New towns sound great, but the devil as ever is in the detail

I gather that at least one of the three new towns the government is promoting might actually be underway by the time of the next election.

The expanded development of Chase Park and Crews Hill in Enfield, North London, is apparently welcomed by the officers of Enfield Council, who are saying this could be the trigger for up to 21,000 new homes, 50% of which they hope could be affordable.

They see thousands of these new homes as being aimed at three- and four-bedroom families, with an equally large number being council homes that Enfield says would help house key workers and families on its housing waiting list.

It all sounds admirable, but the devil as ever is in the detail. While the project includes new NHS GP services, agreement on how these would be provided is currently lacking. Improved rail services will be needed, but there is currently no agreement with Network Rail as to how these improvements will be provided.

In short, all of this sounds absolutely marvellous, but laudable as the new towns initiative is, the chances of it getting seriously underway by the end of the current government’s time in office are slim, even in Enfield.

I don’t know a single property professional who seriously thinks that Steve “Build Baby Build” Reed has a hope in hell of building one and a half million homes in the lifetime of this parliament. As I have pointed out before, he’s already 120,000 units behind given the shortfall in year one, and this year is shaping up to be even worse.

Uncertainly – or, more accurately, fear – about what ‘Rachel from Complaints’ will do to try and plug the massive hole in the nation’s finances seems to centre on residential property in one form or another, ranging from taxing profit on the sale of a primary residence and taxing properties, mainly in London, worth more than £2m to hiking rather than abolishing stamp duty at the top end of the market.

This relentless attack on wealth in any form as if it were an easy way to solve her problems would only accelerate the exodus of wealth from the UK and, more to the point, provide a huge amount of work for surveyors charged with valuing hundreds of thousands of properties to ascertain whether they were eligible to be taxed.

Meanwhile, it looks as if the November budget will ignore what every serious economist is saying, which is that the UK’s problem is a bloated public sector and a benefits budget that is frankly out of control.

It is also sadly true that until the government recognises that the planning system is still a significant barrier to progress and that the Planning and Infrastructure Act does not go far enough to change that, builders and developers will keep their hands in their pockets. They would love to invest, but only when they can be reasonably certain that they can secure a reasonable return on their funds, which until the last unit is sold are essentially at risk.

It is good to see that Mayor of London now accepts that insisting on 35% affordable means nothing can be built – 20% should unlock some sites that are currently unviable. But lowering the S106 requirement is only half the story. A serious government needs to look again at the need for second staircases and the real value of the Building Safety Act.

In both cases, not only are they arguably unnecessary, they were passed by the last government, so surely offer an open goal that even Steve Reed could aim at and score.