Michael Gove’s housing fantasy

Remember ‘localism’ – when David Cameron was going to return powers to local people when it came to things like planning? If that is how the Conservatives’ 14 years in power began, they seem to be ending with the opposite: with Michael Gove threatening to seize the planning reins from Sadiq Khan and get more houses built. ‘If you cannot do what is need to deliver the homes that London needs, I will,’ he wrote in a sniffy letter to London mayor Sadiq Khan ahead of his speech on planning this morning. He has set up an investigation to see whether Khan’s London Plan is holding up housebuilding.

That Britain has a problem with affordable housing is hard to deny. But it is worse than a mere problem. If you are young and looking for somewhere decent – or even half-decent – to live, Britain’s housing market is a constant source of misery. Never mind finding somewhere affordable to buy – it is hard enough finding an affordable place to rent. But are the Conservatives really the problem or the solution? Trouble is there is a deep divide in the party on housing, deeper than any gulf over Rwanda. There are the Nimbys and there is the pro-development wing – and the party veers between favouring one or the other, without ever really coming up with a rational policy which lasts the course. Not even Nicholas Ridley, who popularised the term ‘Nimby’ in the 1980s, had any kind of consistency – he was happy to object to housing when it was in his own Cotswold village. He turned out to be a Nimby himself.

Gove is no different. At the same time as threatening to seize planning powers from local authorities if they do not building enough homes, he has also told councils that they do not need to set aside greenfield sites for new housing. He is, in other words, trying to please both factions. In this he seems to have fallen for the fantasy that the country is full of brownfield sites screaming out for redevelopment. He may have been influenced by a paper put out a year ago by the Council for the Protection of Rural England which claimed that there are 23,000 sites in England stretching over 27,000 hectares which have enough room for 1.2 million new homes. They were not all in the former industrial heartlands, either – the CPRE claimed London could accommodate 399,458 new homes and the South East 170,941.

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The CPRE said that its figures came from brownfield land registers kept by local authorities. But just try looking for these supposedly vast abandoned tracts of London on Google Earth. I found three acres on an industrial estate in Chadwell Heath – although that might be better used to create employment. I thought I had found a few more hectares in Sutton, though on closer inspection it turned out to be an electricity substation. There’s a nice big patch by Old Oak Common, although a large patch of that is earmarked for the HS2 station, and the rest is gradually being gobbled up by data centres – facilities which, by the way, are consuming so much energy that they have prevented new homes being built in West London until the national grid can be beefed up.

Moreover, housing isn’t the only form of competition for brownfield land. There is also the small matter of where we build offices, shops, schools, hospitals and all the other things which a city needs. There is little point in doing as John Prescott did and boasting about building homes on brownfield sites – while simultaneously shunting commercial development onto greenfield land.

Gove, I fear, is in for a big disappointment. If he really wants to revive the government’s ambitions to build 300,000 new homes a year he is going to struggle without annoying Tory Nimbys of the shires. Alternatively, he could annoy his party’s business interests by telling them to move up North, where there is less political resistance to new housebuilding, or siding with those who want to reduce the UK population by closing down all migration (but then it will be harder to get anything built because the required tradespeople won’t be there). The Tory development wars will continue until, one suspects, the whole housebuilding shortage becomes a Labour government’s problem.