The availability of land and the myths of Densification
At the heart of the housing problem is a mistaken view of the availability of land.
A minority have successfully propagated the myth that Britain is so overcrowded and short of land that every acre has to be treated as precious. Less than ten per cent of the total land area is urban; land is not needed for agriculture when much rural land is 'set aside' to avoid overproduction; an urban or suburban area has greater biodiversity than most rural areas, certainly more than land which is farmed intensively. Sir Peter Hall, the distinguished geographer and planner, has put forward similar arguments in a detailed publication for the Town and Country Planning Association.
We need to develop a more balanced view about the possible uses of land and its social value. The current imbalance is demonstrated by the massive difference between the price of land in agricultural versus residential use.
The high price of land available for housing is a consequence of its restricted supply. The demand for housing has increased because of a growing population, an increased number of households, longer life expectancy and, not least, increasing incomes. So, as the supply of land is constrained, the increased demand is reflected in higher and higher prices both for housing and for land which can be used for housing. 60 years ago the price of land for housing was a little more than the price of land for agriculture because it was necessary to give some incentive to the farmer or land owner to sell. Now the price of agricultural land in southern England is about £5,000 per hectare while the price of land with planning permission for residential development is about £2 million per hectare. At the minimum density now permitted of 30 dwellings per hectare each house is, on average, some £65,000 higher in price than they would be if there were no constraints. Land costs therefore account for between 30 and 40 per cent of the £200,000 average price of a new semi-detached or terraced house in the South East.
It is a fact of economic life that as things become more expensive they will have to be used more intensively. So it is with land. As land and housing becomes more expensive people are forced to buy less of both, that is to live in smaller dwellings with smaller gardens, or in multi-storey apartments with no gardens at all.
Tony Burton is the policy director for the National Trust, an organisation that wants to build a new low density housing development in the very centre of the Green Belt near Cliveden in Buckinghamshire. With its commercial hat on the National Trust understands perfectly that there is huge unsatisfied demand for spacious housing in green environments, yet from a policy perspective it argues against any development of this kind.
Thus there is more than an element of the elite telling others what they should want, or settle for. And people may not find these environments as desirable as the architects might wish. This, of course, has happened before. In the 1950s and 1960s, following the teachings of Le Corbusier, tower blocks were built for subsidised local authority housing. Many were built but very few of them are still regarded as desirable environments by those forced to live in them, and they fell out favour until recent densification policies have made them fashionable again.
The need for change
We have established that the UK planning system delivers housing which is expensive and small, and that the arguments used to support it are arguable at best and in our view fallacious. It is not true that we have a shortage of land or that we want to live at higher densities We have also established that other countries pursue different planning policies; policies which result in housing which is neither expensive nor small.
The problem with UK housing is clearest in the concern over affordability, where there is a contradiction at the heart of policy. There is a desire to minimise the amount of land being built on by redeveloping existing urban land.
But in the face of increasing demand this results in rising land and house prices. These high prices are a consequence of planning policy but they are also, economically, a part of that policy. Homes are then said to be 'unaffordable'; key workers are excluded from decent housing. This is followed by a demand that housing should be built which is 'affordable', in other words, subsidised. But this then limits the land available for unsubsidised 'market' housing, so the price of that housing further increases. Some housing is made more affordable but only by making the rest less so.
This effect is magnified if developers are forced to pay a levy for affordable housing or have to make a percentage of the development affordable once planning permission is granted.
Of course these economic interrelationships are little understood. This is largely because the planning system is based on the allocation of land through a physical planning system, not on an understanding of markets.
And that will be England gone?
How often have we heard someone say: "If we allow more development then the whole of the countryside will be lost in just a few decades"? A simple look at the figures helps to put this view into perspective. Let us assume that ten per cent of England is urban (the real figure is probably even slightly lower, as suggested in Unaffordable Housing).That leaves ninety per cent of the whole country non-urban by definition, around 117,086 square kilometres. Multiply this by one million and you get the figure for non-urban square metres in England: 117,086,000,000 square metres. Of course, some of it is used for non-urban settlement or is in locations that are difficult to use for housing, but the rest could in theory be developed. In continental European countries that allow more development than the UK, the average person consumes around 400 square metres of land.This includes land used for things like housing, roads, hospitals and infrastructure, but also green space such as gardens, parks and playing fields. If just five per cent of non-urban English land (5,854 square kilometres) were developed at this rate, this area would provide continental-style settlement for nearly 15 million people - more than double the predicted growth of the English population by 2031. The reality is that, despite the scare stories, England is easily capable of providing the land need to comfortably house a growing population without any risk of the countryside being 'concreted over'.
Jul 06
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