Housing

Though the government's planning reforms will make it easier for developments supported by local communities to gain planning permission, one of the big blockages in the system is made up of developers themselves. The government is becoming increasingly aware of this, and one ministerial aide close to housing policy has come up with a solution. Jake Berry, who has worked as PPS to Grant Shapps since November 2010, has written a paper for Number 10, which Coffee House has had exclusive sight of. It argues that developers who land bank sites with planning permission should be penalised for doing so.

The planning debate has reared its head again, and this time it’s personal. David Cameron is now calling on people to stop their ‘familiar cry’ of opposition to new housing so that he could end the ‘dithering’ and get homes built. Fraser Nelson called this ‘taking aim’ at NIMBYs, and we believe the Prime Minister was right to do so. The principle of doing something to help the current generation who, even if they work and save hard, remain almost completely priced out of the housing market often gets nodding agreement.

The Policy Exchange report Ending Expensive Social Tenancies has predictably provoked a renewed debate about council housing and the value of genuinely mixed communities. It was welcomed by the right as providing a potential narrative for ending the automatic claim of the working and non-working poor to live in more salubrious neighbourhoods, whilst some on the left have attacked it as a fundamental attack on the very notion of council housing. On the basis of my experience as leader of Southwark Council - the largest social landlord in London - I believe the report actually presents us with an opportunity to start talking about what we want our social housing to deliver in future decades, and whether it is time to challenge the direction of so-called ‘affordable housing’.

Your local council owns prime real estate and could sell it to build new social houses. Housing Minister Grant Shapps says the appeal of this idea promoted by Policy Exchange is 'obvious'. With a potential pot of £5.5bn to build up to 170,000 affordable homes, what’s not to like? Plenty, apparently: Labour MP Karen Buck warned of a risk to communities, and the importance of mixing groups within our population. Lord Prescott called the idea ‘gerrymandering'. The empty slogans come from both sides. When someone says ‘nobody has a right to live in’ Chelsea they ought to remember that some people do have a right to live there, and that they pay for that right.

Yesterday's housing strategy offered a mortgage guarantee for first-time buyers of new properties, one of the few new announcements in a document largely consisting of re-hashed policy. At best, the mortgage guarantee helps to provide a boost to house builders and welcome relief for some credit-worthy borrowers who simply can't build up a sufficient deposit. At worst, it encourages risky lending, subsidises high house prices and raises unrealistic expectations for young families. Unaffordable, reckless lending (at least, up until the credit crunch and collapse of the sub-prime market) threatened the stability of the financial sector and caused misery to thousands of homeowners who later found themselves falling behind on payments and threatened with eviction.

The government's announcement on housing today is an attempt to square the circle. On the one hand, a return to excessive lending and sub-prime mortgages is clearly not a good thing. Critics say, with justification, look where government backed mortgages got America. But on the other, there are clearly problems when people who aren't fortunate enough to have parental help aren't getting on the housing ladder until well into their thirties. Conservatives who understand the importance of a property-owning democracy should be concerned about this. The Coalition's solution — and this is the most genuinely coalition piece of policy we've seen in months — is partial government indemnities for people taking out 95 per cent mortgages on new build properties.

If George Osborne is serious about growth, a relatively easy decision awaits him: to stimulate the economy by spending more on housebuilding. David Cameron knows there's a problem, and during Tory conference announced a "Tory Housing Revolution" to tackle the failing housing market, and plans to boost Right to Buy and release more land for house building that will deliver 200,000 new homes and create 400,000 jobs. All welcome, suggesting the government has recognised the role that housing can play in creating growth. But if the Treasury is looking to stimulate demand in the short term, there's still much more that could be done. Investment in housing can happen fast.

This is the second of our occasional 'another voice' series. Siobhan Courtney reports again from Dale Farm. The outcome was not what anyone expected: the bailiffs are not getting into Dale Farm. The atmosphere here now is very different to that of the weekend, when I was able to see what life was like inside Dale Farm. The travellers, cheering with joy and hugging each other have just won an injunction preventing Basildon Council from clearing the site pending a further hearing on Friday. Blockades, scaffolding and walls erected by the travellers and protestors stand defiant.

There was much to commend in Chris Skidmore’s article in the Telegraph earlier this week, calling for a radical approach to public services. But there’s one bit that’s worth dissecting: his idea that people in social housing might sell their homes to invest in shared equity, if they behave well. Here’s what he says: 'Any social housing tenant, under certain conditions of tenure and behaviour, would be able to sell their property and retain a proportion of the equity, reserved for investing in a shared equity programme, giving them a first step onto the housing ladder. The remaining equity would be used to build more affordable housing to meet demand.

This government has developed rather a reputation for u-turning. But I would be extremely surprised if it did one over its planning reforms. When you talk to ministers and advisers one is struck by how up for this fight they are. They’re convinced that it is only by taking on these vested interests that they’ll get their message across to the public. And unlike on forests or the NHS, Number 10 and the Treasury are fully on board. There are those who claim that these reforms are profoundly un-conservative. But, in fact, the opposite is the case as Charles Moore argues with his typical eloquence in today’s Telegraph. As Charles says, planning isn’t a conservative concept it is a socialist one.

The slump in home ownership is reported today as a bad thing. Many Conservatives, who believe that home ownership releases what the late Shirley Letwin called "vigorous virtues", may agree. So might Labour, which came to regret its opposition to the Thatcher policy of allowing council tenants to buy their home. Like inflation targeting, home ownership was a solution that worked so well in the 1990s that it was vigorously pursued in the next decade. But here's the rub: it had disastrous effects. In this case, the disaster was governments pursuing greater home ownership as a policy goal. This meant cheap loans, which meant subprime mortgages, which meant a credit bubble.