No hope on the horizon
The National Housing Federation this week showed that the current financial year will see the lowest number of homes built in England and Wales since 1923.
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So would a Conservative administration be able to ensure the present depths, of 122,700 new homes in 2009/10, were not plumbed again?
Although the final plans are yet to be announced, the headlines have long been known: abolition of regional housing targets; housing numbers to be determined by local authorities; and cash incentives to encourage councils (and their residents) to back plans for new homes. This direction of travel has been widely dismissed by much of the housing sector as an unworkable charter for nimbys which would ensure even fewer homes were built than at present.
However, the more detailed proposals which we reveal today put much meat on the bone. The Conservatives plan to overhaul the cumbersome system of planning obligations by ditching the plan for a ‘community infrastructure levy’ and, in effect, replacing it with a ‘local tariff’.
This would be similar to a process in Milton Keynes that has raised more than £300 million to allow the local authority to develop infrastructure for 15,000 new homes. The attraction of this is obvious, but it is unclear whether this would replace the current section 106 system or run beside it.
There would also be a hugely slimmed-down national planning framework, modelled on the systems in Wales and Scotland. This sounds entirely sensible in practice, but distilling such an unwieldy system (even with the regional aspect removed) into something which will be the key central check on a wily development industry will be challenging to say the least.
The rise of local housing trusts and a liberated self-build sector would provide new supply. But the fear remains that private developers would still only build at a level that pleases shareholders and, with similar cuts to the housing budget expected in England as have been outlined in Scotland, affordable house building will wither.
Labour may have reached its house building nadir, but, based on these proposals, it is highly unlikely that in the same circumstances a Conservative government would do any better.