Building Consent
Originally published in the MJ – 8/04/2024
As Localis publishes an essay collection looking at how homes and developments may be built in harmony with existing communities, Jonathan Werran considers the history of housing and planning.
That our word ‘economy’ derives from the ancient Greek ‘o??os’, meaning household, is normally a decent ruse for reducing to everyday domestic level understanding the bewildering and unfathomable financial forces and institutional powers that control our destiny.
If as Nietzsche posited, time is a flat circle, over the course of this century, housing and planning have seemingly been an expansive forever war with engagements endlessly refought over the historic terrain of previous policy battles. Whether it be Clement Attlee’s new towns policy and planning regime, Harold MacMillan’s success as Churchill’s housing secretary with post-war targets, Margaret Thatcher’s introduction of Right to Buy, Tony Blair’s promotion of housing associations above councils as delivery agents, it is fair to say we have seen enough recurrences for one eternity.
As far as our national political economy goes, it seems we have not moved on George Orwell’s categorisation in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, of England as a household ‘in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts’.
Solving the myriad and interconnected problems of a national housing shortage will require the courage to make new history. ‘Twas ever thus.
In April 1946, the novelist E M Forster took to the airwaves to condemn the new ‘meteorite town’ set to land on Stevenage, the setting for his novel, Howard’s End. The following month, all hell broke loose when Lewis Silkin, minister of Town and Country Planning, came to persuade a raucous meeting in Stevenage Town Hall, only to have protestors label him a ‘dictator’ and find the tyres of his official car deflated and sugar poured into its petrol tank.
Pushing through the smashed policy pillars of a broken housing market in the next Parliament will require the political courage to take on vested interests opposed to housing growth – let alone structural and financial enemies of promise – if Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government is to build 1.5 million new homes and set in train 10 new towns.
With this in mind, Localis has published an essay collection, Building consent: housing by popular demand, in which we asked a wide range of experts to examine the ground-level issue of how we might go about doing so in a way that meets the needs of our communities.
The contributors to Localis’s essay collection set out ideas for a hope-filled future in which the new homes and developments our country needs might be built in harmony with existing communities and in line with the contours of place.
Our 15 essays cover a lot of policy terrain, drawing as they do from diverse experiences and backgrounds of planners, local politicians, policy-makers and developers and covering contexts from the rural to the very urban, greenfield to brownfield.
The collection includes essays from contributors across the local government family as well as planning experts including Barking & Dagenham LBC leader and Local Government Association (LGA) housing spokesperson Cllr Darren Rodwell, as well as Conservative vice chair of the LGA’s Local Infrastructure and Net Zero Group, Cornwall Council leader Cllr Linda Taylor and Cllr Joe Harris, leader of the LGA Liberal Democrat Group.
The role of strategic planning in building consent for new housing features in essays from the chairman of the District Councils’ Network, Cllr Sam Chapman-Allen as well as Catriona Riddell, strategic planning specialist for the Planning Officers’ Society and Richard Blyth, who as head of policy and practice for the Royal Town Planning Institute, outlines a local planning system that works for all.
Stephen Jones, director of Core Cities UK, sets out the housing ambitions for the country’s major urban centres, as does Rob Lamond for the West Midlands Combined Authority.
Countryside development is covered in essays from Kerry Booth, chief executive of the Rural Services Network, who writes on affordable housing and Paul Miner, head of policy and campaigns for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, who writes on building consent for more housing in rural areas.
What unites them is a need for planning that is well-resourced to deliver the quality of results and outcomes we want to see, strategic in scope to integrate at scale and engaging and empathetic enough to carry local populations with them.
The next Parliament is likely to be marked by a pendulum shift to regional spatial planning. This will exert considerable strain on localist sinews and sensibilities. Will it remain the case that you cannot do both in seeking to answer the challenge of building at scale and securing popular local approval?
This collection of essays presents in the round ways of so doing. As Anna Clarke concludes in the last of our essays: ‘This is about democracy, about educating and making the case for new housing. It’s balancing different viewpoints and needs.’
by Jonathan Werran