14
Anyone flying across the UK on a clear day looks down on a country where towns and villages are close together, divided by narrow slivers of woodland or farm land and connected by a substantial network of roads and railways. Compared to driving through France or Spain, where human settlements are further apart, any casual observer would consider the UK, and particularly England, as a place with a great liking for suburbs and low-density development.
And indeed, it is, with the kind of housing readily facilitated by the house-builders, large and small. Today, a century and a half after Ebenezer Howard returned from the US, the type of detached private homes that he would have recognised from his visits to Chicago and New York are still being planned and built in the UK. This is no accident: the house-builders, who jog along completing something between 100,000 and 150,000 homes per year, every year, decade after decade, are well-connected politically and much in favour of more “garden cities” being built. As are the CBI and the CPRE.(1)
The popularity of this type of development is recognised too by politicians. Around the time that George Osborne was announcing funding for Ebbsfleet, proposals were unveiled for a similar scheme at Bicester, where it was to be bolted on, so to speak, to an existing urban area. A close inspection of the plans for this reveal something quite similar to a 1960s or 1970s new town: new homes, greenery, new shops, other employment, new transport links… but minus the pre-1979 “statist” elements, and definitely no council housing.(2)By 2015, Osborne was announcing plans for something akin to this in North Essex as well as a rebooting and expansion of Didcot. Then in 2016 came the “Black Country Garden City” (45,000 new homes, scattered across various defunct ex-industrial sites in the West Midlands), followed a year later by a whole set of mini “garden villages”, of between 1,500 and 10,000 new homes and a selection of larger “garden towns”.(3)
The locations for the former include Warwickshire, Oxfordshire (2,200 homes over 531 acres at Eynsham, an average of only 4 per acre), Northamptonshire, Devon, Hampshire, Cornwall, Essex, Lincolnshire, Merseyside, Surrey (at Runnymede, by house-builder Crest Nicholson whose HQ is in the same area), Lancashire, Derbyshire, Cumbria and Cheshire. The garden towns are to be newly designed expansions of Aylesbury, Taunton and Harlow, Essex. All in all, there are about 50 such projects that will, supposedly, provide 400,000 new homes, an average of about 8,000 per scheme. But at the time of writing less than 5% have been built and many have yet to be granted a detailed planning consent. At this rate of progress, it would take 40-50 years to complete the programme. And, of course, it is only a tiny proportion of the new homes the UK actually needs.
Ironically, in addition to the chunks of land owned by private house-builders that underpin many of these schemes, a great deal else of what is being committed is either state, or local state, property. Much of this has been recycled through several variations of ownership since the New Town Commission became dormant and then defunct in the 1980s: English Partnerships and the Homes and Communities Agency were two such “successor” organisations, both now disbanded. Thus do the land acquisition policies, pursued from the 1940s through to the 1970s, continue to affect us. From time to time, further land is added into this pot, often being ex-MOD, ex-NHS or similar, from recently decommissioned sites.(4)
Relatively few government-owned sites exist within most cities, though. Here, the inflated prices demanded by landowners, and the reduced amount of state funding available for development have driven residential building remorselessly upwards. Hence the clustering of tall towers found in the most expensive areas, within which an increasing number of properties are now rented out to buy-to-let landlords. This “model” works for neither local house-builders nor local would-be home owners. Nor does it function efficiently as a means of providing social housing. What might remedy this state of affairs would be some way of limiting the price of land, as suggested by Lord Reith in 1941 and Churchill in 1945. There are few major politicians in the UK today who would advocate this. In the absence of such controls, what works in practical terms, as far as most people are concerned, is the continuing construction, in modest numbers, of low-density, out-of-town developments built for private sale: the traditional suburb/garden city/new town approach still built to a template that would be recognised by Ebenezer Howard.
The question must be asked, though, just how sustainable is this in the twenty-first century?
