Outside of London, the budget proposed very little to accelerate housing delivery. Support for more planners, whilst helpful, is like a doctor prescribing aspirin to address a heavy drinker’s long running hangover - what's really needed is a long hard look and some uncomfortable truths about the real problems in hand.
And so, we shall continue to labour under a system where Local Authorities play at the edges with their Local Housing Companies; where housing association dribble quite pitiful numbers (given their scale; their level of internal capacity; and the significant volume of extant housing grant that was already in the system) of homes into the market; and the hotels and bed sits continue to bulge under the enormous weight of temporary accommodation demand. All of which further cripples the balance sheets of Councils - very many of which are edging closer to a financial precipice.
To say we have a broken system is an understatement. What's needed is a new and integrated vision that ties these problems together and prescribes a total treatment approach. We have done this before - post war house building; the Commission for the New Towns; Development Corporations. The tools are all out there. They're just out of reach of the increasingly young, persistently Etonian and visionless advisors that surround and drive our national policy making.
.jpeg)
