new dwellings would reduce the value of their properties.

That is far from the only apparent public revolt against the local implications of the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’ target of 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s (a goal restated its recent consultation on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework). Council efforts to meet housing needs have been bedevilled, in part, by local perceptions that there will be immediate disadvantages.

 “Every development has risks and benefits, but they tend to occur on different scales and over different time periods,” says Paul Smith, managing director of the Strategic Land Group, which promotes the allocation of land for development in local plans. “The perceived harm from these developments – such as additional traffic or a change in an area’s character – are often very local and immediate, whereas the rewards – such as ameliorating rising house prices or stimulating economic growth – may be more geographically dispersed and not apparent until well after the development has been completed.”

As Smith sees it: “Hardly anyone will change their vote because a sensible development is approved, but many will do so if something they oppose is allowed. It doesn’t take many voters to switch allegiance to cost councillors their position. It is politically logical for councillors to oppose new developments, and it is politically logical for other councillors to help them because they may need that support reciprocated in future.”

Opinions differ as to whether some local authorities are more interested than others in meeting housing needs. “If you’re living in London, you accept that the city is growing – it’s a matter of civic pride,” says Mike Kiely, chair of the Planning Officers Society (POS), which represents public sector planners. “That’s why you have some councils in the capital – for example, Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest – that are broadly pro-growth. Smaller, rural authorities can be more averse, especially where growth impacts the green belt.”

But Catriona Riddell, POS’s strategic planning specialist, sees things slightly differently: “The councils I know are all trying to do their best to meet housing needs but, in some cases, the targets they have been set by the algorithms used by central government are so large that local opposition is inevitable.”

As an example, she cites Elmbridge Borough Council in Surrey. Deciding that meeting Whitehall’s official target would involve digging up acres of green belt, the council opted to go 70 per cent of the way, proposing to build 7,000 homes over 15 years, a compromise supported by local MP – and deputy prime minister – Dominic Raab. 

“When the planning system was reformed in 2010, the secretary of state Eric Pickles said ‘the blame game is over’ but, instead of decisions being taken by regional authorities, now all the blame is on local councillors, who live in the community, work in it and whose children go to school in it,” says Riddell. Local tensions have escalated as community groups, especially residents’ associations, campaign against new developments on social media, and stand at local elections. As of autumn 2022, 27 of England’s 145 local authorities had no party in overall control. In ten councils – including Castle Point – the ruling coalition included residents’ associations and local independents.

The political potency of housing helped the Liberal Democrats take control of Stockport Council in May, after promising to stay out of Greater Manchester’s city-regional plan. The Lib Dems profited from similar concerns about housebuilding at the Chesham & Amersham by-election in June 2021, ousting the Conservatives for the first time since the seat was formed in 1974. This defeat – and the 29 per cent swing from the Tories – is widely seen as having sparked the rebellion among the party’s MPs that last month spooked the government into proposing softened requirements of authorities with regard to meeting housing need. 

The by-election shock was particularly striking, Smith says, because “despite the absence of any specific proposals, everyone was convinced that development would be taking place near them”.

In such a febrile atmosphere, appraising housing developments can quickly become emotive, partisan and subjective. Former Mid Sussex Conservative councillor Charles Amos has claimed, in an impassioned blog, that he was kicked off its planning committee for trying to apply the council’s own policy that sites’ potential to accommodate development should be “optimised”: “Lowering house prices in East Grinstead was a central concern, so I interpreted the policy to allow substantial development. Fellow committee members told me not to interpret the policy in this manner and to ‘play to the gallery’.”

The task of meeting housing needs is made more daunting by one basic fact of democratic life: older people – who are more likely to be owner-occupiers – vote more than younger people. At the 2017 general election only 54 per cent of 18-24-year-olds used their vote, compared with 71 per cent of the over 65s – a disparity that has characterised every general election since 1992. If you also factor in the UK’s ageing population – and the fact that, studies suggest, a higher proportion of older people oppose new developments – it is easy to see why, in many communities, the balance is tilting against the scale of new builds that the central government says is needed for the housing market – and by extension, society – to function.

The best way to combat this, according to Steve Turner, communications director for the House Builders Federation, is for “representatives to harness the voices of those who do not have homes or live in substandard accommodation and present housing as beneficial for the whole community”. Other ways to change the dynamic, he suggests, include promoting the benefits of development – by, for example, putting signs on a new leisure centre saying ‘Delivered by developer contribution’ – and offering more financial incentives to councils to favour development. According to housing consultant Derek Long, although residents’ concerns must be heard, “we need to be honest with ourselves and admit that someone usually lost out when the homes we live in were built”.

“The government has recognised there is a housing crisis,” says Kiely. “And they’re trying to solve it, even if they’re not doing it very well.” So what is the answer? One remedy would involve changing the conversation. “Meeting housing needs and building new homes are not the same thing,” says Riddell. Converting shops and offices into apartments already generates around 20,000 new homes a year, says Paul Smith, and that could grow with the right political will and investment. 

Redeveloping brownfield sites has been encouraged by the government – which recently granted £35m to 41 councils for regeneration projects – but Long says more could be done: “Chancellors need to fund brownfield development like they really mean it. In the North, that would mean an investment of £3.8bn for 310,000 homes, at a cost of £12,250 a unit. No one would build on green land if they had a choice.”

Headline figures about thousands of new homes – even if they are to be built over a long period – are bound to cause concern among voters. Could focusing on the renewal rate – the percentage of the housing stock at any given time that is newly built – help put things in perspective? “We renew about 0.75 per cent of our housing stock a year in the UK, compared to 1.25 per cent  in France,” says Smith. Abandoning targets based on projected housebuilding growth in favour of asking councils to renew a percentage of their housing stock could reduce controversy, he says.

Another way to change the conversation about housing needs is to focus on economic growth, as Ros Jones, Labour mayor of Doncaster (see box below), is doing. Doncaster Council has identified “poor-quality housing” as a major obstacle to its goal of using its new city status to pursue growth.

It doesn’t help, says Long, that “planning is clunky, a bit random and chronically underfunded” and needs a thorough overhaul. A “cleaner, clearer and fairer” system will, he says, require Whitehall to change tack: “The government needs to stop using local planning authorities as political human shields. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities needs to front up that it has good reasons for building and that local authorities are not free to decide land supply. Leadership means having some skin in the game.”

Some of those with skin in the planning game – developers, consultants, officers and councillors – believe reversing the 2010 abolition of regional planning would make it easier to deliver new homes. “Decisions on, for example, overall numbers and green belt development need to be taken out of local politics and taken at a regional level,” says Turner. Riddell argues that such an arrangement would give every level of government a politically useful degree of plausible deniability. This might also help recognise some inconvenient local truths that, Long says, the government demand that each authority attempts to meet its own housing need glosses over: “Most inner urban councils are land poor – and so they’re not in the game. Ditto many rural shires. The number of authorities who can really move on this issue is quite limited.”