Before weighing up the great strategic issues of our age, it is worth pointing out that even at a basic, practical level, low-density development comes with many hidden costs. The most obvious of these is the expenditure required on regular maintenance of the colossal amounts of communal open space they contain, over and above private gardens and public park areas. The abundance of grass verges, planted areas, bushes, ornamental trees, traffic islands, immense roundabouts and roads that either proceed down heavily wooded cuttings or along similar embankments, all become unsightly eyesores if neglected. Strewn with carrier bags, crushed drink cartons, tins, bottles, blown out tyres, shopping trolleys and miscellaneous bits of furniture, glass, plastic, wood and metal, many increasingly are.(5)
Looking at the various garden cities, garden suburbs and new towns today, Letchworth remains well-kept because of Howard’s heritage fund and associated governance mechanisms. Its neighbour Welwyn, though, is decidedly tatty as are most of the post-war developments, reduced after the sale of most of their income-generating assets to being just large residential areas managed by cash-strapped local authorities. One solution might be to reboot Howard’s governance structures and apply them everywhere. But would this work? Most people do not wish to pay service charges on the scale that would now be required, nor do they want to live in some king of gigantic housing cooperative. Put simply, the problem is the design: because less taxes (local or national) are raised from low-density developments, the cost of providing infrastructure and services is disproportionately greater than the cost of doing so in a high-density community.(6)
But this isn’t just a case of adopting a different style of architecture. In a future where global warming has made parts of the planet uninhabitable and has led to significant amounts of migration, coupled with population rises elsewhere, why would building anything, anywhere, at about 5% of possible urban density make any sense? Consider the facts. Currently the UK has a population density of 724 people per square mile, one of the highest in Europe. There are various estimates available about how much higher it will go. One prediction has the population at 75 million by 2040.(7) To have enough homes for that many people, the UK needs to build 115,000 per annum over and above what it currently does. In other words, it needs to provide an extra 2.3m extra homes, by 2040 – 1.9m more than are set to emerge from all the new “garden villages”, “garden towns” and similar projects currently being prepared. None of this takes into account either the complications caused by an ageing population and the demand that creates in turn for a bigger, younger workforce, or for that matter, changes in the size of households. Nor does it consider the possible abandonment of settlements in low-lying coastal areas should sea levels rise.(8)
Where would we want this extraordinary volume of new housing to be provided? Considering the wider environmental issues we face, expanding cul-de-sacs, low-rise blocks and semi-detached houses further across woodland and farmland is surely the worst approach. We need to be planting more trees – on quite some scale – to maximise carbon capture. And with the likely population increases the UK faces, we should be raising food production to match this, rather than relying on buying what other countries export. Is it time, therefore, to change the way we plan and build new homes? Yes, and fortunately, any exercise that looks critically at where they are to be located, and how new, high-density, socially and ecologically viable towns and cities can be provided, doesn’t need to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel.
One option would be to look closely at Hammarby, the development of which supposedly influenced Ebbsfleet. Located just south of Stockholm city centre, Hammarby is clearly part of an existing urban area and was originally intended as the Olympic village for Stockholm’s bid for the 2004 games. The bid failed, but the area was built out anyway as an eco-town. Covering 66.5 acres it houses about 25,000 people: at a density of 376 per acre (roughly 90 homes per acre) it is about 20 times that of the proposed UK garden villages. Unlike the latter it also benefits from being within an existing city, with residents able to travel to and from work using public transport, bicycles and carpools rather than there being any requirement to own their own vehicle. Something like this is appearing on the site of the UK’s Olympic village at Stratford, and more developments of this type, built to the same Hammarby-style template, could and should follow.(9)
If a completely new city were required, then Shenzhen, formerly a village on the Chinese-Hong Kong border, could be considered as a prototype. With a population of almost 20m, and a density 50% greater than that found in London, it features a vast number of high-rise residential buildings, massive amounts of public transport infrastructure, extensive business, industrial, tourist and leisure areas, all within a carefully designed and maintained public realm. Images of the city at night resemble the world of Philip K Dick’s Blade Runner, as reimagined by Le Corbusier. But this is somewhere real. And if the Earth needs new cities, better this, surely, than cul-de-sacs of semi-detached houses stretching to the horizon.
As it happens, the UK probably doesn’t need additional cities. We just need to make better use of those we already have. Leaving aside Poundbury and its brethren, typical UK house-builder schemes feature a traditional mixture of terraced, semi-detached and detached houses interspersed with occasional blocks of low-rise flats. In most places, these don’t even create the type of streetscape produced by Archibald Cameron Corbett pre-1914, dipping way below this in density terms.(10)Nor is architecture the only problem. Housing in the UK costs too much. Far too many people today spend too much of their income on keeping a roof over their head. To be precise, as noted by the OECD, 25% of UK households now spend more than 40% of their income on housing, the highest level in the world.(11)
The policies followed by governments from both the UK’s main political parties in the last 40 years have led the country to this position. We have been living through a period which has seen the UK evolve from a manufacturing economy with post-industrial features, into a financialised, globalised economy with a self-restraining feeble state. Aside from housing, and its many issues, there has been an economic restructuring occurring within all our major cities. Assuming one wants to change this (and some don’t, or at any rate don’t see housing and town planning as a primary issue of concern) we have to consider how to address the failures of the past whilst also planning in a sustainable way for the future.
