No, Minister! Don’t add more fuel to a self-inflicted fire
BRIEFING NOTE #3
This is a series of briefing notes to yet another new housing minister. Here are some dangers to avoid, some well-trodden paths to be bypassed, and some barriers to thinking that need to be overcome (if we are serious about bringing about change).…….and, oh yes, here are some thoughts on how to deliver this change! Please stick around long enough to make it happen.
Another day goes by and the housing crisis in the UK deepens. It is now talked of as the its biggest policy failure. The front cover of the Economist damns it as a ‘Housing Blunder: Why are we so far from a solution?’, it asks. But, is the housing crisis just a self-inflicted problem? Can it be fixed by fiddling with the system, or do we need a fundamental rethink? Pre-1945, housing was hardly the domain of government. It was as distributed system. People did it. Thousands of small builders built it. The supply chain was hyperlocal. It was not a problem to be solved. Government, with all its good intentions, triggered the problem.
Housing is now largely the domain of the big guys: big developers have become the proxy for big government. This is a natural consequence of government’s withdrawal from its post-war promises to take full responsibility to house all its citizens. By relying on the big private sector alone to solve the housing crisis, it hopes for different outcomes. But the big housebuilders see their job as being to keep their shareholders happy (the housing shortage is sending their share prices soaring). They don’t see it as their job to solve the housing crisis. They are just as happy to sit on the land watching the prices go up.
Why has the system failed:
It treats housing as a numbers game, not as a matter of building neighbourhoods. The focus is too much on the technical aspects of housing rather than the social dynamics.
More than that, the system has put a brake on the normal evolutionary processes that drove good neighbourhood development in the past.
The system breeds adversarial positions between communities and government, as long as people see large amounts of housing dumped on their doorsteps without any regard to social cohesion. Communities see housing development as a threat, not an opportunity.
The government looks to the housebuilders to get its answers from - the very people who are creating the problem. It is a self-perpetuating cycle.
After the second world war big government was prepared to implement utopian visions. Today the government still puts its faith in big visions but struggles implementing them.
Demographics have changed. We have moved away from the typical nuclear family with 2.4 children to a socially diverse, multigenerational and atypical household composition that cannot be boxed into a simple statistic, blindly applied as the perfect end-user across the board.
The way we build is now not scalable, replicable and efficient. We constantly go back to first principles. Housing bears the costs.
Adding another layer of complexity to the planning system not solve the problem and may just add more fuel to the fire. We need fundamental system change, but it must come from the bottom and locally. A focus on a progressive and innovative NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL will give us a chance of unlocking the potential.