Land use planning | Alex's Archives

Tag Archives | Land use planning

Help to Buy?

admin / March 20, 2013 / Economics, Housing, Politics / Permalink

The objections to George Osborne’s latest wheeze to assist the housing market are hardly worth discussing. They are almost too obvious. And they have been rehearsed at length in relation to similar, smaller scale initiatives that have already been tried.

The new “Help to Buy” scheme, announced in today’s Budget, aims to provide equity loans of up to 20% of the value of new properties worth less than £600,000. Households have to come up with a 5% deposit to participate. The Chancellor is proposing that the scheme be backed up with government guarantees sufficient to support £130 billion of mortgages. The guarantee scheme will start in 2014 for a period of three years.

Just about the only perspective from which this initiative makes sense is carrying through on an absolute determination not to add directly to the public sector deficit, but not minding too much if the guarantees get lost amongst everything else in the public debt.

So it probably makes perfect sense to the Treasury.

Otherwise, the scheme has almost nothing to commend it. The economic illiteracy it displays is remarkable. The fact that, coming from the current occupant of No 11, this is no great surprise is perhaps equally remarkable. Continue Reading →

6 Comments

In a pickle over planning

admin / December 28, 2012 / Housing / Permalink

One of the Coalition government’s first acts was to signal the intention to get rid of Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs). They were seen as the embodiment of Labour’s centralising, top-down approach. In their stead we were to enter a new era of localism. Or, possibly, Localism. Spatial planning would have a much stronger bottom-up component. Local people would have a greater say in shaping the way their area developed, including levels of new housing construction locally. The rhetoric may have been of the removal of the dead hand of the State and of local people warmly embracing housebuilding in their neighbourhood, enticed by financial initiatives such as the New Homes Bonus. The reality was never going to be quite like that. And the claims that power is being localised have become ever harder to sustain. Mr Pickles seems to be placing ever more weight on the role of the Planning Inspectorate in overruling and overriding local plans that he doesn’t consider to be acceptable.

It was pretty obvious to anyone who knew anything about planning that removing the RSSs was going to lead to a reduction in housebuilding targets. Local authorities didn’t like the strategies precisely because they imposed higher housebuilding targets than those preferred locally. So removing the RSSs was going to see targets adjusted downwards in many areas. It seemed equally obvious that the sorts of incentives on offer through the New Homes Bonus or other mechanisms – such as the Community Infrastructure Levy – were not going to be sufficiently powerful to counteract this.

Anecdotally we’ve been hearing that this is precisely what has been happening across the country. Today the Policy Exchange produced a brief note, based on research by Tetlow King, that provides some more systematic evidence. It reports that as at mid-2012 some 57% of responding local authorities had reduced their house building targets. And that since 2010 local authorities in England have reduced the number of new homes they were planning by 272,720. Continue Reading →

1 Comment

Nick Boles and the philosophy of the garden

admin / November 29, 2012 / Housing, Politics / Permalink

To what sorts of things do people have moral rights? That’s a profound question worthy of more than a mere blog post.

We could turn to the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for inspiration. We’ll see an aspirational list of rights which still, more than 60 years after its adoption, many countries fail to deliver in full. In that list at number three we have:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Now we know that “liberty” and its realisation is a complex concept. It can, though, incorporate access to adequate housing as a foundation for personal development and security.

But we needn’t try to use Article 3 to cover the issue. We’ve got further resources to draw on when thinking about housing. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Housing at half-time

admin / November 21, 2012 / Housing / Permalink

There isn’t a great deal of disagreement about the key problems facing the British housing market.

The main issues are high housing costs in both the owner occupied and private rented sectors, with correspondingly high bills for housing allowances. Many households have difficulties in accessing appropriate accommodation, particularly given the limited flow of lettings in the social rented sector. And the market is subject to high volatility by international standards, which has negative ramifications for the macroeconomy. The root cause of this is the failure of housing supply – over a period measured in decades rather than years – to keep pace with the increase in the number of households.

The disagreements start to emerge when we move on to discuss what we should do about it. And, more specifically, to consider whether the Government is currently doing enough to address the problems identified. The Government has provided a perfectly sensible diagnosis of the problem. There has been quite a bit of policy pronouncement and promise. Much of the early bustle was brought together in last year’s strategy, Laying the foundations.

But does all this add up to a policy response that is appropriately targeted and on sufficient scale to make a dent in the problem? Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Desperate times call for …

admin / September 7, 2012 / Housing / Permalink

It’s hard to know what to make of yesterday’s slew of policy initiatives in the housing field. It is clear that they are directed primarily at boosting the economy, rather than being any sort of considered response to the problems of the housing market. You get the sense that the Government has pretty much run out of ideas and it just so happens that doing something with housing investment might help. It’s incidental that it is housing. It’s the only lever left to pull.

There has already been a healthy debate in the mainstream and social media as to whether any of the Government’s initiatives will have much impact upon either growth or the housing market.

Much of the media attention has been directed at the relaxation of planning permission on extensions and conservatories. I think it is a safe bet that this is going to make negligible difference to economic activity in the aggregate. Continue Reading →

3 Comments

Tory Green Belt Housebuilding Conniptions

admin / August 28, 2012 / Housing, Politics / Permalink

We’re all pretty much agreed that it would be good if housing supply were a bit perkier. That is, perhaps, an understatement. The housing world is broadly united in the view that residential construction is currently in a parlous state, the housing supply deficit is chronic, and it lies at the heart of many of the housing affordability problems that have afflicted the UK housing system for a long time.

Affordability is improving in many parts of the country and for certain types of household. But the continued shortage of mortgage finance means that many potential buyers are shut out of the market.

The housing wonks have been joined in their aspiration to see an increase in housing supply by those more preoccupied with the enfeebled state of the marcoeconomy. They are looking for capital investment projects that could get up and running quickly. Housing fits the bill perfectly.

All that’s left now is to determine is what to build, where to build it, and who’s going to pay for it. So we’re almost there. Continue Reading →

0 Comments

Planning, it’s always planning …

admin / April 12, 2012 / Economics, Housing / Permalink

On Wednesday the Institute of Economic Affairs discussion paper Abundance of land, shortage of housing, by Kristian Niemietz, was launched on to an unsuspecting world. The timing of this launch is intriguing. We are still trying to come to grips with the final version of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), published only three weeks ago. One would assume that further major reform of the planning system was off the agenda for a while. So it’s a slightly odd time to launch a report which restates the argument that land use planning is the source of most of the housing affordability problems we’re facing in the UK. Continue Reading →