John Prescott and Zach Goldsmith made for entertaining radio this morning over a deadly serious issue.
The former deputy prime minister and new Conservative MP for Richmond clashed on the Today programme [listen again here] over plans that will be announced later today to stop garden grabbing and scrap density targets.
Prescott made a passionate defence of his policies. ‘You have got to look at how many homes we need and where they will be built,’ he said. ‘We are desperately short of land.
‘We are talking about the few people who may object to the house in their street that’s going to be used for social housing. I’m talking about families who haven’t got a ruddy home…we desperately need houses. Prices are far too high.’
But Goldsmith defended the ban on environmental grounds, arguing that counting gardens on brownfield land just made them targets for developers. ‘If you lump gardens and wasteland in the same category, developers will always go for gardens because it’s easier and cheaper.
‘We are not saying there shouldn’t be development, there are other alternatives. There are a lot of empty homes. We want to protect gardens so that instead of being top of the list for developers, they are at the bottom.’
Reports say Communities and Local Government statistics show that the proportion of new homes built on gardens rose from one in ten in 1997 to one in four in 2008.
That figure was almost certainly distorted by the collapse in housebuilding in 2008 but it does illustrate the way that planning policies have had unintended consequences. Brownfield targets led to building on gardens just as the density targets led to the construction thousands of flats aimed at buy-to-let investors.
The trouble is that changing policy can have unintended (or, for nimbys, totally intended) consequences too.
Garden grabbing implies that developers are somehow stealing the land from unsuspecting owners, whereas the reality is that many owners are desperate to sell.
And the moves on gardens and density targets raise an obvious question. Refurbishment of empty homes and development on genuine brownfield sites can only go so far.
Where will the homes go then? On the greenbelt? Crammed into poorer areas where anti-development residents are not as organised as places like Richmond? Or nowhere?
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