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Housing Beyond Markets and State

November 17, 2021   By John Myers and
In partnership with

It’s not NIMBYs preventing housing being built – it’s a system that creates conflict by design.

Local planning authorities should be given the chance to let communities say Yes.

Housing Beyond Markets and State sets out the powers that councils and communities need to fix our broken planning system.

Council planners need extended powers over who builds in their areas and how quickly they do it. This should include the freedom to tax developers sitting on empty land.

Communities should be involved in street-level planning, ‘gentle intensification’, and consensus decision-making. The report is full of inspiring examples of places pioneering this approach, from Liverpool to Zurich.

Executive Summary

We do not build enough homes to meet the housing needs of the country and have not done so for decades.

Despite successive Governments’ attempts to set targets, to fund development and, especially, to overhaul the planning system, these reforms have yet to produce enough homes in the right places. This has created a crisis of affordability, which harms people and undermines economic performance.

Housing supply is caught between a complex set of planning requirements, balancing national and locally generated policy, and what are ultimately simplistic quantitative delivery targets.

These targets neither recognise the qualitative needs of an individual place, nor account for economic circumstances found within it.

As a consequence, the current system creates an adversarial culture that inclines people to be hostile to any new developments, rather than building consensus to create win-win solutions.

At the heart of the tension between communities and development is a reaction to a system that has excluded residents from important decisions about their place at the key moments. The inability to genuinely influence key decisions about major housing development has led to strong feelings of disenfranchisement.

Case Study: Community Review Panel, Southwark Council

If we are to end the chronic undersupply of homes, we need to develop a community-powered approach to planning and housing, starting with a radical change in how we think about the places where we live.

Because of the complex interrelated effects of each property and space on other inhabitants, these places should be seen as a commons. This refers to the outcomes collectively generated by inhabitants and all those who take part in activities in the area, with communities themselves managing precious local resources.

In realising these principles, government and the planning system need to work with the community, meeting people’s desire to participate in decisions that affect the places where they live.

This would involve including them in discussions about their built environment through participatory techniques and other innovative approaches.

Case Study: Lancaster Cohousing

To embed a community-powered approach in housing and planning, we recommend the following three strategies for central and local government to consider:

  • Give local planning authorities more powers and incentives to meet local housing needs, including the freedom to impose a modest tax on the value of unused consented sites.
  • Enable a more collaborative culture to replace existing adversarial local planning, moving away from the existing adversarial approach by investing in the ability of officers and members to work with communities.
  • Create the necessary framework to enable communities to have more of a role and say, making greater use of participatory and deliberative approaches in planning, from local forums to citizens’ assemblies.

Rather than yet another top-down set of ‘radical’ planning reforms, a truly radical community-powered approach could change attitudes to development and help spur the large-scale housebuilding boom that the government desires and this country needs.

A Housing System in Crisis

The undersupply of homes has led to a crisis of affordability. If you added up the prices of all the homes in the UK today, it would be approximately three times higher than the actual cost of building that many homes.

Only 23 per cent of the new homes built in England in 2019-20 are considered affordable. The proportion of affordable homes completed has varied considerably over the last decade, peaking at 40 per cent in 2010-11 and dipping to as low as 16 per cent in 2015-16.

Affordability issues have meant that increasing numbers of people are homeless or without suitable accommodation. An estimated 280,000 people were homeless in England in 2019, a nine per cent increase since 2016, and recent years have seen over a million households on local authority housing waiting lists, many of them living in overcrowded temporary accommodation. About 8.4 million people in England are living in unaffordable and unsuitable homes:

  • 1.4 million are living in sub-standard housing
  • 3.6 million people are still living in overcrowded accommodation
  • 1.7 million are living in homes which are unsuitable for their needs.

Many millions more are living far away from where they would prefer to live (nearer to employment opportunities, to friends or family), or are paying far more than they should be paying in rent.

Not only does this deprive hundreds of thousands of people of appropriate housing, it also undermines wider economic performance. Studies have shown that housing shortages have caused a significant reduction in overall average wages, welfare and GDP.

The Barker Review 2006 found that lower rates of house building can lead to reduced labour mobility and constrained productivity, contributing to an overall cost in terms of economic welfare.

The need for a new approach

In order to meet increasing demand for housing, before even starting to meet existing unmet demand, we will need to build 340,000 new homes every year until 2031. However, only around 148,880 homes were built in England in 2020 – many of them in the wrong locations. While there was a general upward trend in housing completions before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, rising from 109,440 in 2013 to 177, 880 in 2019, this was still far below the level of house building we need to see.

Case Study: Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust

If we are to change the story, we need to try something new. This report argues that it is time for communities to play a major role in getting more homes built to meet the needs of existing and new members of those communities, now and into the future.

It is often assumed that communities will always seek to block development, rather than back it. But when people have no real opportunities for constructive participation, often their only option is to oppose.

By enabling people to take greater control of the system and to shape housing growth so that it benefits them, the current adversarial zero-sum system can be dismantled and the incentives for oppositionalism reduced or removed.

About this report

This research seeks to identify the key barriers to enabling communities to support more housing in their area, how these can be removed and what potential this could unleash in terms of the future of housebuilding.

Unlike many other failed attempts, we are not proposing a root and branch reform of the existing system. Rather, we propose supplementary processes that can work with the grain of local communities’ wishes, without jeopardising the existing supply of housing.

This report outlines the problems with the current system, which is no longer fit for purpose.

Then it makes the case for a community-powered reform to housing and planning, before sketching out the key principles of that approach.

The report concludes with a set of recommendations to help bring this vision into reality.


Date
November 17, 2021
Authored by

John Myers and
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