Housing

Thursday

Jessica Douglas-Home

Why is modern architecture so ugly?

In Chesham and Amersham last week, Tory voters punished the government, not only for building on greenfield sites, but for allowing the construction of too many ugly, badly designed buildings. The British public are fed up with modern architecture. Despite polls that prove this time and time again, architects simply ignore people’s views. Indeed, if the public has the temerity to criticise their latest works, there is uproar — as I have discovered to my cost. At a dinner in late 2019, I asked Norman Foster, the ‘starchitect’ of such things as London’s widely derided City Hall and the Berlin Reichstag, if he was pleased by the government’s new Building

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why private equity sharks are shopping at Morrisons

The late Sir Ken Morrison — founder of the eponymous supermarket chain that’s the latest UK target for US private equity — had the blunt manner of the Yorkshire cattle farmer he became in reluctant retirement after he was ousted by his own board. Criticising his successors from the floor at one of his last AGM attendances, he roared: ‘I have 1,000 bullocks… but you’ve got a lot more bullshit than me.’ So I’m sorry he’s not around to accost the suits from the New York firm of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (and their adviser, former Tesco chief Sir Terry Leahy) on the intentions behind the takeover bid that sent

Thursday

Andrew Watts

A second home in Cornwall is nothing to be proud of

Last week there was a public toilet for sale on the coast of Cornwall. The Kent-based auctioneer called it ‘an exciting and rare opportunity’, although its video tour of the property did not even undo the padlock on the security door. It was on the market for £20,000, which was a bargain — the last exciting and rare toilet block to be auctioned in Cornwall went for five times its asking price, even though it didn’t have as nice a view. It did, however, have windows. It’s undeniable that the property market in Cornwall is overheating. The backlash to the toilet auction was such that it was withdrawn from sale,

Wednesday

John Myers

How to build more houses

Since the 1930s, bad planning has destroyed swathes of our most precious heritage while causing economic damage that, by some estimates, exceeds that of the second world war. We will end the disaster only if we learn from past mistakes. The current war about housing targets and ‘concreting over the South East’ is the latest in a long line of — generally successful — revolts against government housebuilding plans. In the 1940s, jeering protestors coined the name ‘Silkingrad’ for housing minister Lewis Silkin’s new town of Stevenage. In the 1980s, Nicholas Ridley’s controversial boost in housebuilding was reversed when he was replaced by Chris Patten. And in 2010 the backlash

Wednesday

Christopher Snowdon

The insanity of Britain’s housing market

On the day the Office for National Statistics announced a sharp rise in consumer price inflation, albeit to a still modest 1.5 per cent, we discovered that house prices have jumped by a staggering 10.2 per cent in the last year. The average house in England now costs £275,000, close to ten times the average annual income. In 1992, the average house cost three times the average income. A housing boom during a pandemic in the wake of the deepest recession in 300 years doesn’t make a lot of sense, but a few recent events can partially explain it. After three lockdowns, there is pent-up demand, including for houses. The

Friday

James Forsyth

Why the Tories mustn’t give in to the Nimbys

A 15-point YouGov poll lead and last week’s election performance suggests that things look good for the Tories in England. But some results are still causing concern in Tory ranks. In Cambridgeshire, the party lost control of the county council; in Oxfordshire, the Tory council leader lost his seat; and the Conservatives had their majority on Surrey County Council slashed. Some Tories are quick to point the finger at proposed developments for these losses, as I say in the Times today. They argue that a radical shake-up of the planning system, such as the one the government is proposing, will make this problem far worse. They fear this could put parliamentary seats across the

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Bricks and pieces: the blight of London’s fake facades

‘I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.’ So Augustus is supposed to have said. What would an emperor of London say today? ‘I found the capital a city of bricks and left her a city of rubble’? London bricks are falling down. Across the capital, brick facades are coming off in chunks. Like the Cadbury chocolate Flake, this is the crumbliest, flakiest brickwork. I was all for the new brick city. I’m a brickwork bore. Away with glass, away with steel! Build back better, build back brick. When I saw brick buildings going up in new developments I cheered. I will bang on

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The veiled elitism of social mobility

Levelling up Sir: In making the case for social mobility, Lee Cain unwittingly endorses the classism he hopes to fight (‘Left behind’, 24 April). As the historian Christopher Lasch has argued, the canard of social mobility merely replaces ‘an aristocracy of wealth with an aristocracy of talent’. Far from being egalitarian, the concept is inherently elitist: it implies moving up, out or away from a class, town or profession condemned as undesirable. And by paying lip service to ‘meritocracy’ it becomes a self-serving justification for elites’ power and privilege — if they had the ‘ability and ambition’ to rise to the top, it must only be indolent dullards who are

Thursday

Hamish Scott

The fury and frustration of living in a listed building

You have to really love old houses to buy a listed building. My wife and I know this to our cost. We’re now on our third in a row. In each case we swore we’d never make the same mistake again and then, idiots that we are, we’d be seduced by some deceptively charming little gem and the same story would unfold. It’s not just that old houses are likely to be impractical by modern standards: cold, crumbly and liable to leak. You accept that there’s a price to pay for character and historic heft. Most of these problems can also be lessened with some hard — and usually extremely

Friday

James Forsyth

London’s mayoral race is a warning to Tories nationwide

The London Mayoral election is more of a procession than a race. The only real question is whether Sadiq Khan can manage to win on the first round or not. Shaun Bailey, the Tory challenger, is struggling badly. As I say in The Times today, there are a slew of reasons why the Tories are doing poorly in London: the capital was heavily for Remain and its demographics skew against the Tories. But perhaps the single most important factor is housing.  At the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, in 1990, the home ownership rate for London households headed by someone aged 35 to 44 was 69 per cent. At the time,

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Why is Westminster unable to solve the cladding crisis?

