Thought I'd post this as I found it an interesting read. It's written by Conservative MP Richard Bacon and is in the latest edition of Inside Housing.
The bigger picture
While housing was an issue for some during the election, the bigger points of discussion on the doorstep were the economy, the NHS and immigration.
Why didn’t housing take a greater role? Well, for one thing, if you are talking to someone on a doorstep, then by definition they already have somewhere to live.
Housing was mentioned to me most frequently on the doorstep byConservative voters who were perplexed by the extension of Right to Buy to housing association tenants.
Crudely, their line was: ‘Why should I pay tax to help provide social housing only to see someone be given a free house? I had to pay for my house myself.’
There are many important issues surrounding Right to Buy - is it going to work? Will it be value for money?
Can it be done legally?
But broader themes also emerged on the doorstep. One lady told me her son, who was 34 years old, was still living at home because he could not afford a place of his own.
Another couple were worried about accommodating an elderly parent nearby for the remaining years of her life.
The big questions
It is an extraordinary fact that when planners look at housing schemes, they are not required to consider the overall social impact.
True, the key watchword is ‘sustainability’, but too often this means no more or less than what an expensive lawyer at a planning enquiry wants it to mean.
In terms of thinking holistically about the communities we want to see - and then designing andbuilding places for people to live, rather than large numbers of identical boxes - we are still in the dark ages.
If a young couple with children visit a show home on a typical new build development and ask if they would be able to extend into the roof if they have another baby, they are told in no uncertain terms that it would be out of tthe question for structural reasons.
If a more mature couple asks if there are starter homes in the scheme so their son no longer has to live at home, they will be told that starter homes don’t make enough money for the developer.
If they ask how much sheltered accommodation is integrated into the scheme, where their elderly mother would be able to come to live so that they and her grandchildren could see each other easily, they are almost treated as if they are mad.
And yet each of these examples comes much closer to the ideal of a ‘sustainable’ community than what is normally served up by the large house builders, with a green light from local planners.
I told a colleague that it was a remarkable fact that the higher quality developments in my constituency - that is, those with more generous dimensions and better energy performance - were quite often the dwellings provided by my main local housing association, the innovative and forward-looking Saffron Housing, rather than by private sector suppliers.
My colleague replied: ‘Oh, it’s the same in my constituency.’
When starting to plan new developments, it would be obvious - one would think - to integrate into the approach the views of local businesses, their needs for staff, the growing possibilities for self-employment, the need for workshops and small business incubators, the views of the local NHS, mental health practitioners, and care providers - never mind (speak it softly) the actual preferences of customers - as well as making sure that the high-speed broadband connections, roads, GP surgeries and school places are delivered when they are needed, not much later when the pressure has become intolerable.
But we are nowhere near having as the norm a holistic approach, which weaves together the different strands of what makes a good place to lead a life.
Forming community
And yet the right to build on land at all is a gift conferred by society.
There is therefore already an enormous amount of ‘we’ involved.
We should not forget this. And the ‘we’ in this equation need to get much better at discerning and specifying what we have the right to expect in the places where we will have our futures.
Large-scale commercial house builders are only acting rationally so we cannot be surprised at their behaviour.
But we have to change what is rational.
And in the meantime, housing associations - if they are imaginative enough, and if the government is careful enough - could end up as key players in helping to fix our broken housing market.
Richard Bacon, Conservative MP for South Norfolk
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