Most of those 12 red flags for housing on the new oneplace website will be forgotten about by next week but there is one that could have a lasting and ironic legacy.
It’s not the idea of red flags flying over Tory councils - Labour and Lib Dem authorities get them too - but that one of them goes to Conservative Hertfordshire for planning for new housing. Hertfordshire is of course the home patch of the man leading the Tory fight against exactly that policy: shadow housing minister and MP for Welwyn Hatfield Grant Shapps.
‘The county has been allocated large targets for new houses and jobs,’ notes the assessment dryly. Those are of course exactly the targets that Shapps has opposed nationally - and locally in the ‘no way to 10k’ campaign.
The red flag assessment says that:‘Despite more affordable housing being a priority, plans for the delivery of housing in the future are underdeveloped. There is not a comprehensive assessment of what Hertfordshire’s housing needs are. The range of organisations involved in housing provision have not effectively coordinated their work to produce clear plans for how housing need in Hertfordshire is going to be met. This means that currently, the prospects of meeting the area’s housing needs are weak.’
I suspect that the assessment - which in fairness also notes that Welwyn Hatfield was one of the districts that ‘built more homes than they were targeted with’ - is not going to change many people’s minds. Conservatives will see it as yet more evidence that top-down targets do not work whole Labour supporters will see it as proof that scrapping them in favour of localism will just mean fewer homes.
However, it would surely be enough to convince the Tories to scrap the whole process of comprehensive area assessment - if they hadn’t promised exactly that already.
And perhaps with good reason. One of the other red flags goes to my home authority, Cornwall Council, for housing provision and quality in general and lack of affordable housing in particular.
The council has some pretty spectacular incompetence since being it became the unitary authority for the whole county in April, but it’s hard not to sympathise in this case. Affordable housing is indeed in desperately short supply but as the chair of the local strategic partnership, Blair Thomson, points out: ‘This is a totally unfair criticism as the amount of affordable housing we can build is entirely dependent on the level of funding we receive from the government…The government has short changed the South West in this area and it is outrageous that they are now criticising us for a situation they have created.’
One of the ways housing associations in the county are tackling the problem is through local housing trusts. Just to tie things up neatly, Shapps is in Cornwall today to talk about them in a village that has one of the highest concentration of second homes in the country.
However, he gets a personal red flag from the National Housing Federation, which argues that his requirement for a 90% positive vote by local people to set up a trust could ‘hand a veto to rumps of local nimbys’.
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