six - Solutions

Summary

If we had a planning system we could trust to define growth needs in credible ways and to defend core assets in the long term. If we combined that with processes for land assembly and for the public ‘capture’ of land values that would make the plans deliverable. If we had a development industry that produced quality, funded for the long-term with ‘patient capital’, private and public. If we at CPRE [Campaign to Protect Rural England] evolved our position on how Town & Country can be reconciled to meet both development needs and the protection of landscape, the environment and country life…. Then we might be able to engage in the creative way our founders did.

Until then, it seems we have to simply keep on saying ‘not an inch of the Green Belt, development must be predominantly brownfield’, and so on. Because any other posture takes too many risks with our core values. (Crookston, 2016)

Introduction

After the 2017 Housing White Paper was published, Housing Minister Gavin Barwell went around the country saying, ‘there’s no silver bullet solution. If there was, one of my predecessors would have found it’ (Barwell, 2017). He was teased for saying this in countless interviews, but he was right. There rarely are ‘silver bullets’ in politics, and there are complex and deep-seated reasons why we have failed for many years to build enough new homes of the right sort.

• • Economically, a good deal of national and personal wealth is tied up in property. Politicians tread carefully.

• • Culturally, land in our small, beautiful and highly populated country has peculiar significance. There is broad national agreement that we should take great care where we build. When politicians or developers ignore this sentiment, they are fiercely resisted. Planning restrictions are an expression of the national will. Weakening planning laws will not stop communities fighting for places they care about.

• • Politically, faith in the market and hostility to council housing have been core to post-1979 Conservatism, but the Thatcherite housing legacy is now in tatters. Conservatives must look beyond mythology and ideology to the evidence, and countenance solutions that have been taboo since Mrs Thatcher’s time.

• • Who is going to build the homes we need? There are too few firms able or willing to do so.