England is building more homes than it has for many years

TO THE WEST of the road, a housing estate blossoms behind the hedgerows. Identikit boxes bestride gravel drives; the gardens are festooned with decking. The eastern side of this road in Wiltshire is another England: rolling fields where cattle stare down traffic. But that idyll is being encroached on, too. At one end of the road, two new estates near completion; at the other, a third welcomes its first residents. Locals bemoan a damaged environment and homeless newts. But in this competition between two Englands, it seems clear which is winning.

In the key battleground of London and the south-east, however, housing developers are facing stiffer resistance. After decades of demand far outstripping supply, Britain is once again building lots of homes, but not yet as many as the government wants—and, worse, not in the right places. It wants to force councils in popular, pricey regions to allow more development, but is wavering in the face of electoral opposition. At stake is not just Britain’s urban and rural landscape, but its political landscape, too.

In 2017 Theresa May, then prime minister, reiterated a long-standing but never-met target of 300,000 new homes per year for England. Between April 2019 and March 2020, 244,000 were built, the most since 1987. That followed six years of net increases in the housing stock. But many were in cheaper areas, such as the south-west and west Midlands, and not enough were in London and the south-east, where already-high prices and projected population growth suggest expansion is most needed. The population of East Sussex, for example, has grown by 9% over the past decade and is expected to grow by 8% over the coming one. But its housing stock has increased by just 5.8% since 2010. Last year Mrs May’s successor, Boris Johnson, proposed a big overhaul of the planning system, both to hit the national target and to rebalance where houses are built.

Planning rules have already been loosened in several ways over the past decade. A change in 2012 made it easier to build on farmland near towns, the effects of which can already be seen in places such as Wiltshire. According to Residential Analysts, a research firm, over the past decade the price paid per plot by the big housebuilders stayed steady or even fell. This suggests that supply constraints caused by over-restrictive planners have not been reflected in the price of land, says Neal Hudson, the firm’s founder.

In 2013 rules about redeveloping existing buildings were loosened, which encouraged the conversion of derelict warehouses in city centres into flats. And last year Mr Johnson reiterated a previous Tory promise to allow developers to build higher. A subsequent boom in such projects shows that local authorities had indeed been acting as a brake on development, says Anthony Breach of the Centre for Cities, a think-tank.

Even after these reforms, however, planners often stop local supply rising in response to local demand. The Local Government Association (LGA), a trade body for councils, argues that nine out of ten planning applications are approved. But that disguises wide regional variation. Councils within commuting distance of London still block much development. According to the Centre for Cities, over a fifth of urban neighbourhoods outside city centres have built no new houses since 2011. Getting lots more houses built, says Mr Breach, will require “every expensive area to do their bit”.

There has also been too little thought about the mix of new housing, says Mr Hudson. Britain isn’t suffering from a monolithic housing crisis, but several different ones. Some big cities struggle to build anywhere near enough; Liverpool has too few homes for well-paid professionals; the north-east’s existing stock needs upgrading; much of the south-east needs more homes for young families.

Mr Johnson’s government briefly seemed ready to tackle these problems head-on. A white paper last August promised the biggest shake-up of planning in decades. Every council would have to write a ten-year plan consistent with providing its share of the national target, categorising all land as protected (no building allowed), or earmarked for renewal (some building) or growth (proposals that conformed with the plan would be automatically approved). Locals would lose the ability to comment on individual applications, but would still get a say on the new ten-year plans that underpin the zones. Builders reckon such a streamlined system would allow more development in the highest-priced areas.

But such places are precisely where opposition is stiffest. In local elections in May the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats, both opponents of many building projects, made inroads in Tory-voting counties such as Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. The next month the Lib Dems won a by-election in Chesham and Amersham, a pair of pricey London suburbs, by opposing new housing and a high-speed rail line running through the constituency.

In a speech on July 7th to the LGA Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, gave the strongest signal yet that the planning bill expected in Parliament this autumn would fall far short of the radicalism of last year’s white paper. He promised that the current planning system would not be ripped up, and hinted that English councils with a track record of permitting lots of new housing could retain greater control over planning. Analysts fear that the national target could thus be retained, even as the areas where demand is highest are allowed to shirk their duty. “The 300,000 homes a year target is useless if you just end up building 300,000 micro-apartments in Sunderland,” says Mr Hudson.

It is hard for any government to take on vested interests who have always voted for it. For a Conservative government, however, the dilemma is particularly sharp. The fight to build more housing is not just a fight between existing homeowners and would-be ones: it is a fight between those who vote Conservative now and those who might in the future—if their aspirations for a home of their own are satisfied. ■