Over the decade since the housing supply review, there have been many changes in planning regulations and administration. These were mostly positive and are now helping to support some recovery in new supply from its lows after the financial crisis.
But there has been a significant step backwards with an effective retreat in much of the country from planning at a scale wider than an individual local authority.
The main political parties all talk of more housing supply in their manifestos, but none is fully convincing. Those politicians who are advocating new towns and settlements fight shy of identifying locations as these would immediately carry political risk.
At the local level, planning outcomes are working too much against the market. The Conservatives are seeking to tackle this by lowering prices for their Starter Homes initiative, and Labour has suggested using rent controls.
These measures attempt to counteract the outcomes of the planning system by further market intervention. They are not without merit, but are far better at winning today’s headlines than at tackling the fundamental problem.
The housing system today is unfairly weighted towards those already owning a home, or lucky enough to inherit funds from property ownership. The next government needs to act radically and coherently. Either there must be a determined effort to bring more land into development (both by using public land in the wider public interest and by tackling local opposition where it has no real substance), or there should be higher taxation on the rising property prices that benefit home owners but are, of course, unearned. In practice both of these may be needed, but both will be highly unpopular.
Existing home owners should recognise the stark truth that if they insist on keeping new development away from them, and on keeping all the profits from higher prices, we will not be able to house our children in a fair manner, and in some cases perhaps they will not be housed at all.
Dame Kate Barker, CBE, senior visiting fellow in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, spoke on the future of UK housing policy at the Whitehall Lecture Series, organised by the Cambridge University Land Society (www.culandsoc.com), on 30 April
