24 October 2007
Let’s just have more homes
Claire Fox
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It’s a good job Liverpool is a city of culture, because its neighbour, Manchester, has rather compromised its arty credentials.
Any aspiring Mancunian musicians will have to get past the city council’s anti-social behaviour action team if they want to practise at home.
This month, two classical violinists were threatened with a Noise Abatement Notice and a warrant to enter their property to seize their instruments.
Manchester’s red-faced director of housing, Deborah McLaughlin, admitted the response might have been ‘heavy-handed’ – never mind Philistine. However it is a sign of the times that local housing services are more likely to proactively stamp on ‘unacceptable’ behaviour than to hit the headlines for doing anything actually related to housing per se.
Housing policy is in a muddle and plans to put housing at the centre of the Government’s community cohesion strategy will make things even more confusing. Housing services are being charged with solving the problems of segregated communities, ethnic and religious tensions and broader fragmentation.
Meanwhile, my own council, Haringey has taken to spying on residents from the sky. Earlier this year it hired a plane equipped with a thermal-imaging camera and proceeded to check on local homes deemed wasteful of energy or lying empty.
But here’s a novel idea – why doesn’t housing policy concentrate its energy on building houses? The housing minister Yvette Cooper, has been strident in her proclamations about the need for more and cheaper houses, and has chastised those councils reluctant to free up land for new building. And prime minister Gordon Brown has promised us three million new homes by 2020.
But before the nation’s homeless pat New Labour on the back, there are some sobering reality checks to confront. It is easy to look good when promises of new builds are contrasted with a rubbish baseline. Despite recent rhetoric, the Green Paper’s target is far too conservative.
We have built so few houses each year we are not even managing to replace dilapidated stock, and realistically, we need five million homes in the next decade, just to catch up. Even Mrs Thatcher, infamous for flogging off 1.6 million council houses, managed to construct more houses than New Labour has.
Ms Cooper has inferred that one barrier to house building is local planners’ intransigence and NIMBY-ism. Undoubtedly, panics about concreting over the countryside, and excessive municipal red tape, have choked back building.
But the orthodoxy of building only on brownfield sites is more a result of housing once more being sacrificed to another political priority, in this instance, environmental impacts.
It is central government which has focused the housing debate on zero emissions, eco homes and minimising energy consumption. The DCLG promises to work with contractors and architects to design and build ‘flagship zero-carbon and low-carbon communities’. But micro-managing every new build project to ensure it meets the supposed limits imposed by climate change can only lead to nervousness about mass building programmes.
Sustainability, in the context of reducing carbon, will always mean less. The Green Paper’s chapter on infrastructure promises to ensure that growth is planned to ‘reduce demand for the new infrastructure’. But building more homes will require more energy use. It’s only shantytowns and slums with no electricity that can boast that their carbon footprint is minimal.
Having a roof over your head shouldn’t be too much to ask from a modern society, and local authorites should be key players in this crucial task.
This is not about fetishising social housing. The world has moved on since 1979, when half the population lived in council-provided homes.
Today, almost three-quarters of us own our own homes, and barely one in 10 are housed by councils. Nevertheless, housing departments should concentrate on their core activity – housing.
Forget policing violin-playing neighbours, or counting carbon. Just build, build, build, and I guarantee you, communities will thrive and cohere if you do.
Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas
Any aspiring Mancunian musicians will have to get past the city council’s anti-social behaviour action team if they want to practise at home.
This month, two classical violinists were threatened with a Noise Abatement Notice and a warrant to enter their property to seize their instruments.
Manchester’s red-faced director of housing, Deborah McLaughlin, admitted the response might have been ‘heavy-handed’ – never mind Philistine. However it is a sign of the times that local housing services are more likely to proactively stamp on ‘unacceptable’ behaviour than to hit the headlines for doing anything actually related to housing per se.
Housing policy is in a muddle and plans to put housing at the centre of the Government’s community cohesion strategy will make things even more confusing. Housing services are being charged with solving the problems of segregated communities, ethnic and religious tensions and broader fragmentation.
Meanwhile, my own council, Haringey has taken to spying on residents from the sky. Earlier this year it hired a plane equipped with a thermal-imaging camera and proceeded to check on local homes deemed wasteful of energy or lying empty.
But here’s a novel idea – why doesn’t housing policy concentrate its energy on building houses? The housing minister Yvette Cooper, has been strident in her proclamations about the need for more and cheaper houses, and has chastised those councils reluctant to free up land for new building. And prime minister Gordon Brown has promised us three million new homes by 2020.
But before the nation’s homeless pat New Labour on the back, there are some sobering reality checks to confront. It is easy to look good when promises of new builds are contrasted with a rubbish baseline. Despite recent rhetoric, the Green Paper’s target is far too conservative.
We have built so few houses each year we are not even managing to replace dilapidated stock, and realistically, we need five million homes in the next decade, just to catch up. Even Mrs Thatcher, infamous for flogging off 1.6 million council houses, managed to construct more houses than New Labour has.
Ms Cooper has inferred that one barrier to house building is local planners’ intransigence and NIMBY-ism. Undoubtedly, panics about concreting over the countryside, and excessive municipal red tape, have choked back building.
But the orthodoxy of building only on brownfield sites is more a result of housing once more being sacrificed to another political priority, in this instance, environmental impacts.
It is central government which has focused the housing debate on zero emissions, eco homes and minimising energy consumption. The DCLG promises to work with contractors and architects to design and build ‘flagship zero-carbon and low-carbon communities’. But micro-managing every new build project to ensure it meets the supposed limits imposed by climate change can only lead to nervousness about mass building programmes.
Sustainability, in the context of reducing carbon, will always mean less. The Green Paper’s chapter on infrastructure promises to ensure that growth is planned to ‘reduce demand for the new infrastructure’. But building more homes will require more energy use. It’s only shantytowns and slums with no electricity that can boast that their carbon footprint is minimal.
Having a roof over your head shouldn’t be too much to ask from a modern society, and local authorites should be key players in this crucial task.
This is not about fetishising social housing. The world has moved on since 1979, when half the population lived in council-provided homes.
Today, almost three-quarters of us own our own homes, and barely one in 10 are housed by councils. Nevertheless, housing departments should concentrate on their core activity – housing.
Forget policing violin-playing neighbours, or counting carbon. Just build, build, build, and I guarantee you, communities will thrive and cohere if you do.
Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas
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