You do not have to be exposed to the English planning system for long to realise that it exists primarily to designate acceptable sites for new housing. In my own area of South Worcestershire, the three district councils have prepared a draft local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’ or ‘SWDP’), the bulk of which comprises long lists of potential housing sites in individual towns and villages, together with various justifications for their inclusion.
The most important such justification is the concept of ‘housing need’. This involves calculating a target for the number of new dwellings to be completed in the area covered by the local plan over a given period of time. The Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requires each plan to identify a ‘five year land supply’, or land which is currently approved for housing development to meet the target number of dwellings for the next five years. The figure for local housing need therefore has the effect of determining how many hectares of (usually) countryside get built on. The job of the local planners is then to approve sites and find some suitable reason (often that the site is supposedly ‘sustainable.
But how is housing need calculated? There are actually several different methods, but all involve aggregating several quite different groups of people and using census data to estimate future trends. These groups include people who are homeless or in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation, people who are expected to move into an area to work or retire, and a group termed ‘concealed households’. The latter includes families (with or without children) sharing a house with another family. Census data is used to estimate ‘household formation’, based on expected birth and death rates as well as rates for marriage and divorce. At present, the number of households in England is growing by over 200,000/year, although the mean size of households is falling because of the increasing number of single-parent families and single elderly people.
This is all of course based on a set of social assumptions - that every household should have its own dwelling, even if the ‘household’ is just one lonely adult. A further problem is that housing is highly-differentiated: houses vary in size and type. Some are in a block of flats, a row of terrace-houses, or stand in their own grounds. Most of all, they vary in cost and location - these two often being related. Houses may stand empty because they are in an area no-one wishes to, or can afford to, live in. In fact, there are over 200,000 houses in England which have been empty for more than six months. Some of these, particularly in London, have been left empty because they are an investment by wealthy exiles or foreigners.
However, all this seems to matter little when planners estimate ‘housing need’. In South Worcestershire, the first draft of the SWDP in 2011 estimated a ‘need’ for 20,361 new dwellings between 2006 and 2030. Some of these had of course already been approved or even built by the time the report was published. Local plans do not have any legal force until they are approved by a planning inspector, who is a civil servant pretending to act in a judicial capacity. The most judicial aspect of this whole process of approval is the extraordinary length of time taken to reach a conclusion - comparable to Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’ novel Bleak House. By 2013, the planning inspector reported that he believed that the draft SWDP underestimated rates of household formation, economic activity among elderly people, and various other factors, which led him to conclude that the figure for ‘housing need’ should be revised upwards. The three district councils then produced a revised figure (together with an expanded list of building sites in the countryside) of 23,200. The planning inspector has now begun a leisurely process of consultation, but has suggested that even 23,200 dwellings may be insufficient. He noted that the various developers eager to build houses in South Worcestershire have calculated a ‘need’ for between 23,500 and 36,000 new dwellings.
All this suggests that calculations of ‘housing need’ are not after all a matter of technical calculation, but rather a way of giving a rational gloss to political and economic preferences. District councils in rural areas are under pressure from their electorate to resist large-scale housebuilding. But once planning permission is granted for new houses, agricultural land can increase in value by eighty times. It is not therefore surprising to find that landowners and developers wish to cover the countryside with houses, presumably so that they can use the resulting profits to move their home to an area that is not similarly blighted.
What makes all the calculations of ‘housing need’ nonsense, however, is that the houses that get built do not meet most people’s need for housing. This is because almost all houses are now built by the private corporations, which naturally build the type of houses they can sell at the greatest profit. Houses prices have risen much faster than incomes in the last few years, and the majority of people who do not own a house can not get a mortgage or loan to buy one (or afford the repayments for that matter). This is of course most likely to be the case among people with the most severe housing need. As a result, developers concentrate on meeting the needs of people who can get and afford a mortgage, who are usually those with a house to sell and who wish to move to a larger one. The most profit is made if as many as possible of these houses can be crammed onto a site. This rules out bungalows, however much these are preferred by the elderly and disabled.
One Government policy that is supposed to deal with this problem is ‘affordable housing’. This is another deviously misleading term used in planning, and designates houses which are either for sale or rented at 80% of the market rates. A fifth of dwellings in new housing developments of ten or more houses must be reserved as ‘affordable homes’. Developers do not lose by this policy because they can bid for funds from Central Government to meet this subsidised price. Needless to say, most such ‘affordable housing’ is still beyond the reach of most people who wish to buy or rent a home. Some help comes from Housing Benefit (HB), which is paid to people who are not working or who are in work but with a low income. But this is a major policy disaster. The annual amount paid in HB in England has risen by £2.4 billion since 2010. This is not, it should be emphasised, money spent on building houses, but is instead a kind of subsidy to existing landlords, with the largest profits going to those who are most extortionate and neglectful.
To summarise, our system for planning and housing is extremely successful if you own land, are a developer, or are an unscrupulous landlord. It does not help meet ‘housing need’ in any real sense of the term, and is now promoting the destruction of large areas of the countryside. This is truly another horror of planning.
