Getting Britain Building again
PM Kier Starmer, announcing Labour’s plan to build 1.5 million homes at the CIH Presidential Dinner, February 2024
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how one of the challenges facing the new Labour government is housebuilding, with the UK failing to meet a target of 300,000 new homes per year since the 1970’s. Kier Starmer pledges to build 1.5m by the end of the parliament, which would meet the target, but how likely is it, and what’s needed to make that happen?
source: FT.com
The 300,000 home target
The previous government also announced a 300,000 homes per year target, and failed to meet it, as had successive administrations. In fact, we can go back as far as the 2004 Barker Review of Housing Supply to see we’ve been falling short of the target for at least 2 decades.
The Barker report stated ‘ 145,000 more houses per annum might be needed, about double the current private sector housing output of 150,000 units’ - i.e. 295,000 homes per annum. There were 36 recommendations in Kate Barker’s report, many of them sound, such as increasing the number of apprenticeships in construction, but the report failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room, that the rate of housebuilding - as shown in the chart below from the report - collapsed when the main engine in housebuilding - council housing delivery - was shut down by government policies from 1980 onwards.
Up until the 1980s, many councils employed whole teams of architects, planners, project managers, clerk of works, etc. dedicated to the planning and delivery of not just homes, but whole new towns with all the physical, social and cultural assets they needed to thrive. This was made possible by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which was, according to the then Minister Lewis Silkin “an instrument of which we can be justly proud; we shall have begun a new era in the life of this country, an era in which human happiness, beauty and culture will play a greater part in its social and economic life than they have ever done before”
This era of housebuilding also delivered many some of the new towns and housing estates that have often been criticised as failures: destroying tightly knit communities and designing in criminal and anti social behaviour. Many of these failures have since been erased, however what is often forgotten is that the majority of the housing that was built were good homes in desirable places, and a lot of those are part of the 1.9 million council homes in England alone that have been transferred into private ownership since 1980 through the Right to Buy.
More recently, government policy has loosened the financial restrictions preventing councils from building new homes, but many of these new homes are just the social housing that private house builders are obliged to deliver anyway. Few, if any councils now have the resources or leadership to match Lewis Silkin’s vision of creating new places - acquiring land, obtaining planning consent and building homes affordable for all that are connected with the infrastructure needed to nurture communities.
To achieve the ambitious target of 1.5 million homes in this Parliament will require a major shift in thinking from Whitehall to the town hall on the coordination of planning, housing and investment with private sector delivery partners. This isn’t rocket science, and at Enabling Place we’ve made this happen before, and we’re ready to do it again.
Enabling Place
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