Tory planning changes perverse and creating unbalanced development warns Cable
Author: Isabel Hardman, The Spectator |
One of the most striking things about the Lib Dem conference is not that the party has decided to be mean about the Tories in a mildly obsessive and weird way, but that Nick Clegg and colleagues have also been softening the red lines that could really stop them returning into coalition with the Conservatives. At a fringe meeting today, even Vince Cable managed to say a number of nice things about his coalition partners on housebuilding. Asked whether the Tories and Lib Dems had started to disagree over new housebuilding so much that they’d really run out of road to share after 2015, Cable replied:
‘No, there are some positive things that are happening on housing, which we do agree with them on. In my area of government one of the things we’ve established is trading construction as part of the industrial strategy and a lot of very useful, you know, practical things are now being done about skills training, and one particular thing which actually George Osborne introduced and I am very supportive of, at the Budget, was credits for small builders who currently can’t get money out to the banks for love or money, and I would like to see that scheme expanded.
‘So there are a whole lot of things you can do in terms of housing supply where you can get agreement across government I’m not wanting to get into the debate about coalitions and Lib Dems, I’ve had that all week from the press. But just isolating the housing issues, there are things we disagree with them on completely: they loathe social hosting and we’ve had awful side effects of that over the years on the right to buy and its consequences, and they disagree with us on the garden cities as well but nonetheless there are positive things you can do and there are areas of common ground.’
What did become clear from the fringe, perhaps surprisingly for the Lib Dems listening, was that Cable clearly finds it much easier to work with George Osborne than he does with other Cabinet Ministers such as Eric Pickles. He said Pickles was ‘absolutely pathologically hostile to land auctions but I and my colleagues in government had support from Osborne on this one’. He also attacked Pickles’ policy of allowing change of use from commercial to residential property, saying it was damaging small businesses. The Business Secretary said:
‘I don’t know how many people are aware of this, in most towns and cities there is a result of measures which Mr Pickles brought in, encouraged by people on the other side of the Coalition, if you have shops and commercial property, they can be converted without reference to planning committees straightforwardly into housing.
‘So in an area like mine in South West London large swathes of commercial property are in the process of disappearing so that people can build converted flats on them. Now you could say well you are desperate for the housing – which we are – but it does mean that there is nowhere for small firms to operate from, so we are creating the homes but driving out employment which is perverse and it just means you’re getting terribly unbalanced development’.
Just to drive the knife in a little deeper, Cable also suggested that in areas of high demand, people should consider building on golf courses. He cited Surrey as an example, saying:
‘As I understand it in Surrey there is more land under golf courses than there is for houses and that says there is a problem and if I were in a relatively middle-income family in Surrey desperately trying to get a house I would ask myself is the golf course sacred or are there more better uses of the land? One does have to challenge the status quo in cases like that.’
That’s not going to go down well with Eric Pickles either, is it?