To build or not to build?

It was Grant Shapps who first introduced the concept of bananas to my housing vocabulary. ‘The banana element - build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone,’ he explained.

It was a balmy afternoon late in the summer of 2007. Mr Shapps, sat beneath a portrait of Margaret Thatcher in the Hatfield Conservatives Association office for his first ever interview with Inside Housing, had just been appointed shadow housing minister and was doing his best to distance his party from charges of ‘not in my backyard’ nimbyism. ‘One of the things in planning is that no one has a right to an unfettered view across the fields or whatever,’ he pronounced.

Now, in the weeks since becoming housing minister for real in the new coalition government, Mr Shapps’ impression of the pro-development campaigner has been less convincing. Last week critics attacked the government’s move to stamp out ‘garden grabbing’ by reclassifying residential land to prevent homes being built in gardens. Then on Sunday it emerged that the National Housing Federation had written to the housing minister warning that his plans to abolish the regional planning system in favour of local decision-making powers risked pushing housing development ‘off a cliff’.

But is Mr Shapps’ push to give local people greater sway over planning decisions really likely to severely curtail new housing? An exclusive new survey of public attitudes towards housing development conducted for Inside Housing by market research company Ipsos Mori suggests it might not be. Published today, the exhaustive poll of more than 1,000 British adults* shows that while most people are opposed to large-scale housing development, there is widespread support for smaller schemes. The data also offers geographical and tenure snapshots of attitudes towards housing.

The question is, do these findings vindicate the government’s planning stance and thus prove music to the housing ministers’ ears? And will the survey’s other findings - about the distances people are prepared to move to find work or more affordable housing, and where our ageing population would like to live in old age - help or hinder the new government’s nascent housing policies?

At first glance the poll’s headline findings on public views towards the scale of new housing development appear to be good news for the government. Almost two thirds - 65 per cent - of those questioned favour smaller developments of up to 25 homes in their local area if it would mean more affordable housing to buy or rent for them and their children in the future. And support for such schemes is consistently high across all tenure groups (see graph: Views on scale of housing development by tenure). What’s more, just 9 per cent are opposed to this size of scheme.

‘It might seem surprising to see that level of support but it does demonstrate how sensitive people are to the scale of any development being proposed,’ says Stephen Finlay, head of housing research at Ipsos Mori.

Certainly such numbers chime well with proposals in the recently announced decentralisation and localism bill. If MPs pass this into law next year as expected, the ensuing act will abolish the regional planning system and its house building targets, and new ‘local housing trusts’ will become one of the principal mechanisms for getting homes built. These trusts are a Conservative idea detailed in the party’s 2009 housing green paper to ‘allow villages and towns to develop the local homes that local people want provided there is strong community backing’.

So the 65 per cent support voiced by our survey participants aligns well for the approach, right? Not necessarily. First up, ministers look set to toughen up their definition of ‘strong community backing’. The Conservatives suggested originally that homes planned by local housing trusts could be built provided they attracted ‘no more than 10 per cent opposition in a community referendum’. Yet a spokesperson for the Communities and Local Government department tells Inside Housing that figure remains unconfirmed and ‘will probably be less than 10 per cent’ once it is. This news brings into sharp relief the 9 per cent of respondents saying they would oppose even small-scale development.

The bad news doesn’t end there. That 9 per cent opposition appears to be a best case scenario - 26 per cent of those questioned profess no opinion or ‘don’t know’ whether or not they would back schemes of up to 25 homes. It would take just a fraction of this group to make up their minds to oppose development to tip the balance in favour of the naysayers.

Ipsos Mori’s Mr Finlay adds: ‘We know from our other research on this topic that mentioning more affordable housing for the resident or their children in any questions about development will produce the most positive reaction to new housing plans. So by asking the question this way we are looking at the best possible scenario in terms of support for development.’

A Communities department spokesperson simply says: ‘It’s right that development brought forward by trusts should be subject to a local referendum’.

All this is to say nothing of the fact that opposition to development among respondents grows with the size of proposed schemes. It increases three-fold, to 27 per cent, for schemes between 26 and 100 homes. More than half of those polled - 56 per cent - object to developments of between 101 and 500 homes, while 65 per cent are against more than 500 homes.

