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Labour flunks the Housing Test

I am a housebuilder by trade.  I have served both Bovis Homes and Barratts as Managing Director of their "London Divisions".  A historian by education, Yes.  A Barrister by profession, Yes.  But a housebuilder by trade, by real occupation.  I have loved it. Housebuilding is the most satisfying of all business pursuits - exciting, challenging, demanding.

And Labour - as the Party of change - needs the housebuilders.  Yet the Cabinet, now with John Prescott again in the lead, has completely failed to reach any real concordat with the housebuilding industry.  And Prescott's "Urban Summit" this week was an embarrassment to anyone with understanding of the issues.  It was a deep disappointment to all those professionally and industrially concerned.

For "residential development", properly understood, is one of the nation's great manufacturing industries, producing the largest and most popular consumer durable known to the consumer society - the home. It is a key agent of social change and of urban regeneration and new urban growth.  It is a powerful economic driver, without significant "foreign" corporate penetration.  Yet my Party has persistently failed to get to grips with its processes, its needs, its interests, its ambitions.  Admittedly, the Tories were just as bad, but that is no comfort to me - I was confident that in 1997 Labour, conscious of the social significance of a decaying national housing-stock, would try to improve upon the Tories' dismal record.

I was wrong.  Labour has been just as bad as the Tories.  I regret that my colleague Nick Raynsford, whom I know better than any Minister because he was for so many years Labour's Minister for Construction (both in Opposition and Government) showed no inclination to get to grips with and understand the "private" housebuilding industry.  Coming from the housing association movement himself, he viewed "spec housebuilders" with mistrust, and no positive relationship was engendered.

Labour has treated this great industry with contempt, suspecting its motives, subjecting it to public criticism, dismissing its complaints about the planning system, disregarding its critique of official Green Belt policy, and showing deep ignorance of its business processes. The Civil Service has never been organised to deliver to Ministers an understanding of "residential development" as the key manufacturing industry it is.

The blundering insensitivity of the Labour Government is a matter of acute personal discomfiture to me.  This is "Old Labour" at its worst.
Governments (Tory and Labour alike) have in the last twenty-five years mismanaged the regulation of development industry and of land-supply, with the result that house production has now fallen to dangerously low levels. At the present rate of construction, it will take 150 years to replace the present housing stock. 

Having served (1974/77) as Industrial Adviser on
Construction to the Wilson/Callaghan Labour Government, I can testify that under Tony Crosland and Reg Freeson it was not like that - great strides were made in deepening mutual trust and confidence between Government and development industry.  Indeed, most of the procedures we invented then are still in position, without
subsequent innovation.

John Prescott's briefing for the Birmingham "Urban Summit" this week was dire.  He was targeting the housebuilders, who were said to build at excessively low densities. 

• "We shall enforce minimum densities of 30 homes per hectare" he thundered, "as compared with the present minimum of 20".  He made it sound as if the tumbrils of revolution were already on their rumbling way, with Wimpey destined for the big drop.

But what does that mean?   "30 homes per hectare" represents only the traditional semi-detached estate density of 12 houses per acre (by way of gentle reminder, there are 2.41 acres to one hectare, remember?)  In 1970 I had to face a deeply antagonistic public inquiry in Camberley in order to get planning permission to increase densities from 4 per acre to 12 per acre - and most developers would now prefer to operate at 18/20 per acre - or 45 per hectare (not 30!)  At the 1970 Camberley public inquiry, I was accused of undermining the social fabric of Camberley (to which I pleaded guilty - developers are commonly agents of social change..)  We won planning permission on appeal, and the "Heatherside" estate is still there, to this very day...  But the offender, dear DPM, was not the housebuilder (i.e. me..) - it was the planning authority, desperate to prevent working-class Londoners entering the charmed middle-class circle of Camberley and Frimley.  The NIMBY brigade opposed the construction of houses that ordinary folk could afford.  Middle England, dear John, has not changed.  You are pillorying the wrong people.

There is no short cut to effective urban regeneration.  The problem lies is the long-term emasculation of city government, and unwise political centralisation, under both Tory and Labour Governments.  Until Labour goes back to its democratic roots, and allows UK cities to govern themselves, these problems of urban decay will subsist.  Don't centralise, municipalise! 

Labour should certainly be making common cause with the residential development industry.  I could, if asked, explain precisely how that could best be done - but nobody in the Labour Party seems to want to know...