Both sides in Tory battle over housing and planning have a point – and both are wrong

The Conservatives are in a bind about planning and housebuilding. Again. The fallout from last week’s local elections prompted another spasm of in-fighting over housebuilding targets, as the nimby and deregulatory hemispheres of the Tory brain both seized on the results as proof of their cause.

The “planning concern” group, led by Theresa Villiers, claim the drubbing the Tories got showed they had to listen to voters in their heartlands by letting them refuse new homes in their backyards. This wing had already forced the government to abandon mandatory targets in local plans; they now insist that opposing top-down targets should be a dividing line in the forthcoming general election. Labour, understandably, is trying to capitalise on Tory woes by feeding headlines about their willingness to take on the nimbys.

Meanwhile Simon Clarke, who was secretary of state during Liz Truss’s brief tenure, toured the media studios arguing for the need to build enough homes to meet the aspirations of younger generations. In his reading, the loss of councillors showed that the Conservatives could “never out-nimby the Lib Dems” and that the dropping of targets was a terrible mistake.

This blue-on-blue psychodrama leaves the secretary of state Michael Gove trying to hold the ring – or rather, holding the bag. None of this is very edifying. Especially as we have been here before. Many times.

Whenever a complex, multi-faceted issue becomes a political battleground, truth – or its geekier cousin ‘understanding of the policy detail’ – is the first casualty

Sometimes it seems as though the war over targets is the only real issue in housing, and with each flare-up the battle becomes increasingly polarised. Whenever a complex, multi-faceted issue becomes a political battleground, truth – or its geekier cousin “understanding of the policy detail” – is the first casualty. And the truth is that neither the nimbys nor the yinmbys are right.

Planning and development are sufficiently rich and complex issues for there to be ample opportunities for simplistic and wrong positions – which means we can probably look forward to many more years of these feuds.

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The nimby contingent are clearly wrong because we do need more development. Aging, thermally inefficient stock, some of it in places that made more economic sense a century ago than today, needs upgrading or replacing.

The population has been rising for ages, and the number of households has been rising even faster – including those hidden by the very lack of a home to form in. The vast bulk of those homes will need to be in or around towns and cities that already exist – which means in someone’s back yard.

Just because you are well housed should not mean you deny others the same right. Yet clearly many of the schemes that come forward now are soulless, car-dependent sprawls that do little if anything to improve the health, wealth or happiness of the local community. And, if we can’t say no to poor schemes, what is the point of planning – or of democracy?

The deregulatory brigade are wrong because liberalising planning rules on its own will never build enough homes to lower the price significantly – let alone deliver attractive, sustainable, healthy and economically thriving communities. The development system as it stands cannot do it, because it is geared towards squeezing the maximum short-term return on capital from each site.

The mess of our housing system is a product of decisions made over decades in multiple other policy areas

If house prices ever fall, developers quite rationally cut supply until they start rising again, so it should be obvious that we can never expect the current system to build our way out of the affordability crisis. The yimbys will point out that the system I am criticising is largely a product of the planning regime – and they are partly right – but it doesn’t follow that planning liberalisation alone will change all the other things that shape development outcomes.

Planning is only one piece of the picture; the mess of our housing system is a product of decisions made over decades in multiple other policy areas, from building regulations to landlord and tenant law, from welfare benefits to mortgage market rules.

So both sides have a point, and both sides are wrong. If the past 20 years are any guide we could go on like this indefinitely, without ever actually fixing the housing crisis. But there are some glimmers of hope out there, signs that a more nuanced, positive alternative to either of the extremes is emerging.

To pick two, Chesham – frontline of the Conservative electoral dilemma – is pioneering the use of design codes and neighbourhood development rrders to create a bottom-up local plan for more homes that will enhance rather than encrust the existing town. In Lewes, a high density housing scheme is going ahead - in a national park no less – largely because the commercial developer is prepared to take a lower return over the longer time frame that delivering a really successful neighbourhood requires.

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If these approaches can get communities to welcome new homes in the most contested places, they may finally offer a way out of the political cul-de-sac we have got ourselves into. The catch is that such considered, careful models take time and patience – both of which are in short supply as we head towards a divisive general election amid a fevered “debate” that has to reduce everything to crude binaries.

Toby Lloyd is an independent housing policy consultant and former No10 special adviser