By the Labour Campaign for Council Housing

There is a fundamental contradiction between the government’s talk of devolving power away from Westminster and its decision to impose mandatory housebuilding targets on local authorities. Combined with proposals to give more power to unelected council planning officers to determine planning applications, it constitutes an attack on local democracy. It will not only take power away from elected councillors but it will undermine even further the ability of local communities to interrogate and challenge planning applications. Already 96% of planning applications are decided by officers. Is this not enough?

Opposing mandatory housing targets, the Local Government Association described them as  “a centralising policy which removes local decision-making powers and flexibilities over how to objectively develop an area over time…

“The algorithms and formulas used to obtain the housebuilding targets in both the existing and proposed new standard method can never be a substitute for local knowledge and decision-making by local authorities and communities who know their areas best.”

The Town and Country Planning Association was right when it said that “Our current planning system has many problems, but it is not, and has never been, the root cause of the housing crisis.” There are two systemic problems – “an overwhelming lack of investment by government in homes for social rent,” and “the repeated mistake” of four decades of planning reform focusing on “the generation of planning consents for housing with no effective strategy for their delivery.” There are around a million planning application plots granted which have not yet been built on. The building oligopoly will not build at a pace or scale which reduces prices.

Councils can be instructed to achieve a certain number of homes in their locality but the reality is that they cannot control the market. They cannot make the large volume builders build. Neither can the government under any of its current proposals. These builders, who constitute an oligopoly, are not concerned with resolving the housing crisis. Their only interest is maximising profits and dividend payments to shareholders. The market delivers homes only for those who have a sizable deposit and can afford a mortgage at the current inflated prices, both of which are increasingly beyond the reach of many people on low to middle incomes.

The only thing which the government has an element of control over is housing that it funds, council or housing association homes. It can decide on a definite level of grant for a certain number of homes. However, instead of focusing on social rent homes it has decided to keep the Tory definition of ‘affordable housing’, which includes the child of austerity, ‘affordable rent’ (up to 80% of market rent) and various forms of ‘affordable home ownership.’ It also supports funding for ‘affordable private rent.’ Currently, of the Affordable Homes Programme funding, only 16% of homes funded by Homes England are social rent homes.

Martin Wicks, Secretary of the Labour Campaign for Council Housing, said:

“Councils should determine their housing strategy based on social need, not ‘demand’ which is only a measure of those people who can afford a mortgage. Nor should they be given mandatory targets from central government, based on an algorithm. Give councils funding and they will build council housing on a much larger scale than is currently the case. This should be the government’s first housing priority: funding at least 100,000 social rent homes a year. This is the only means of getting people out of temporary accommodation and cutting the number of households on the waiting lists. Market mechanisms never build for social need.”

Ben Clay, Chair, said:

“Without giving councils targets for building Council and Housing Association social rent homes, and making available a huge increase of grant funding to subsidise their construction, we will never achieve the generational shift in delivering homes for social rent the government has promised. All these targets will do, along with proposals to further deregulate the planning system, is promote a bonanza for speculative developers and land bankers, enable more unsuitable ‘permitted developments’ converting offices into poor quality accommodation, and take away any ability for communities or locally elected councillors to have some input into the planning process and influence what is built in their areas.

“If these changes go through, and are compounded with ongoing subsidies to developers and housebuilders to carry on building so called ‘affordable housing’, which is beyond the reach of most people in housing need, the government may set us up for a lost decade, with the housing crisis getting even worse as a direct result of poor policy choices.”

The number of homes which the government is imposing on council can be seen here Mapped: Housing targets for each council under proposed method | Local Government Chronicle (LGC).

131 councils have an increased target of 50% or more; 45 more than 100%; 20 more than 200%.

The BBC reported on the backlash from councils over Angela Rayner’s housing targets. Salford Council Leader Paul Dennett warned the government that its approach “loses any connection with future demographic change and is divorced from need”.

Sensible housebuilding plans should not be based just on numbers, he said. “It’s about looking at your housing waiting list, it’s about looking at the impacts around homelessness and rough sleeping, and building the homes that communities and residents need.” That’s need as opposed to ‘demand’ which is determined by the ability to afford to buy.

From 1953 to 1977 (the last year when 300,000 homes were built), of the 22 years when that many or more were built, in 17 of them, 40% or more were council homes. Of the other five there were never less than one third council homes. Therefore, to imagine that you can set a 370,000 target, which the new government is proposing, and to rely on the market and speculative builders to ramp up building, is illusory.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dudley-council/51889508119 Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 Deed