The housing epidemic
NEW houses are devouring our countryside like plagues of locusts. As individuals we’re utterly powerless to stop them, as groups we’re increasingly upset by them, as a borough we’ve lost battle after battle, as a nation we’re oblivious to the distortions they make in society, not just today but for all time.
Departments, ministers, even governments seem paralysed, caught in the headlights of a problem that’s too big to tackle.
As the situation in parts of the borough edge ever closer to Paris in 1789 before the French Revolution, one local politician has called the unrest as “residents with pitchforks”.
But the problems aren’t limited to those the parts of the borough where the developments are taking place. They’re suffocating our roads, schools, surgeries and hospitals too. And as roads are being dug up again and again to expand capacity of the wiring and plumbing underneath, even the utilities are struggling to cope.
The time for reform is at hand.
Difficulties in Supply and Demand
The housing epidemic isn’t a simple problem, if it were it would have been solved long ago. Nor is it a particularly new problem, it’s been acutely obvious since the at least the First World War.
Likewise, a single political party isn’t responsible for the epidemic any more than a single company or organisation has been.
And while each government has proclaimed loudly that it is going to fix the problem, history shows that very, very few have succeeded.
Legislation to deliver ‘homes fit for heroes’ after the First World War delivered 213,000 houses of the 500,000 needed. The Second World War public house building programme started by the New Towns Act 1946 and the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 ran for 30 years before it was stopped.
Things changed drastically with the Housing Act 1980. This introduced a tenant’s right to buy public sector housing and saw the greatest ever wealth transfer from the people to the state.
The houses which were sold off weren’t replaced with new stock, despite being questioned by a Wokingham councillor at the time.
Since then, the rise and rise of immigration, unregulated foreign investment in UK housing, economic warfare launched by the American financial crisis of 2008, the concentration of jobs by region (e.g. the M4 corridor or the southeast) and a preference to travel rather than move house have all ramped demand up to its present level.
Keeping with simplistic supply and demand economics, on the supply side the building industry has cycled continuously from feast to famine and back every five to 10 years.
The only consistent performance characteristic in private sector building is that of repeated failure to deliver what governments want and what the people need.
Difficulties in Politics and Planning
Our local political leaders claim that Wokingham has 11,000 “unbuilt permissions”, where the builders have got planning permission but haven’t built the houses yet. According to the Government’s published data, the household projections tables show that the Borough of Wokingham needs just 542 houses per year up to 2036.
Divide one by the other and this gives a land supply of just over 20 years. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that no new permissions are needed for a while.
However, as July’s planning appeal decision on the Sonning Golf Club development (in Theresa May’s backyard) shows, the Planning Inspectorate doesn’t believe that Wokingham has even got the five year land supply the NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) requires.
Wokingham doesn’t think much of the Planning Inspectorate either and the minister who was responsible for ‘fixing our broken housing market’ has been reshuffled into the Home Office where he’ll no doubt be equally successful.
Meanwhile the Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP has been appointed as his successor and as we know, where housing is concerned, our shire is well and truly broken.
But don’t hold your breath.
In JB’s previous job as secretary of state for Northern Ireland, he didn’t have much luck in getting local government to function in Stormont at all, let alone properly.
The last word (for now)
Those of us who take an interest in such things will know that Sir Oliver Letwin has been conducting an enquiry into why Da Bildaaz have been letting the nation down.
But as parts of his recently published interim report suggest, at a national level his enquiry isn’t going down very well.
Hmmm, wonder what’s happening with WBC’s Local Plan Update ?