Housing Matters

“Erase the word ‘affordable’ from housing discourse; insert instead ‘public rent’ (80% of market rent that currently defines ‘affordable’ is a joke to those most in need.)”

This is an editorial by Patrick Hannay, from Touchstone, the Journal for Architecture in Wales 2025. Reproduced with the editor’s permission.

Of course it does; access to a decent home is a socio-economic fundamental. There are youthful street protests across Europe, South America, everywhere; priced out of a home by exorbitant rents and house prices they are angry – they have been failed. And yet the UK’s youth appears curiously passive: are they simply waiting for the multi-million pound property leader of Reform UK to sort it for them?

The inter-generational churn of homes that once allowed the young to gain a home has been disrupted by longer life expectancy, the elderly understandably hanging on to their memories and housing assets until the very last moment as their protection against astronomic private-sector care-home costs. Our modern world, in the UK at least, has long ago dismantled multi-generation households. Everyone makes his own independent way, dispersed geographically, but at a considerable social cost. The lonely elderly must look out for themselves. Some of the young wait to inherit, only to find the house sale price frittered away on care-home bills. Others make a killing, a capital-gain inheritance that simply fuels the widening gap between the 5% and the rest.

Alongside all that, no political party seems willing to tackle the further inequalities of the council tax system, unreformed for decades, or use stamp duty levels to curb ever rising house price inflation or link it to energy efficiency.

Will ramping up new housing supply sort it, the Labour Party’s 1.5 million-homes strategy? Unlikely – there are simply too many big beasts to slay in the time frame of a parliament. The counties’ local development plans (LDPs) should deliver, but as long as they are led and constrained by the private-landowner ‘candidate-sites’ process, those vastly inflated land prices will cripple the required supply. The housebuilders will further control supply to ensure they can balance those exorbitant ‘hope value’ land costs. This ensures the houses most needed, don’t arrive or come grudgingly.

The LDPs take forever to be confirmed. Understaffed and overworked county planning departments suffocate under the mounting layers and layers of well-intentioned regulations; their colleagues are tempted away by developers paying better wages to undertake creative strategic planning, while those left behind battle with arguing how to say ‘no’ or ‘yes’ to the market forces encircling them aided and abetted by the nimbys. Despite the introduction of the UK-wide Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, there seems to be a pathological resistance in Wales to using compulsory purchase powers on land assembly potentially removing the ‘hope value’ from that land purchase cost. Don’t we remember how we built new towns? Wales needs to get on the front foot.

History tells us that the private sector will never provide for those most in need. They will always baulk at the up-front cost of meeting progressive decarbonisation regulations and coping with climate-change impacts. The public sector must lead. So in Wales the Welsh Government’s Innovative Housing Programme (IHP) launched in 2017 has produced progressive exemplars delivered by registered social landlords or housing associations. In the process they are breaking long-standing social taboos; others prove that private individuals are quite happy purchasing homes with air-source heat pumps, PVs, batteries, MHVR, off-site assembled Welsh-modular-timber super-insulated-air-tight fabric, and European triple-glazed windows. But the sizeable state loans that have made this possible can simply add fuel to the private market’s argument – give us the same and we will do likewise.

The IHP has been monitored; lessons are being learnt. The January 2025 launch of the Tai ar y Cyd pattern book backed by 25 RSLs, councils and housing associations – and driven by seconded leaders in the Welsh Government – grows out of those lessons, but without massive and speedy reforms to planning and land-price issues, the ambition for reliable continuity for off-site, modular-timber construction may falter.

However, there are fundamental doubts about this Gadarene rush for 1.5 million new homes. The editor of the Architects’ Journal, Emily Booth, questioned its very premise, arguing ‘you can’t build 1.5 million brand new homes and stay within critical carbon budgets’. Shouldn’t we tackle what exists, the poor energy performance of our existing stock, the empty homes, the tourism industry abuse of second homes, and Airbnb driving home prices out of local people’s reach? Again, the Welsh Government has taken a lead. The Optimised RetroFit Programme (ORP), which grew out of the 2019 Jofeh report (TS2021pp.30-32 & TS2022 pp.47-49) was launched in August 2020, but there appears to be no meaningful feedback after five years in operation. Is the government finding, as the 80% of Welsh home-owners are finding, that there are very deep fundamental challenges at all levels of delivering these much needed and urgent retrofits?