During the UK’s deliberate journey away from high levels of state provision, particularly spending on housing, there have been many who have made a positive contribution, despite having to navigate these difficulties. Of all the architects, politicians and planners, though, none has been more consistent in this field, or wielded as much influence during that time as Michael Heseltine. When he was interviewed for this book in October 2020 both his experience and continuing commitment to urban renewal and improved housing were apparent. We spoke by telephone during the first lengthy pandemic lockdown, ranging over a career that stretched from the immense optimism of the UK in the 1960s (when he was better known, to some, as a magazine publisher), through the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s to his triumph in the 1990s with City Challenge and his brief Indian summer under David Cameron and George Osborne.
How would he tackle today’s problems? Without hesitation he answered “…I’d create a land register with every site on it. I would compel land owners – and most of the bigger ones are government departments – to release their land by starting with a legal presumption that it was available for purchase, and transferring control of the land to a central body, a sort of roving Development Corporation, responsible for its disposal. I’d also face down the issues raised about the green belt, much of which is actually quite poor-quality land. I’d have an arrangement where for every acre of green belt developed, 10 acres of “brownfield” land elsewhere would have to be “greened”. People would understand that. For private sites, and land that wasn’t being properly used I’d use Compulsory Purchase Order powers. Government-owned land is the key here…” Having set out an unashamedly “statist” position, he then underscored this with “…Government has an absolutely crucial role – there is no conceivable way you can get any progress without it. Reform of local government is also required…”
And what would he build? Whilst agreeing that the UK was a small country with a high population, he favoured a mixed approach “…I’m a great believer in creating free-standing towns – attractive places where people want to live. To do that we need to clear more land and also do a lot of land assembly. You’re really talking about having another Land Commission, of the sort that operated under Sir Henry Wells when the New Towns were being built in the 1960s… I think we need to do both – build traditional towns and go up in height. We also need to industrialise housing production…” The latter point was particularly intriguing, with its implication that the state would have an industrial strategy directed at tackling shortages across the economy, in this case within housing. A far cry from where we have been in the last couple of decades.
Finally, he acknowledged the critical issue of affordability, stating “…To produce council housing you need government subsidy… which can only come with government commitment… The private sector does a fantastic job, but the private sector is there to make a profit. You can’t make a profit out of social housing…” After a couple of decades of bipartisan agreement about the primacy of the private sector and the importance of endlessly expanding home ownership it was refreshing to hear such a thorough counter-argument being made: one, incidentally, that many Prime Ministers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, stretching back over 100 years would have automatically accepted.
Today, we live at a time when the future of the planet is more to the fore in the minds of most people than at any time since the peak years of the nuclear stand-off between east and west. With regular reminders appearing on news bulletins about unusual weather, the spread of arid conditions, storm damage and flooding, the market – if one could put it that way – for “green” policies has never been greater. Accordingly, all the major political parties ensure that their manifestos feature significant commentaries and commitments on environmental matters. Some of this might be implemented. Whether it will be sufficient or not is a moot point, and we should perhaps judge such remarks against the policies proposed by the Green Party, support for whom has never been higher. Today they participate in government in Scotland (and Ireland), so how would they organise housing provision nationally, were they to get the chance?
In July 2021 I contacted Councillor Carla Denyer, representing Clifton Down in Bristol for the Green Party whilst doubling as their national housing spokesperson. She replied to a detailed set of questions within 3 weeks, which, given she became Joint Leader of the Green Party 24 days after responding, said much for her commitment and organisation. Like Heseltine she favoured a greater role for the state, and, like him, she would, for the main, build in existing cities and towns, commenting “…Higher density urban living is more sustainable in terms of carbon footprint and also helps sustain local high streets, bus routes and other facilities by providing the critical mass of customers. I want to see a future where most people live in a ‘15-minute neighbourhood’…” There were other areas too where the Green Party approach overlapped with Heseltine’s statist model: they wanted a housing market where people have real choices (ie, genuinely affordable housing and a balanced mixture of tenure) and significantly increased funding to enable all of their proposals to come to fruition.
