How the next PM can help solve the housing crisis

The Government’s commission on how to make new houses more beautiful – yes, that one – is set to publish its first report in the next few weeks. It no longer has a permanent Chair and it will be reporting to a different administration and a new prime minister, but its advice will be crucially important. In order to get new homes built in areas where opposition is most vociferous – which tend to be the places new homes are needed most – the house-building industry needs to change. Monocultural housing estates, once labelled the “turkey twizzlers of architecture” by the philosopher Alain de Botton, are simply not what the public wants.

But there will be opposition. When the commission was first announced, a band of Z-list architects lined up to criticise ministers. Sam Jacob, who runs a small firm, said it was “a front for the continuing attack on progressive ideas about cities.” He accused the government of “seek[ing] to enforce a singular, a-historical fantasy featuring a few fragments of architectural reference that appeal to blinkered, quasi-fascist old white men.”