Meanwhile, the architectural media salivate over quirky one-off alternative home delivery projects, the over-excitement about self-build, the tiny number of co-housing projects, the community land trusts (so few in Wales), the likes of: the Mayday Saxonvale community-led, master-planned development in Frome working with Studio SAAR; the Phoenix Estate by Ash Sakula Architects for Human Nature in Lewes; the nearly Stirling Prize-shortlisted Hazelmead project of 53 homes at Bridport by Barefoot Architects; even The Observer promoted the 75-flat Grønne Eng (Green Meadow) development in Copenhagen. All of these are fascinating; each is a glimpse of a better life – but they are a distraction. When one investigates what it actually takes – and who has the resources and time to take on such brave and optimistic adventures – then it becomes obvious that it is not a strategic delivery option for those most in need. Starting right back with the pioneering radical schemes of the pre-first-world-war Brentham Garden Suburb in Ealing (itself built on co-partnership principles), it was not long before the realities of land prices, land ownership, and the substantial assets required for forward funding, undermined those utopian principles. We should never forget those lessons.

So what to do? A manifesto for a May Senedd election.

Implement Mark Drakeford’s proposal for a tax on vacant land. Reform the Council Tax bands to properly reflect the inflationary rise in house prices and use the money generated towards the compulsory purchase of land at current-use value for public-rent homes. Link stamp duty to energy efficiency and alter the stamp duty levels to capture more public income for the delivery of new homes. Tax capital gains on top-level house sale prices discounting home improvement costs.

Learn lessons from John Lovell’s Tirion Homes experiment with its 50-year management and maintenance commitment. Own up honestly to the public on the timescale to deliver realistic retrofit given the skills’ deficit – according to one source a need for 12,000 FTE and 2,800 more plumbers for heat-pump installation. Even up VAT on new-build and retrofit. Halt all right-to-buy schemes.

Boost pay for council planners and shift their focus to strategic planning, using compulsory purchase powers to the full so that development occurs where it is needed not where powerful landowners desire it. Use the Development Bank of Wales for compulsory land purchase or reinstate a public works loan board offering loans to authorities at 2% interest. Change the rules overnight on mortgages where loans can only be based on three times one person’s salary. Allow more flexible procurement arrangements for SME house designer/builders.

Erase the word ‘affordable’ from housing discourse; insert instead ‘public rent’ (80% of market rent that currently defines ‘affordable’ is a joke to those most in need.) Ensure much speedier approvals in the planning system from SuDs regulators, Natural Resources Wales, and focus on the essentials of ecological, archaeological and biodiversity surveys that have become a gravy train for specialist consultants.

Ensure full feedback on current ORP schemes. Accept that one has to better balance meeting the Welsh Development Quality Requirements and meeting decarbonisation demands in retrofit – one can’t always have ‘Rolls-Royce’ standards. Cap rents across the board. Pursue and compulsorily purchase empty homes. Mandate a publicly accessible register of all public and private land and publish the development potential of all publicly owned underused land.

Ensure, as the chartered institute of housing cymru notes, that all of the unspent £71 million of section 106 monies is fully spent for public betterment. Ensure there is full public transparency on development viability claims. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s try and raise our architecture ambition to at least build on all the fine estate layout, home-planning and elevational skills that such early pioneers as Parker and Unwin demonstrated 100 years ago.

Let’s get at least some of this done because, if not, Shelter Cymru’s claim that it would take over 35 years at current delivery rates to meet the needs of those waiting for a social home, is simply too insulting to our younger generation. Put more bluntly, as Lyndsey German does, the current context is such that the current system if left unaltered ‘is a direct transfer from the needy to the greedy’. Housing matters.