In very candid comments, Yvonne Gagen, Leader of West Lancashire Council told the BBC that “I feel that we are going to be on a collision course with Labour”. She will not have uttered these words lightly. She was clearly exasperated by an increased target for her authority of 605 homes a year as compared to 166 currently. With an absence of available land she said this target could not be achieved. She said the government should start listening to councils, otherwise what was the point of the consultation?
Read on below or download a PDF here.
Yvonne Gagen is not alone. The BBC recently reported “Backlash from Councils over Rayner housing targets”. Based on Freedom of information requests, it said that local councils have told the government that the housing targets it is proposing to impose on them are “unrealistic” and “impossible to achieve”. “The vast majority of councils expressed concern about the plan in a consultation exercise carried out by Angela Rayner’s housing department earlier this year.”
Salford Council Leader Paul Dennett hit the nail on the head when he warned the government that its approach “loses any connection with future demographic change and is divorced from need”. Sensible housebuilding plans should not be based just on numbers, he said. “It’s about looking at your housing waiting list, it’s about looking at the impacts around homelessness and rough sleeping, and building the homes that communities and residents need.” That’s need as opposed to ‘demand’ which is determined by the ability to afford to buy.
He called on the government not to “control this agenda from Westminster and Whitehall”, and allow more flexibility in the new system so councils can consider specific issues in their area.
The targets, some of the most absurd can be seen in the table below, have been determined by an algorithm!
Undemocratic
There is a fundamental contradiction in the government’s position. It talks of devolving power away from Westminster, yet it is proposing to impose central targets on local authorities in a quest to reach a target of 1.5 million homes which virtually everybody involved in housing considers to be unachievable, certainly without a return to large scale council house building.
It is fundamentally undemocratic to impose centrally determined housing targets. It should be left to councils to determine their building targets rather than have numbers imposed by Westminster diktat. If the government significantly increased grant available for council housing then local authorities would build/acquire more. As a result of New Labour’s support for the Tory policy of stock transfer half of English councils have no council housing stock. Given the scale of the housing crisis and the spiralling cost of temporary accommodation, which is taking some councils to the financial brink, these local authorities would build council housing again if the government provided them with the funding to do so.
The fundamental flaw in the government’s housing strategy is that it believes there is a market solution to the housing crisis. The planning reforms are designed to prod the large volume house builders into building at a pace and a speed which will lower prices. But as the Town and Country Planning Association has said, “Our current planning system has many problems, but it is not, and has never been, the root cause of the housing crisis.” It said there are two systemic problems – “an overwhelming lack of investment by government in homes for social rent”, and “the repeated mistake” of four decades of planning reform focusing on “the generation of planning consents for housing with no effective strategy for their delivery”.
There has been no shortage of planning permissions but, the TCPA estimates that there has been “a consistent gap between planning consents for housing, running at an average of 311,000 a year over the last decade, and building, which ran at 220,000 over the same timeframe”.
It is the “overwhelming lack of investment by government in homes for social rent” which is the key problem which needs resolving. Setting tenure blind targets for councils, determined by an algorithm rather than by a local assessment of social need, is guaranteed to fail. Councils can determine what numbers of councils homes they can build/acquire, provided they are given the funding by central government, but they cannot make the large volume builders build at a scale to lower prices and profits. As explained elsewhere, planning changes will not resolve the housing crisis.
As councils fail to achieve these imposed and largely unachievable targets, are they to be treated as the enemy; as “the blockers and the bureaucrats”? Market mechanisms do not provide for social need. Social rent council housing is the key to resolving the housing crisis, not “affordable rent” or various forms of “affordable home ownership”. Only council house building/acquisition on the scale of 100,000 a year will begin to bring down the numbers on the waiting lists and in temporary accommodation.
Martin Wicks
Labour Campaign for Council Housing 