Affordable Housing: Supply

Lord Taylor of Goss Moor Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Goss Moor (LD)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my declared interests, as I work in housing and planning in various ways. It is an immense interest of mine. That work came out of policy reviews for successive Governments in this arena.

Before I turn to the issue at hand, I want to address a few comments to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. She made an excellent maiden speech. I remember making my own in the other place rather a long time ago as the then youngest Member of Parliament just elected. She may possibly match one record I think I still have. Ten years later I was still the youngest Member of Parliament. I have a suspicion she may achieve something similar in this place, but we will see.

I have one word of advice. One comes in and people think of you as radical because you are young. Time passes and you are no longer young, but it is very important to remain radical. I have always been a firm believer that the people who should be here, or in the other place or in any other form of public life, should be those who want to change things. Holding on to that is not always easy when you are the beneficiary of the establishment, so I hope—I think she will, to judge by her speech—she will remember that.

Turning to change, it is clear from the speeches across the House how much concern there is, irrespective of party, about the difficulties people have in finding a home. It can be addressed as affording a home, but the truth is that it is finding a home because there are literally millions of people in this country who do not have the home they would wish for. Much of that is hidden. It is young adults living with their parents far beyond the length of time they used to. It is people in inappropriately small accommodation who need larger family accommodation. It is people in flats with children who deserve gardens. It is people in houses in multiple occupation, each of whom should have their own home.

There is a simple fundamental reason for this. It is not addressed by simply saying, “Oh well, the planning system is not really the problem; it is the developers”, or “We need to have more affordable homes”. The fundamental underlying reason is that we have not been building enough homes for decades. We have failed to build enough not by a small amount, but by a very large amount. In the last decade, for all the Government have done, we were about 1 million homes short of what we know needed to be built. In the decade before that, we were at least another 1 million homes short of the numbers we knew we needed to build.

While the 300,000 figure is pretty much universally acclaimed, let us remember what it is built off. Around 250,000 of that is merely addressing the demographic need. The remaining 50,000, which comes originally from work by Kate Barker in two reviews, was a very slow process of building back the undersupply that, at that time, was 1 million or so homes over a decade. It is now 2 million homes over two decades. The figure of 300,000 is only slow progress over many years to address the under-provision that has taken place over so long. Kate Barker said that there is only so fast you can go without causing an impact on house prices that will destabilise household finances. That is properly right. But the truth is that we are coming nowhere near to what needs to be provided.

In my remaining time, I want briefly to address the history of this. Between the two great wars, we were delivering enough homes. It was largely done through the private sector, but also the “homes fit for heroes” policy and the rest of it. Part of the reason for that was that there was a ready supply of land. Anyone who owned land could build on it or sell it to be built on. The problem was that, as people no longer had to walk from home to work or to the shop, and they became able to move more freely, we saw the spread of suburbanisation around towns and cities, and the coastlines and countryside being built up. That is why, after campaigning by organisations like the CPRE, we saw the planning Acts introduced in the 1940s.

However, when they introduced the planning Acts, they knew full well the impacts of restricting the ability to build, so they set out a clear strategy to make sure that enough homes were built. First, they said you should renew the bombed-out cities and the slums—in effect, a form of brownfield first. It was urban renewal, but not with densification and towers; it was on garden city principles of removing the dense slums and giving people decent homes with gardens. You see that in London and the other cities around the UK. We seem to have forgotten that lesson, because what we are building today is not fit for families, as we densify, go up and build flats.

I do not know how many Members of the House of Lords choose to live in a flat as their main home. I suspect some do for second homes. I asked this question when I did a planning review at a time when 45% of all homes being built were flats—it will be similar now. I asked: what proportion of the public did not have to live in a flat because that is all they could afford or because it was a moment in their lifetime? How many actually wanted to live in one? The answer was that, while 45% were being built as flats, just over 1% wanted to live in them.

This is a country where, particularly when you go through the stages of family life, you want access to gardens and open space. Of course there is a role for flats—there is in every country—but we need to remember that those buildings turn to slums very quickly when people who cannot afford to maintain them are in them. Councils could not maintain them and housing associations struggle to maintain them because, over time, their lift shafts, heating systems and windows need to be renewed. All of that is enormously expensive for these properties. I fear that we have forgotten that, the last time we did this, they turned into slums. I fear they will turn into slums again—particularly with offers for the private sector to buy buildings that have been built with 40-year or 50-year lifespans and no intention of renewing them in the long run.

Secondly, they wanted urban renewal around the edges, but they understood that you do not want parasitic development with no facilities and poor-quality housing that destroys historic communities—the towns, villages and cities that we love. They wanted planned urban extensions that would have facilities, schools, hospitals, shops and neighbourhoods. We understand these here in London—we all understand the process of city by neighbourhood, with each neighbourhood in walking distance of the facilities you need for everyday life. That is how they planned those urban extensions, but we have forgotten that. We build housing estates with no facilities at all, cut off from shops and schools. We talk about them as sustainable extensions, but they are anything but; they are just dormitories for people with cars, with no facilities and people struggling to get a dentist or a doctor’s appointment, or struggling to find a school on the other side of town. Everyone in them has to drive because all the facilities are scattered around.

Thirdly, they said that, if you built well in the cities and urban centres on the brownfield sites, there would not be enough homes. If you built well in the urban extensions around the towns and cities but respected people’s desire for them to remain historic places, there would not be enough homes. So you also needed to create new communities, using the ideas of Ebenezer Howard and the new towns programme. Why do we forget that lesson? It is what we need today. The answer is: in the late 1970s, we built enough homes and it worked, but we stopped. When the demographic numbers started to go up again—because people lived longer in their own homes, there was more migration and more babies were born—we forgot all those lessons and started to try to build towers in cities and little urban housing estates around the edges, pretending that you could deliver communities by delivering a minimum number of homes.

We need to go back to the origins of planning and plan long term for place and how places evolve. We need to stop fighting about whether it is 20, 30, 40 or 50 homes this year or next.