A Political Pipe-Dream

It is Party Conference season, and whatever your politics, this is the time of year when we realise that most politicians are far removed from the real world, says Tony Abel.

Housing is set to be a key political football for the next few years.  Labour’s new leader Jeremy Corbyn is wedded to the idea of rent controls, and massive government subsidy for building new social housing.  Meanwhile, Norfolk’s own Brandon Lewis, who is housing minister, has unveiled a plan to build one million new homes in the next five years.

Actually it isn’t a plan at all; it’s an ‘ambition’.  And that carefully-chosen weasel word betrays the weakness in all such political announcements.  They sound good on the news, but without a proper strategy to back them up, they are pretty much worthless.

Has Mr Lewis stopped to think about why his desired number of new homes are not being built already?  If he did, he would soon realise that much of the problem lies with the lack of government action to tackle the obstacles faced by those of us who are putting our money where our mouths are and trying to build new homes.

If you cut funding for housing associations (as has happened), you shift the burden for providing new homes onto the private sector.  Which would be fine if politicians didn’t then put a succession of hurdles in our way.

The lack of resources in the sector is a huge barrier.  It’s not just the lack of skilled tradespeople (although if Mr Lewis was serious about his ‘ambition’, he would be putting much more government support into apprenticeships); there is a chronic shortage in the whole supply chain – for example, legal conveyancers, council officers and building society surveyors.  They can’t keep up with the pace at which we are building right now; how does Mr Lewis think they will cope with a massive acceleration of housed building?

And then there is the planning process.  Every house builder is exasperated by the regulation and red tape which we have to wade through before we can get on and build.  Identifying suitable land (often in the absence of a local planning framework), and taking a proposal through a labyrinthine planning process which appears to have delay built into the process at every stage, is time-consuming and frustrating.

There seems to be a disconnect between national government’s desire to see new homes being built, and local politicians’ ability to deliver this on the ground.  Most local councillors are not professional politicians, and so perhaps it is inevitable that many struggle to understand the complex planning process. 

Mr Lewis is Minister of State in the very department which has responsibility for local government.  Should he not be pressing for better training for those local politicians who have to make the planning decisions on which his ‘ambition’ relies? And review the complexity of the planning system?

Unless he can back it up with a strategy to deliver it, Mr Lewis’s million homes idea looks increasingly like an empty pipe-dream.