On 23rd February I was asked to be a witness to support housing in the countryside. (Listen to Kate again here: approx 28 mins 50 seconds in)
To do this, I did quite a lot of research and thought it would be useful to highlight how ridiculous the call is that developers are ‘concreting’ over Britain.
My key point is that we have a housing crisis in the UK – but one that is rarely properly defined. The true housing crisis isn’t greedy landlords and developers, who are often blamed, it’s simple:-
There are between 1.2mn (Government stats) and 1.6mn households (National Housing Federation estimates) who are eligible.
This is the true housing crisis, rarely raised. What we hear about instead is private developers aren’t doing enough and are limiting supply to keep prices up and landlords are charging extortionate rent. Although this kind of bad behaviour will happen in any market – and does – in the main, the private sector is delivering decent quality homes and putting roofs over people’s heads.
What isn’t happening is successive governments, councils and the planners are failing miserably to actually build homes for vulnerable people on minimum wage and on benefits.
The second ‘blame game’ that isn’t used and should be in my opinion is that businesses are not paying staff enough. Wages for some time now haven’t even kept up with inflation, let alone housing inflation, and instead the tax payer is picking up the bill for Local Housing Allowance to spend in the private rented sector instead.
It’s a vicious circle. Wages aren’t high enough, local authorities aren’t building / providing enough social homes, landlords and developers are blamed for the lack of stock and ‘sky high prices’. Because of this, restrictions, tax increases etc have been curbed by the government to stop the growth of the PRS. The news headlines say that these ‘evil’ landlords are taking billions of tax payers’ money in rent, but make no mention of the fact that this is only happening because:-
There are then less properties to let as landlords pull out, then rents go up, then the blame game happens all over again.
It’s madness and it’s unfair on the many well deserving people who need and are eligible for a decent roof over their head.
When you consider government – and indeed Shelter’s – failure to make the differences required in the PRS, despite all the new laws introduced, putting vulnerable people in a poorly regulated PRS and then not giving them the funds they need to live there is a national disgrace.
The programme came from a letter written to Michael Gove by countryside organisations to ask that in the levelling up agenda, people were given a ‘legal right’ to access ‘nature’ within a 15-minute walk of their home.
Do I agree? Well yes and no!
I think we already have nature all around us, even in big cities, but if I’m honest, if people have a right to anything it should be access to a quality roof over their head that they can afford – especially when on minimum wage or UC.
Our housing crisis – often never really defined - means we need land, more than anyone else is the 1.2 (gov figs) -1.6mn (NHF) people who are eligible or should have access to a social home that successive governments have:
1. Sold off and
2. Didn’t re-invest in.
Most are now in temporary accommodation/B&Bs and the Private Rented Sector which the government is failing to regulate properly.
From my perspective, I am happy to support people having access to nature – but not until we have made sure that those that need it are given a decent door to walk out of, and at the moment, that isn’t happening.
While we continue to blame the private sector, the social sector will continue to be allowed to ‘get away’ with not delivering and that’s not right.
A good example is in Bristol, when instead of focusing on delivering the 13,000 households that are eligible for social housing, they are focusing on worsening the housing crisis by looking at rent controls which have proved time and time again to fail tenants.
The big surprise to many is that most of the land in the UK is not given to housing. In fact, it’s estimated we care more about our golfers than we do putting a roof over people’s heads, as they are estimated to take up twice as much land as we give to housing.
Funny that no-one blames the golfers for a lack of housing!
According to this data around 5% of land is given to housing and around 8-10% is urbanised – not exactly ‘concreting’ over the UK!
Source: Countryfile
Urban areas represent an estimated 8% of the total UK land area
And I am surprised at the call from ‘more land’ for nature. There is lots of land given over to nature!
This data from the ONS shows that of all functional green space area, 67.9% is publicly accessible in Great Britain, made up of parks and gardens (51.3%), playing fields (33.1%), cemeteries (8.9%), and religious grounds (6.7%).
In Wales, 69.9% of functional green space is publicly accessible, higher than England and Scotland with 68.4% and 64.2% respectively.
Source: Ordnance Survey
Definition of ‘Natural land cover’
Any land cover classified as being natural in type, for example, grassland, heath, scrub, orchards, coniferous trees and so on but does not include inland water bodies.
And in some other research I’ve carried out, Dr Oliver Hartwich shows that "less than 10 per cent of England was developed", he said, "while 55 per cent, including the national parks, was protected by conservationists".
