Planning ahead

The interim Barker report provided a balanced and objective analysis of the shortage of housing across the country. It steers clear of recommendations, with the exception of proposals to encourage institutional investment in property through the real estate investment trust model.

The final report is eagerly awaited in the spring. But the interim conclusions provide important clues as to the whole policy debate and the agenda that is likely to emerge this year.

Indeed, it's a pity there was no similar analysis of the whole planning system before the government rushed headlong into its current planning reforms.

One priority will be balancing the social and economic benefits of more housing against the environmental costs. In Kate Barker's words: "This gives rise to difficult choices, and the government needs to weigh carefully its different policy objectives to determine its overall approach to housing. Making a real difference to housing supply may require a robust set of policies."

The clear implication is that the government's present housing and planning policies are failing to deliver.

It seems to me that many of the difficulties have been created by amorphous word "sustainable". This word helps maintain the pretence that it is possible to deliver on all fronts without choosing priorities from among objectives that are often competing and contradictory. The planning profession has been obsessed with the environmental dimension of sustainable development to the exclusion of other factors, and the planning system has become totally bogged down. It has become all too easy to delay hard decisions.

So, with all this is mind, here are the foremost issues that I would like to see addressed in 2004:

• how many houses need to be built across England every year and what proportion of them should be "affordable"?
  
• how is the delivery of this affordable housing to be funded? In particular, how much is expected of the planning system?
  
• what is the national spatial strategy for delivering all these houses and what are its regional implications?
  
• how can the 69% of brownfield land that, according to the Barker report, cannot be built on "for the foreseeable future", be brought forward more quickly?
  
• is it more important to deliver the right amount of housing of the right type in sustainable locations than to be obsessed with whether or not these sites happen to be brownfield?
  
• how can the private housebuilding industry be persuaded to deliver more homes, and affordable ones in particular, where they are most needed?
  
• what does "sustainable communities" really mean and how do social and tenure mix, and investment in other infrastructure, impinge upon this?
  
• how can quality in design and construction be improved?
  
• what interim measures can be put in place to ensure that the current delays in the planning system are not perpetuated as the new system beds in during the next three to four years?
  
• can community consultation really be enhanced without causing more delay?
  
• what sanctions can be put in place to ensure that non-performing authorities shape up – especially those that persistently refuse applications for affordable housing, often against officers' advice?
  
• how does the policy of promoting consumer choice in housing fit with the concentration on urban high-density areas and the reality that more and more people are either homeless or cannot afford any choice at all?

All these questions reasonably arise from the various pronouncements of 2003. There are many others. None have simple answers but hopefully 2004 will see some "hard choices" being made, as Barker so rightly asked.