The government was never going to come out well from Monday afternoon’s cladding debate in the House of Commons, given it has taken so long to address the crisis facing tens of thousands of leaseholders trapped in dangerous and unsellable flats or holding bills for tens of thousands of pounds. Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick stayed away entirely, leaving housing minister Chris Pincher to respond at the start and junior housing minister Eddie Hughes to do the wind-up. This gave the impression that ministers do not see this as a priority, despite it developing into a huge scandal that will blight the lives of

Monday

James Max

Where to search for property in 2021

Did anyone get their predictions for the 2020 property market right? I suspect not. We’d barely heard of Covid back in January last year and, if we had, we would have probably written off the housing market for half a decade. But look at property now. Prices are up 5 per cent on average and so too is the volume of sales: £62 billion of extra transactions according to Zoopla compared to 2019. And that’s despite the economic hit we’ve experienced over the last year. I’d suggest the upward trajectory will continue, albeit with a few wobbles. This market movement is being driven by macro factors, not local ones. Low

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The perils of shared ownership

Fancy buying half a flat, paying 100 per cent of the maintenance and the cost of putting right a developer’s shoddy work? Therein lies the great scandal at the heart of shared ownership, the government scheme which BBC Panorama exposed last week but which I others were writing about over a decade ago. Shared ownership has allowed developers to put fancy price tags on properties which they might otherwise struggle to sell The concept sits at the heart of government efforts to increase the rate of home-ownership. Look around at the prices of London flats, compare them with average London salaries and you wonder how anyone can get on the

Thursday

Ross Clark

What virtual property viewings don’t show you

I’ve never worked out why anyone would want to buy an outfit over the internet without first seeing it in the flesh and trying it on. I know my wife does it all the time — although the constant piles of parcels by the door, full of stuff waiting to be sent back whence it came, pays testament to drawbacks of buying things sight unseen. Then again, a suit or a dress is only a suit or a dress. I would rather buy clothes online than I would a five-storey townhouse. But maybe I’m a bit of an old stick-in-the-mud. There are some buyers, it seems, who are only too

Thursday

John Phipps

A beautiful radio adaptation: Radio 4’s The Housing Lark reviewed

Nineteen fifty-six: the Suez crisis, the first Tesco, Jim Laker takes 19 wickets in a match. But also: Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell becomes the first black woman to have a UK number one with ‘The Poor People of Paris’; Kenneth Tynan announces a playwriting competition in the Observer, which is won by the Trinidadian dramatist Errol John, and a third Trinidadian, Sam Selvon, publishes his most enduring novel, The Lonely Londoners. He was photographed the same year by Ida Kerr, looking up out of shot past a crooked nose, a frown half creasing his forehead as a smile plays around the corners of his mouth. Selvon’s novels are fatalistic comedies,

Thursday

James Forsyth

Can Boris build support for his planning reforms?

The government always knew it would have to expend political capital to get its planning reforms through. Making it easier to build houses was never going to be popular with Tories in leafy areas. The benefit of an 80-seat majority was meant to be the ability to push through difficult but important changes. The problem is, as I say in the magazine this week, that the government has been expending political capital on rather a lot of other things recently. Tory MPs are in a fractious mood, irritated by the number of U-turns, and opposition to planning reform is beginning to build up. One normally mild-mannered former cabinet minister tells

Emma Byrne

Is the government about to bankrupt thousands of homeowners?

Within the next year or two, I could go bankrupt. My mistake: to join a government-backed affordable housing scheme and purchase a one-bedroom flat in east London. For the past four years, it has been my pride and joy — not to mention my savings, my pension and my financial future. I was grateful for the government’s help in getting a foothold in the city. But now another government policy is hurtling towards me, against which I have no defence. Nor do potentially tens of thousands of first-time buyers and the owners of affordable housing in my position. It might be the next big scandal to hit the government. It’s

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Boris the builder mustn’t buckle over planning reform

The government will pass the test it has set itself: schools in England will return next week. Pupils may well have to wear masks at times, but they will be back in the classroom. Yet ministers privately acknowledge this isn’t the real challenge. The bigger question is what effect the return of schools has on the prevalence of the virus and what happens to education in the case of further local outbreaks. The exams grading debacle and the various other summer U-turns have been damaging. As one minister concedes: ‘There’s only a limited amount of time before the “incompetence” label sticks. It hasn’t yet — but we can’t afford many

Friday

James Forsyth

Why the Tories can’t back down over planning reforms

A rigid and complicated planning system has long been one of the issues holding back the UK economy. The planning reforms announced by Robert Jenrick this week are designed to bring more predictability and speed to the system. Jenrick’s document is very much a case of politics being the art of the possible. The green belt is left alone in its entirety, despite the fact that a more rational planning system would require examining whether all of the green belt is needed, and if it is all in the right place. For example, building houses around train stations in the green belt would seem a sensible move – but these

Thursday

James Forsyth

Is Boris brave enough to stand up to the Nimbys?

In the next few weeks, the government will publish planning reforms designed to simplify the system and free up land for development, I report in the magazine this week. It is by far the government’s most significant supply-side reform. One of those involved says ‘this is what the Thatcher government should have done but didn’t’. The plans would see the UK move to a zonal development system. In certain land classes, building would be actively encouraged, with a presumption in favour of development. The Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick has pushed aesthetic standards, influenced by the work of the late Roger Scruton, which he believes will ensure new homes are more