Only 8 per cent of land in Britain is urban, half the figure in the Netherlands and also less than Belgium, Germany and Denmark.
78 per cent of UK land is used for agriculture, compared to an EU average of 64.2 per cent.
"Even if England's urban areas were expanded by 10 per cent", said Dr Hartwich, "it would use up less than 1 per cent of the country's total landmass".
Goodness me – how much more land at the expense of vulnerable people has to be ‘given back’.
Building homes and a right to nature aren’t mutually exclusive, in fact the opposite
My other point was that the idea of building homes means a loss of nature is just wrong today. Just like zoos have become amazing conservationists, so are developers learning to nurture nature and many large developments have been recognising the need and desire for green/outdoor space for years.
Here are some great examples you may not know about!
Newhall, near Harlow –The area used to be 250 acres (101ha) of farmland and woodland, which made up New Hall Farm, and the farm’s owners are still the current landowners. Aim to create 2,200 homes which will be no further than 65 yards from a ‘green space’; some 40 per cent of the entire area has been set aside for parks and a wildlife reserve.
Milton Keynes – whole new town built on farmland, delivering a major community where everyone has access to green space within ½ mile – so about 5-10 minutes’ walk away. The Trust’s sheep and cattle graze around 750 acres of the parkland, helping to create a richer diversity of wildlife and encourage the growth of wildflower rich meadows. In addition, there are 50 horse and pony paddocks covering over 85 acres of land. On average, around 40,000 new trees and shrubs are planted each year to replace plants dying out or those affected by utility works and landscape remodelling. Since 1992, they have planted one million new trees and shrubs, and in the last nine years, planted over 400,000 bulbs.
The latest development by Barratt called Springfield Place, near Tooting Bec, will have 1,000 homes, and a 32 acre park on an old hospital site, 20% of which will be affordable.
Chatting this through with Barratt, their green credentials are huge, when developing homes during 2021 they also created:
The private sector is absolutely delivering green space from an owner occupation perspective, the problem is, the government/local authorities are not delivering, because they seem to ignore the need to meet their housing list targets and spend time blaming the problem on private landlords or large developers.
The reality is, the countryside research is far too narrow
I don’t need to do research to know that if you had asked them what the most important thing was, it would be to have an affordable roof over their head first.
I expect if they had asked in the research what other facilities they wanted, they would have also said a local pub, good local transport links, a good doctors, and a shop.
And without enough people to service all of these things, to only have a few wealthy people having access to lots of wildlife is utterly useless.
Having lots of undeveloped fields is useless.
But what about the huge profits developers make?
Yes, developers are doing well just now. But this is a ‘boom and bust’ business and they suffered horrendously in the last crash – we lost most of our medium sized developers.
But things ebb and flow. For example, latest research suggests that the cost of construction for a new-build property is set to climb by almost £18,000 per unit in 2022 – a jump that could cost UK housebuilders £3.2 billion per year.
That is according to research by Sirius Property Finance, which shows that the current average cost of constructing a new-build home sits at £2,375 per sq m. With the average house coming in at 73.45 sq ms, that’s a total estimated construction cost of £174,444 per property.
With an estimated 181,846 homes built last year in the UK, that’s a total of £31.7 billion spent on the cost of construction.
A profitable house building sector means that they can buy land and build the houses we need, what’s so bad about that?
I don’t think people realise the reality of Green Belt. It’s an incredibly outdated concept – it’s 80 years old, it does not work or necessarily apply for today.
Already, England’s 14 Green Belts cover more than a tenth (12.4%) of land in the country, and provide a breath of fresh air for 30 million people. We give more to the Green Belt than we do to build homes for vulnerable people – it’s wrong. Source: CPRE
For example, “London’s Green Belt makes up 22 per cent of London’s land area”. If this land was developed sensibly, alongside easy access for people because we built homes for them nearby, then why not?
The rules currently prevent taking pressure off the homeless and vulnerable that need homes in:-
For more on the Green Belt, it’s worth reading: ‘Beware the new justifications for the green belt: what we need is a new approach' by Alan Mace, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Studies in the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE.
My conclusion
There is so much misinformation on property which we have to put right and the above is my attempt to get some of the truth out there.
The lack of government, council and planners’ support for social housing is a national disgrace. We have the money, the land and it’s not a cost – it delivers back in buckets from an investment perspective.
So let’s focus the housing crisis on building the social homes that people need, where they need them!
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