Where they were different was in the scale and scope of the regulatory framework that the Green Party would erect. Firstly, they would introduce rent controls, implement a licensing scheme for all private landlords and put the local housing market across the UK under local authority regulation.(12) Next, they would adopt, presumably at national level, a statutory provision for affordable housing, irrespective of what has been paid for land, (echoes here of Reith and Churchill) and would end RTB discounts in England.(13) They would allow local authorities to borrow to build, as had been the case pre-1979, and they would reboot non-local authority affordable housing, including an enhanced role for housing cooperatives. Thirdly, they would improve the building regulations and the regulatory framework within which private developers operated.(14) Finally, they would instigate a massive national emergency retrofit programme – across all tenures and ownerships – to ensure that every home in the UK was environmentally compliant. Most radically of all, though, was a pledge to hold down house prices by ending tax breaks, with the policing of this being given to the Bank of England as a duty.(15)
None of the above ought to surprise anyone. Considering the UK’s housing journey over the last century and a half, it is clear from studying the evidence that, if we wish to build sufficient homes, ensure that they are truly affordable and produced in a way that both respects the environment and takes into account all the important social factors governing their location, then the state, and only the state, must have a major role in deciding, funding and implementing this. It is clear that the private sector cannot do this by itself. Leave them to build their 100,000 to 150,000 units per annum (subject to location and improved regulation) and instead reboot local authority housing, on a massive scale! And, as part of this, reconsider the role and functions of housing associations. Today, many of these, after 20 years of mergers, re-brandings, further mergers and further re-brandings, are effectively large corporate businesses. Most are also somewhat remote(16) and have little in common with the sharply focussed community-based organisations they once were when founded in the 1960s and 1970s. Having non-local authority social housing providers is a good thing: if nothing else, it provides the public with a choice of social landlords within their area. But do we need such entities to be so immense? It might be better, surely, if they were more localised in function and able, once more, to tackle specific problems rather than just act as the recipients of whatever amounts of social housing local house-builders were amenable to providing on their traditional low-density schemes.
There are many challenges bearing down upon us. The way we build our housing in the future, and who we build it for, will determine if we can survive and indeed thrive despite these. This book argues that we should put aside the way we have conducted the political economy of the UK in recent decades, so that we can make the best-informed choices about how to proceed. It is time to provide for all, plan strategically, and accept the cost that entails. Our children and grandchildren must not look back and wonder why we failed.
Notes
1. On the CPRE and garden cities see: https://www.cpre.org.uk/stories/garden-cities-for-the-21st-century/
2. For more on Bicester see The Financial Times 1 December 2014 at https://www.ft.com/content/5e815bc6-798a-11e4-9e81-00144feabdc0
3. On the Black Country Garden City see the brochure at: https://www.blackcountrylep.co.uk/upload/files/GardenCity/bcgc_brochure_FINAL.pdf
4. For new garden city proposals see: https://www.housinglin.org.uk/_assets/Resources/Housing/OtherOrganisation/New_towns_report.pdf This argues for more of them and shows how much ex-new town development corporation land is owned by Homes for England, the latest quango to inherit that role. It also argues for a continuation of the Letchworth community investment model. On the issue of whether private house-builders buy and hoard land, the 2019 Bellway Homes Annual Report says that they started 13,000 homes that year and had enough land in reserve to last about 3 years if they ceased buying. (Enough for 42,000 homes). They recorded an annual profit before tax of £663m.