Chris Handy, chief executive of developing housing association Accord, says such opposition is to be expected. ‘It doesn’t surprise me, because at a local level people have this natural kind of resistance to “bigness”.’ The largest Accord development to date created 180 homes; Mr Handy suggests that schemes which house more than 150 people are likely to meet opposition. ‘Where you’ve got your 25-home development, with three or four people [in each household] you’re probably talking between 70 and 100 people. The next level up, you’re going beyond that magic number [of 150] and people get overwhelmed.’

Mr Handy adds that though the changing planning environment presents challenges, house builders have no choice but to overcome them. ‘We have a housing crisis. We see how waiting lists grow day by day. We need to build new homes to meet these changing demographic needs.’

The survey contains some relief for providers of new social housing provided they pick development sites carefully - social renters are the group most likely to favour developments of 100 homes or less, and the least likely to block larger scale developments. Conversely, outright owners are least likely to back smaller projects and most likely to oppose large developments - more than three quarters of this group say no to more than 500 homes.

‘It reflects the potential fear that allowing more development will have a negative impact on the price of their property,’ explains Mr Finlay.

Ironically, if the ‘age of aspiration for homeownership’ heralded by Mr Shapps in a speech last week comes to pass then the housing minister may have inadvertently made his task of addressing the nation’s acute shortage of new homes even harder.

Another stated aim for Mr Shapps is solving the conundrum that makes it very difficult for social tenants to move home, robbing them of the prospect of relocating to take up jobs and relinquish state benefits. New work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has made plain his intention to get claimants back into work, telling Inside Housing that housing should be a ‘portable resource’ for social tenants.

Our survey reveals that Mr Duncan Smith has his work cut out. While a third of the social tenants polled say they would be prepared to move more than 20 miles for a new job or position (assuming that was possible), nearly a quarter (24 per cent) are not prepared to move at all. Those most willing to move for work are private renters and mortgagees, with just over half of each group willing to move more than 20 miles.

‘Our current welfare system too often traps people on benefits rather than getting them into work,’ says Mr Duncan Smith in response to these findings. ‘We are working hard to ensure that jobseekers get the dynamic, personalised support they need to pursue the right career options, but we then expect them to take up this challenge and show willingness to work.’

Ipsos Mori’s Mr Finlay describes the 24 per cent of social tenants who refuse to move for work as ‘a sizeable minority’. He adds that it calls into question the feasibility of a national mobility scheme for tenants proposed by a group of housing associations last year, which piqued the housing minister’s interest.

But Simon Randall, who authored the Homes and Communities Agency-backed report which advocated the introduction of a scheme to enable social tenants to move around the country with ease, far from puts the kibosh on the idea. ‘I don’t think anything [in the survey] contradicts or weakens the case for a national scheme,’ he says, pointing to the fact that 17 per cent of the social renters polled say they would move more than 100 miles for more affordable housing, a figure that rises to 19 per cent for a more suitable home or to take up work.

‘This confirms the survey that I was involved in. Of 1,280 social tenants, 17 per cent wanted to move a lot,’ he says. ‘There’s a large, latent demand for social housing tenants to move.’ A taskforce headed by National Housing Federation chief executive David Orr is due to report to the housing minister shortly on how a national mobility scheme could be introduced, says NHF spokesperson Nick Foley.

Finally to the question plaguing housing providers, developers and policy makers alike: how to house the nation’s ageing population. By 2031,
32 per cent of UK households will be headed by those aged 65 or more, up from 26 per cent in 2006 according to official figures.

Remaining in their own home is the clear pick for most participants (63 per cent), a preference which increases steadily with age. Almost three quarters of the 65+ age group (71 per cent) would like to remain in their own home with appropriate care/support provided, compared with 46 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds (see pie chart, left). The latter bracket, meanwhile, is the most likely to wish to live in the family home with care and support provided in older age, with a fifth of this group expressing that preference.

Finally, 18 per cent of respondents would prefer to live in specialised accommodation such as supported, nursing or residential accommodation.
Abigail Davies, head of policy at the Chartered Institute of Housing, says the findings send, ‘quite a clear message on the types of [housing] support services that will be needed in the broadest sense: ways of helping people doing repairs and maintenance on their home as they get older, making sure they can adapt their homes.’ She adds there is a need to rethink housing design: ‘the homes that are built today still aren’t built with ageing households in mind’.

Alas housing the increasingly grey British population is but a single, if significant, bullet point on the to-do lists of Mr Shapps and his colleagues.

itto making it easier for social renters to move and overseeing housing development of a scale capable of alleviating pressure on a housing waiting list currently burdened by almost 2 million households nationwide. Enough, perhaps, to drive you bananas.

See the full survey results

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