See also: The horrors of planning No. 1. 'Sustainability'
The most important such justification is the concept of ‘housing need’. This involves calculating a target for the number of new dwellings to be completed in the area covered by the local plan over a given period of time. The Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requires each plan to identify a ‘five year land supply’, or land which is currently approved for housing development to meet the target number of dwellings for the next five years. The figure for local housing need therefore has the effect of determining how many hectares of (usually) countryside get built on. The job of the local planners is then to approve sites and find some suitable reason (often that the site is supposedly ‘sustainable.
But how is housing need calculated? There are actually several different methods, but all involve aggregating several quite different groups of people and using census data to estimate future trends. These groups include people who are homeless or in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory accommodation, people who are expected to move into an area to work or retire, and a group termed ‘concealed households’. The latter includes families (with or without children) sharing a house with another family. Census data is used to estimate ‘household formation’, based on expected birth and death rates as well as rates for marriage and divorce. At present, the number of households in England is growing by over 200,000/year, although the mean size of households is falling because of the increasing number of single-parent families and single elderly people.
This is all of course based on a set of social assumptions - that every household should have its own dwelling, even if the ‘household’ is just one lonely adult. A further problem is that housing is highly-differentiated: houses vary in size and type. Some are in a block of flats, a row of terrace-houses, or stand in their own grounds. Most of all, they vary in cost and location - these two often being related. Houses may stand empty because they are in an area no-one wishes to, or can afford to, live in. In fact, there are over 200,000 houses in England which have been empty for more than six months. Some of these, particularly in London, have been left empty because they are an investment by wealthy exiles or foreigners.
However, all this seems to matter little when planners estimate ‘housing need’. In South Worcestershire, the first draft of the SWDP in 2011 estimated a ‘need’ for 20,361 new dwellings between 2006 and 2030. Some of these had of course already been approved or even built by the time the report was published. Local plans do not have any legal force until they are approved by a planning inspector, who is a civil servant pretending to act in a judicial capacity. The most judicial aspect of this whole process of approval is the extraordinary length of time taken to reach a conclusion - comparable to Jarndyce v Jarndyce in Dickens’ novel Bleak House. By 2013, the planning inspector reported that he believed that the draft SWDP underestimated rates of household formation, economic activity among elderly people, and various other factors, which led him to conclude that the figure for ‘housing need’ should be revised upwards. The three district councils then produced a revised figure (together with an expanded list of building sites in the countryside) of 23,200. The planning inspector has now begun a leisurely process of consultation, but has suggested that even 23,200 dwellings may be insufficient. He noted that the various developers eager to build houses in South Worcestershire have calculated a ‘need’ for between 23,500 and 36,000 new dwellings.
All this suggests that calculations of ‘housing need’ are not after all a matter of technical calculation, but rather a way of giving a rational gloss to political and economic preferences. District councils in rural areas are under pressure from their electorate to resist large-scale housebuilding. But once planning permission is granted for new houses, agricultural land can increase in value by eighty times. It is not therefore surprising to find that landowners and developers wish to cover the countryside with houses, presumably so that they can use the resulting profits to move their home to an area that is not similarly blighted.
What makes all the calculations of ‘housing need’ nonsense, however, is that the houses that get built do not meet most people’s need for housing. This is because almost all houses are now built by the private corporations, which naturally build the type of houses they can sell at the greatest profit. Houses prices have risen much faster than incomes in the last few years, and the majority of people who do not own a house can not get a mortgage or loan to buy one (or afford the repayments for that matter). This is of course most likely to be the case among people with the most severe housing need. As a result, developers concentrate on meeting the needs of people who can get and afford a mortgage, who are usually those with a house to sell and who wish to move to a larger one. The most profit is made if as many as possible of these houses can be crammed onto a site. This rules out bungalows, however much these are preferred by the elderly and disabled.
One Government policy that is supposed to deal with this problem is ‘affordable housing’. This is another deviously misleading term used in planning, and designates houses which are either for sale or rented at 80% of the market rates. A fifth of dwellings in new housing developments of ten or more houses must be reserved as ‘affordable homes’. Developers do not lose by this policy because they can bid for funds from Central Government to meet this subsidised price. Needless to say, most such ‘affordable housing’ is still beyond the reach of most people who wish to buy or rent a home. Some help comes from Housing Benefit (HB), which is paid to people who are not working or who are in work but with a low income. But this is a major policy disaster. The annual amount paid in HB in England has risen by £2.4 billion since 2010. This is not, it should be emphasised, money spent on building houses, but is instead a kind of subsidy to existing landlords, with the largest profits going to those who are most extortionate and neglectful.
To summarise, our system for planning and housing is extremely successful if you own land, are a developer, or are an unscrupulous landlord. It does not help meet ‘housing need’ in any real sense of the term, and is now promoting the destruction of large areas of the countryside. This is truly another horror of planning.
See also: The horrors of planning No. 1. 'Sustainability'
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