An ‘old-fashioned and dunderheaded’ approach

The behemoth in question is the regional plan for the South East of England Regional Assembly, which details where and how many homes should be built across nine county councils.

Conservative shadow secretary Eric Pickles has declared himself and his party sick of what he describes as Labour’s ‘old-fashioned and dunderheaded’ approach to planning.

‘Its over-reliance on the clunking fist of unattainable targets has resulted in a glut of flats that nobody wants and a shortage of decent family homes,’ he told the Tory faithful to great applause at its annual conference last week. Into the bin would go five years of toil by the councillors, officers and experts who worked on SEERA’s and the seven other regional assemblies’ planning blueprints.

Bob Neil, local government spokesperson for the Conservatives, was clear that the house building goals in the regional plans were worthless.

‘The target culture has failed in the delivery of housing, failed in the delivery of affordable housing. We want to scrap the regional planning regime,’ he told a fringe session at the conference. Messrs Pickles’ and Neil’s stance is shared by their counterparts in local government. John Reynolds, Conservative chair of the East of England Regional Assembly, told Inside Housing it had been unhappy with the government imposing house building goals. ‘Any policy to take that pressure off would be good.’

He was confident that plans prepared at district level would ensure house building programmes were well managed. ‘Looking at the current east of England plan, it goes up to 2021. Most local authorities have plans to take them through to 2025,’ Mr Reynolds said.

Relying on an expanding housing market to power economic growth was getting it the wrong way round, he added. ‘The current government has tried to drive housing starts and building as a way of driving the market. The basis of the economy should be manufacturing and technology.’ Paul Carter, the Conservative chair of SEERA, said it was vital that targets did not prevent councils from balancing necessary housing growth with the need for decent infrastructure. ‘The future debate should be around what is necessary,’ he added.

Authorities in the south east have built 30,600 homes a year over the past five years – against an annual target of 28,050. House building growth should follow the pull of industrial growth, in other words. But the Tories’ view is not held by all those involved in shaping the plans.

Roger Humber, a planning consultant who represented the house building industry in the East of England Regional Assembly, was furious at the idea of ditching house building goals. ‘It is exactly back to where Michael Heseltine took us in the 1980s when he said, “I don’t want to know about household projections”,’ he said.

‘He told local authorities to abandon local plans. The end product of that was today’s housing crisis. Eric Pickles is going right back to that.’

Mr Humber had no confidence in the Conservatives’ belief that councils would champion house building programmes if allowed to keep tax generated by newcomers. He said the idea of ‘stuffing the mouths of authorities with gold’ was ‘idiotic’ at a time of economic crisis, when the cost of sticking to planning rules had cut land prices in some places to zero.

Abigail Davies, head of policy at the Chartered Institute of Housing, was also worried about the idea of ditching targets. ‘If you scrap a target imposed at national or regional level how would you know how much you would need to build?’ she asked.

Ms Davies said a Conservative government should make good its pledge to help disenfranchised people before scrapping targets aimed at improving their lives. ‘People oppose [development] because they are OK and they often have a much bigger voice. The Tories are making a lot about the broken society and a lot of areas aren’t empowered.

‘You have to fix one before you go around scrapping targets. People have to be able to argue their case.’

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