1 August 2024
Coming Soon
To a field near you
by J.R.Thomas
It slightly grates to say so, but Labour has got off to a good start as our new government. Sir Keir has adopted a generally impressive prime ministerial manner, calm and authoritative and, dare one say it, caring and friendly. His Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has thus far refrained from putting his foot in anything obnoxious (that might have changed by the time you read this); and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is everything a chancellor should be; rather dull, in command of her brief, parsimonious, and clear in her pronouncements. Indeed, on the evidence so far she is the best Conservative chancellor we have had for years (Kwasi Kwarteng never get a chance to prove himself and his brief tenure in the job was distinctly undull.) The Tories should have taken her on instead of the vaguely idiotic and incompetent Jeremy Hunt, who really was a major cause of that extraordinary electoral result.
But none of us get everything right and Sir Keir has had two wildcards that he had to play: Ed “Electro” Miliband and Angela Rayner. And it is Ms Rayner, who had to be given a reasonable cabinet job as Keir’s elected deputy and was thus shunted into Housing Secretary on the basis that she could not do much damage there, who is about to first test the Keir strategy.
Now, Angela knows a thing or two about housing, though mainly from a tax perspective, as those who followed her minor difficulties last year may recall. Her task is to get 1,500,000 – yes, one million five hundred – houses built over the presumed government term of the next five years. That is to say, 300,000 a year, a favourite housing target of every government for no more obvious reasons that Harold MacMillan managed to do just that in 1953. He did it by shoving most of his civil servants out of the way, having Ernest Marples, a former construction millionaire, as his deputy, doing a lot of smooching of housing companies and planning officers, and bringing in a couple of heavy weight housing developers to show local councils how it was done. (We can’t see Angela doing that.) But there we are; he did it and the houses are mostly still standing to prove it. Indeed, they were mainly well built traditional houses that their owners and tenants still enjoy living in.
For about twenty years, following the Macmillan methods and by dint of massive local authority building, those sorts of numbers were provided – though the quality got progressively worse and some – especially tower blocks – have been replaced or extensively repaired since. But no government in the last thirty years has managed to procure the building of more than about 200,000 homes and in the last ten years this has sunk towards 100,000 per annum.
Angela has a different approach. She is ordaining that her homes will be built and she is taking, she says, no nonsense from planning officers who resist the great scheme, or from locals who may think their area already overcrowded, with insufficient schools, roads, hospitals, and sewers. “Shut up, nimbys” is Ms Rayner’s approach, “the country needs homes; never mind all this green stuff, get building!” And furthermore, in a stroke of genius much of the green belt will be designated as “grey belt” – such things such as rubbish dumps, golf courses, car parks, “abandoned” land. No matter that these are friendly adjuncts to towns and at least greenish. They got to be turned into little brick boxes, says Ange. But good news at least for developers and land speculators; now you know what to do to get planning consent; turn your green land grey and order in a large supply of timber frames and plasterboard. After all, says Angela, only 10% of England is built over, there’s plenty more of the wild stuff, fields and trees an’ all that.
One does slightly wonder if Minister Rayner is trying to wind her opponents up. “Naw” she says, “we don’t want beautiful houses, just lots of boxes.” Never mind the aesthetics, feel the scale. Is the lady serious? One of the big causes of so much opposition to recent housing is not just the very poor quality of large schemes, but how appallingly ugly they are. It is worth a visit to a couple of modern housing estates, even quite expensive ones, to see how over crowded they are, tiny gardens, no garaging, little parking, and no evidence of design or of sympathy to local styles or materials.
We are not going to go on and on and on this subject [Ed: you already have done], but one more thing, as the pub crank says: there is not actually a real housing shortage in this country. That is one of the reasons the number of new home starts keeps falling. What there is, is a shortage of homes in the right places. Move to the north-east, the north west, the parts in between, and even the Midlands, there is a reasonable supply of houses though perhaps not in the best condition or most desirable locations. The problem is in the south of England and in all those nice places where we should prefer to live. There are alternative solutions to that conundrum, as both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson, and indeed Mrs Thatcher, recognised, with some success.
If Ms Rayner wants a fight though, and her nature is of the ilk that does enjoy a good battle, she may find that things are not going to go well; already resistance is forming in the suburbs and shires and trouble is on the near horizon. Which will be very upsetting for Sir Keir, to have his deputy so distracted in this way. Won’t it?
