The wrong houses in the wrong places

As a parish councillor, I spend much of my time reading and preparing responses to planning applications. My quiet village in the Worcestershire countryside is now under assault from landowners who wish to profit from the massive increases in the values of their fields when planning permission to build houses has been approved. It was estimated in 2015 that agricultural land, on average, increases in value from £21,000/ hectare to £1.95 million/hectare once planning permission has been granted.

So we currently have applications for over a hundred houses, which would have the effect of increasing commuter traffic down our narrow lanes, taking good agricultural land out of food production, and straining public services such as drainage and sewage, water supply, education and primary healthcare. Each of these applications comprises many plans and reports, all of which are published online by the district council. The various reports are produced by specialist private agencies and deal with the implications of the proposed development for such matters as transport, drainage, health and ‘visual impact’. They are paid for by the developer and, not surprisingly, always seem to come out in favour of the development.

I have learnt over time to be suspicious of the quality of these reports. I have found that they are frequently inconsistent, contain basic factual errors, and even suppress unwelcome information. However, they sometimes include things that are interesting and provide enlightenment. One such is a recent drainage report which concluded that most of my village has been built on an aquifer. This explains the frequent floods at times of heavy rain, the incessant dampness in our houses, and why, for instance, the pit in the local garage always fills up with water at such times. This should not of course have been too much of a surprise. The village is surrounded by hills on three sides and the land even rises on the fourth side where the main road heads to Worcester.

Although most of the village was built on an aquifer, there are dry places. All the old buildings, from our 12th Century parish church until about the 19th Century were constructed on higher and drier ground. The contrast with lower-lying ground is striking. Due South of the parish church is a field which has a lake and is now a wildlife reserve. This would have been convenient as an extension to the overcrowded graveyard around the church. But the water-table in that field is so high that, when conducting funeral services by the graveside, the vicar would have needed to use the section of the prayerbook for burials at sea.

Unfortunately, villages in the past often lacked enough dryfield and houses in villages and towns were built on soggier ground. This problem was faced in the Middle Ages, when people constructed towns in excellent locations for trade where the only land was also an excellent location for flooding. This is shown in the photograph from 2007 of the lovely market town of Tewkesbury, where the Rivers Avon and Severn meet and where the only dry ground is occupied by the abbey. 

Since then, in Tewkesbury and elsewhere, modern houses have been built on ground even more prone to flooding. Indeed, 10,000 houses each year are built on flood plains in England and in the coalition government in 2011 relaxed planning rules to make this easier.

Why did this happen? The main reason is that governments in England have decided that housebuilding should be outsourced to private corporations and, to a lesser degree, to housing associations. They must therefore be encouraged to build houses by removing any impediments which might reduce their profitability. This has meant weakening planning laws and building regulations, even those which protect the buyers from flooding and fire. It has also meant allowing housebuilding on flood plains (where land is cheap) and on good agricultural land (because this is cheaper to build on than brownfield sites).

This policy has not been particularly successful in meeting the demand for new houses. Most experts identify a need for 250,000 new dwellings/year, while in the last decade the number completed is about 130,500/year. The large building corporations instead accumulate land which has planning permission so that 40% of such sites are at any one time undeveloped. The building corporations do this because the shortage of homes keeps prices high. Why incur the cost of building twice as many houses when this would radically depress prices and profit margins?

The outsourcing of housebuilding in England may have failed to meet the need for new houses, but it has been very successful in other ways. Housebuilding is one of the most profitable sectors of the British economy, with profit margins on each house completion double that made in the USA. The largest UK housebuilder (Persimmon) pays its senior management team a bonus of £100 million/year. In response, the property sector generously rewards the Conservative Party. A recent article in the Financial Times reported that the property sector provided £18 million pounds for the party in the last two years, equivalent to a quarter of its total donations. See: https://www.ft.com/content/c5737fbb-2893-4a5a-be5e-965785f1a37b.

So insufficient houses are built and houses are built in the wrong places, but the system works well for landowners, the building corporations, the Conservative Party and the many private agencies that produce the multiple misleading reports that accompany each planning application.