Case for Housebuilding report doesn’t pull any punches

I don’t know what comes to mind if I quote a think tank, but if your eyes glazed over, I wouldn’t be surprised. They are everywhere these days, and they are generally identifiable as being from the left or right in the same way the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph are.

It’s also true that some are better than others and for me one of the very best is the Centre for Policy Studies. They hail from what I’d define as the centre right. Their backers are mostly obvious Conservatives, but they are happy to criticise if they think the party now in government has got it wrong.

The CPS recently published a report called The Case for Housebuilding and if anyone has any doubts about its objectivity, I can tell you it will not go down well with the current and former secretary of state at DLUHC Michael Gove, because it demolishes the thesis Gove has been advancing in recent weeks as he moves away from the value of local plans, turning them from mandatory under the current version of the NPPF into merely advisory.

Far from getting anywhere near the government’s target of building 300,000 homes a year, experts on all sides now think if all this remains in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill currently before parliament, 2023 could see as few as 120,000 new starts.

Gove talks a lot about building beautiful, but as we know beauty is in the eye of the beholder and you only have to watch Grand Designs to prove that old chestnut. He talks about local engagement, but what he really means is pandering to NIMBYism. His too clever by half BIDEN – beauty, infrastructure, democracy, environment and neighbourhood – reminds me of Eric Morecambe: the right words, but not necessarily in the right order.

The CPS report doesn’t pull its punches, nor should it. It points out that we built 3.6m homes in the 1960s but only 1.5m in the 2010s, when the population was significantly higher. It also notes a little discussed fact, which is that the UK builds smaller homes than almost anywhere else in Europe. We’re a crowded island for sure, but that’s not a good enough argument when in reality it’s all about how desperate young people are to have anywhere they can call home.

Prices have risen faster than across the rest of Europe because our failure to build means supply is limited while demand increases, and we all know what that means. Help to Buy, for which we can thank George Osborne, a major destroyer of housing value during his time as chancellor, was one of this government’s stupidest ideas, alongside turning SDLT into a double-digit tax on mobility and now, combined with the rapid rise in interest rates, it will destroy many young people’s chances of ever owning a home.

The report also demolishes the notion, to which Gove appears to be wedded, that all our needs can be achieved by putting brownfield land first. In major cities including London, that might get to a quarter of the homes we need. In many rural areas, there is almost no brownfield land but a clear demand for housing.

What seems to be at the heart of Michael Gove’s thinking is that housebuilding is inherently unpopular. Every survey shows that a large majority of voters think the housing market isn’t working and however much an individual scheme might be opposed for perfectly good reasons, there is no evidence to suggest that voters who don’t like the outcome change their vote at election time.

I recall a recent survey by pollsters Ipsos MORI that showed more parental concern about whether their children could ever afford a home than about neighbouring development. Nor does building more homes drive down prices. Demand sees to that.