No, Minister! Don’t be caught in the headlights of big numbers
BRIEFING NOTE #1
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.
Left and right politics have become the same side of the coin in the UK. Both believe they can solve the housing problem with promising big numbers and delivering big solutions. Targets are set and never met. The big risk is that the government continues to do even more of what it did before, in the hope that it will solve the problem. So, each new housing minister falls into the same trap. In some form, all have failed. Now the magic number is 1,500,000 homes (and by 2029)! Once we are caught in the headlights of such a big number, it’s inevitable that you grab for big solutions. This leads to more strategic initiatives, more big visions and, more big procurement processes that promise big change but always fail to deliver both the numbers and the kind of places we want.
In blind desperation, we play the New Towns ticket, forgetting their reality. They were delivered in the post-war Beveridge years, when the government seriously intervened – a principle that will prove difficult to mobilise in the social market economy of today. They were delivered with the promise of a social utopian, ‘Brave New World’, which never materialised – a promise that has little or no meaning today. They were delivered in a time when the necessary public sector skills and resources existed – a quality we have lost in recent decades. We also forget that probably our best example of a new town, Milton Keynes, took 10 years to incubate and another 30 years to develop. It only produced over 100,000 new homes. So, from start to finish, this only represented some 2,500 homes per year. A drop in the ocean when we are considering our big numbers. Clearly a non-starter, given the government’s 5-year window of opportunity. The green belt (or ‘grey belt’, as it is also referred to) also becomes a same old target…same old problem! There may be some opportunities but they will take endless time to unlock these.
Grey belt [definition]: A place free of objectors, where imaginary housing numbers are dreamt up, at the expense of good urbanism.
This is the time for upside-down thinking. We need to come out of the glare of the headlights and zoom in from the large sites to the hyperlocal level. This is the realm of low-hanging fruit – the endless number of small opportunities in private ownership that will quickly deliver the numbers and type of housing we are looking for. By releasing the collective power of many small actions, we can see how quickly they add up to the big numbers. By focusing on granular small change and scaling these up, we open up endless opportunities. Housing as a distributed system that can be disaggregated down to its smallest component. We don’t need big solutions.
There are vast parts of our cities and towns, where the planning system has arrested the natural evolution of these places into more urban neighbourhoods. As an example, these could be in places like our pebble-dashed, interwar housing estates that are well-connected, well-laid out, but have a housing stock that is largely energy inefficient. We need to free these places and allow them to intensify in a progressive, organic way that meets the individual needs of the population. We’re not talking about high-density, but enabling good solid, medium-density neighbourhoods that provide a full range of long-life, loose-fit, mixed-use living conditions. Small shifts in the planning system will allow this to happen. We don’t have to wait for large-scale reform.
Our next briefing notes will explore a NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL that aims to unlock the potential of many bottom-up ideas and actions by many people and scale these up to build great urban neighbourhoods.