Last week’s Communities Plan came as little surprise. John Prescott’s ideas for the South East had been well trailed and detailed a major programme of house building and job creation in four main areas – the Thames Gateway, Ashford, Milton Keynes and the South Midlands and the Stanstead/ Cambridge-M11 corridor. Some 200,000 houses over and above the regional planning guidance are to be built. The plan aims to maximise brownfield building and encourages greater densities with a minimum of 30 dwellings per ha in these areas.
The major beneficiary of the public money to be spent in the next three years will be the Thames Gateway area, where £446m is promised for land preparation and much-needed infrastructure. The other three areas will together receive only £164m over this timescale.
It is a huge project, driven by the perfectly appalling figures for new housing that have characterised the past four or five years. The government is seriously and properly worried that the situation in the London area is near meltdown. The capital is the driver of the UK economy and the way in which key workers are being driven out by the sheer shortage of accommodation is now being viewed with considerable alarm. I shall forbear the “I told you so”!
My concern is rather the revelation that the Prime Minister will be chairing a cabinet committee on the development of the Thames Gateway with the rather ominous name of MISC22. This committee will include most of the Cabinet – from Gordon Brown to Alistair Darling – and will aim to discuss and lay out comprehensive plans for infrastructure and funding for the area by May this year. The hope is that they can restore developer confidence in this beleaguered area where regeneration seems to have ground to a halt.
My experience of these committees is that they are an unlikely method of working things through and can often be a substitute for action. They are useful only as a means of getting buy-in from all departments and to show that the Prime Minister means business. They can’t create a policy or formulate a programme, they can only consider detailed proposals and commit to carrying them through. That means that merely setting up MISC22 achieves nothing unless the real issues are faced. The high-level forum, the involvement of the Prime Minister, the commitment of the Cabinet, and the money of the Chancellor lift the enterprise out of the common run. That may make success possible, but it doesn’t guarantee it. What we need now is innovative proposals, not just for the housing but for the infrastructure.
Thames Gateway is mediaspeak for a heterogeneous collection of places on both sides of the river from Hackney to Swale that have little in common except that they are hell to get to. No-one should underestimate the task and the track record on infrastructure isn’t good. Where is the Chelsea/Hackney Tube line or Crossrail? What has been done to upgrade the dreadful southern regional rail system? Both this government and its Tory predecessor have little of which to be proud in planning transport for the new millennium.
It is in that context that I doubt whether Mr Prescott’s figures add up. I don’t want to be curmudgeonly because I honour him for his grasping the nettle and screwing at least this out of the Treasury. However, here is an area served so badly for so long that the present stretched infrastructure will just not take any further pressure. The cost of modernisation will be enormous and the job will require concentrated resources and a powerful team. Yet, with the Strategic Rail Authority slashing the budgets for upgrading the rail system, Alistair Darling reneging on the transport promises, and continued obfuscation on the link between the Thames Gateway and Heathrow, John Prescott will need all the support he can get.
War in Iraq seems increasingly likely and that will have as yet unquantifiable effects on the property market. Already London has been hit by the shortage of visitors, particularly from the US. No nation is more easily deterred from going abroad than the US and hotels and letting agents must expect a pretty lean time. The fall in London house prices and the slump in the demand for office space are already potent factors. Schemes are being aborted and building plans cancelled. I have grave doubts about the war in any case but, whatever one’s view, once the first shots are fired the reverberations will be felt very sharply here at home.
John Gummer is Conservative MP for Suffolk Coastal and a former Secretary of State for the Environment
