Fri 24 Oct 2008
Land of the free
We’re heading for recession, the Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned recently – just a few days after Housing Minister Margaret Beckett declared at a dinner that she wanted the government to release more land for new homes. What an interesting and depressing juxtaposition those two statements present.I don’t know what weird mathematical parameters Merv uses to define a recession, but I can tell him that for those of us working inside the housebuilding industry, it arrived a while ago. We are already suffering terribly and having him tell the global business community that it is going to get worse is tantamount to turning the thumbscrew. I expect that sort of damaging twaddle from the so-called sector analysts, those cocooned “experts” who sit in banks playing god with real businesses like ours. Still, that’s always been the way of the money men and women.
More intriguing is Margaret Beckett’s desire for the government to release more land for housing. David Pretty made exactly the same call several times when he was chief executive of Barratt, and has since done so at least twice in his capacity as chairman of the New Homes Marketing Board, but I doubt Ms Beckett realises any of that. She may be a veteran MP of both Old and New Labour varieties, and she certainly has previous ministerial form, but there’s no reason to believe she has any firmer grasp of the housing brief than any of her recent predecessors.
Charming Keith Hill, eye-wateringly ambitious Yvette Cooper, glamorous Caroline Flint – none of ‘em, it seems to me, had much more than the vaguest clue about how our industry works and, more importantly, how it meshes into both the economy and psyche of the UK. They all had a few scraps of half-baked policy, but each of them seemed to want to get shot of the dreaded housing brief as soon as humanly possible, and – surprise, surprise – that’s exactly what they all did. I once asked one of the above-named housing ministers what they thought “sustainable” meant and they couldn’t answer, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Beckett, as a seasoned juggler of political balls, may manage to appear slightly better informed in the public performance stakes, but is she just another also-ran?
Well, let’s consider her call to get more government land freed up. She will certainly know the true extent of the housing shortage, and her advisors have no doubt also whispered the political secret that is never uttered in public: ie that we are going to continue to have a chronic housing shortage in the UK for at least another 25 years. She probably also knows that housing can only ever spring from planning consents, and those – thanks to a planning system which is moribund to the point of constipation – are in desperately short supply. So Beckett has gone for the obvious option and declared that more land will equal more houses. That used to be true when Pretty was making his calls and housebuilding was a booming, vibrant and dynamic industry. It may still be true in places like London, where the amount of unused, redundant government land verges on the scandalous. But generally, it’s pointless to suggest that more land will result in more homes. The reality is, there’s never been a shortage of housing land, especially since we’ve all got so much better at identifying and recycling brownfield land. And it was only five minutes ago that our industry was accused of hoarding too much land, for goodness sake. If there’s been a shortage of anything, it’s been a sensible, streamlined and fair planning regime giving straightforward consents and refusals within a workable timeframe.
Now, however, we lack something else which will take years, maybe decades, to build back up: industrial capacity. The credit crunch – fuelled by the greed and stupidity of the same bankers and money-shufflers who burdened us with unhelpful analysts – has done massive damage. Land and planning programmes have stopped, sites have been mothballed and skills have been lost as thousands of people have been ‘let go’, many of them never to return. Even the Poles, who made such a tremendous contribution to our industry when the going was good, are returning home in droves because lower pay and worse conditions are better than no pay and conditions at all.
Margaret Beckett needs to understand that more land is not going to get our industry off its knees anytime soon.
Posted by Bob Barlow
in Bank of England, Caroline Flint, David Pretty, Keith Hill, Margaret Beckett, Mervyn King, The Bob Barlow Column, Yvette Cooper on Fri 24 Oct 2008
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