5. Impenetrable roundabouts seem to be something of a haven for the destitute, some of whom have resided there for many years. Frequent news reports appear about their use by the homeless: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-tyne-39411937 (Sunderland), https://www.leeds-live.co.uk/news/leeds-news/man-living-armley-gyratory-roundabout-15010718 (Armley Gyratory), https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/homeless-man-camped-roundabout-hopes-19283919 (Scarborough) and https://www.westerntelegraph.co.uk/news/18907128.community-pays-tribute-kilgettys-mini-man-lived-outdoors-half-life/ (Kilgetty, Pembrokeshire). In something like a cross between Clive King’s 1963 children’s novel Stig of the Dump and JG Ballard’s 1974 Concrete Island, the Wolverhampton Ring Road was home for nearly 50 years for Jozef Stawinoga, thought at one time to be a Nazi war criminal. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Stawinoga
6. The Goldsmith Street scheme in Norwich, built as council housing by Norwich City Council, provides an example of a dense, low-rise, energy-efficient scheme: 93 homes over 4.5 acres (roughly 17 per acre). It is built to passivhaus standards, a concept developed in Europe from the early 1990s. Not all such schemes are low-rise. China has the largest project of this type. See: https://www.treehugger.com/chinese-city-has-largest-passive-house-project-world-4856144 Spain has the tallest such building, in Bilbao. See: https://prismpub.com/bolueta-in-bilbao-spain-is-now-the-tallest-passive-house-building-in-the-world/
7. On the rising population of the UK see: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/07/01/what-the-uk-population-will-look-like-by-2061-under-hard-soft-or-no-brexit-scenarios/ In Europe, the Netherlands (1,060 per sq ml) and Belgium (983 per sq ml) exceed the current UK level with Germany somewhat lower at 608 per sq ml. Population density in the US is 91 per sq ml. (12.5% that of the UK).
8. In terms of comparisons with neighbouring countries, the IPPR think tank compared the UK with Germany at: https://www.ippr.org/publications/german-model-homes It found that, allowing for population differences, the UK builds, year on year, about 14% less housing than Germany. Ireland, on the other hand, built 21,686 “affordable” homes in 2020, which pro-rata to the population size is vastly in excess of the UK output. See: https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/a5cb1-construction-activity-starts/
9. The UK’s Olympic Village, the Stratford Olympic Park, is almost the same size as Hammarby and was developed by the Olympic Delivery Authority, established by the Blair government in 2006. Unlike the New Deal for Communities schemes, this was very much a route one development corporation. Unlike in Sweden, its assets have subsequently been sold to the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund. Other parts of the area continue to be developed by the London Legacy Development Corporation, under the jurisdiction of the Mayor of London. Scandinavia hosts many innovative architects, notably Jan Gehl (Danish, and an advocate of car-free areas within cities from the early 1970s) and Finn Williams (a UK national, now City Architect in Malmo).
10. One example of this might be the redevelopment of Regent Quay, Sittingbourne. A 26-acre former industrial site, the northern section of this contains 102 homes on 9.5 acres. Most of these are 4-bedroom houses, and all but 4 are for private sale. In appearance – garages excepted – many resemble pre-1914 garden suburb/garden city properties. Which is not a specific criticism (after all, these are popular and they sell) but rather an indication of how deeply embedded this type of aspirational housing is.
11. Evidence of this can be seen at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/898397/2018-19_EHS_Housing_costs_and_affordability.pdf and also at https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC1-2-Housing-costs-over-income.pdf
12. Rent controls are common across Europe. See: https://www.iut.nu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/b017e9d8-ccda-4974-b4ab-e455010aa32d-1.pdf They also exist in selected areas within the US, but have no equivalent in the UK.
13. With the advent of devolved government, the RTB has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, and similar is expected to happen in Northern Ireland. In an example of “English exceptionalism” no one else operates an RTB discount of the type available to English council tenants. Some countries (Denmark, Sweden, Belgium) allow no sales of social rented properties at all, others allow a sale “to sitting tenants”, approximately the same policy that the UK had pre-1972. See: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/note/join/2013/492469/IPOL-EMPL_NT(2013)492469_EN.pdf
14. A topical issue once again following the disastrous fire at Grenfell Tower, and the subsequent discovery of inadequately regulated and inspected practices in building construction: in this case the use of cladding as an integral part of a buildings structure. In another legacy of the Thatcher era, (and an echo of the root cause of the earlier Ronan Point collapse) the UK’s building regulations have been greatly reduced since the 1980s, as have the numbers of staff at local authorities with a duty to enforce them.
15. This might seem odd to some people, but compared to other national banks, the Bank of England has few, if any, duties outside of managing the UK’s currency. In comparison, the US Federal Reserve is expected to assist the economy in maintaining maximum employment, the Bank of France is in charge of the economic education of the public and assists businesses of various sizes in obtaining credit, the Reserve Bank of Australia is responsible for the maintenance of full employment and “the economic prosperity and welfare of the people” whilst De Nederlandsche Bank may – subject to Royal Decree – “perform other tasks in the public interest”. The Bank of England could do with a bit more work.
16. In every sense as a great many now shelter behind call centres in business parks located on the fringe of urban areas.