Decoding the Housing White Paper

A discussion note

Author: Jack Airey   |   28/04/2017

This short report is a response to the government white paper Fixing our broken housing market. Its starting point is that the white paper is a welcome strategy document which codifies significant and positive shifts in rhetoric. However what the white paper delivers in rhetoric it lacks in specific policy prescriptions. It identifies the parts of the system that are broken but not how they can be fixed.

To contribute towards the new ideas needed to fix the country’s broken housing market, this short report considers the white paper’s hidden messages, how its measures will play out on the ground; and, where government’s housing and planning strategy can be tweaked to most effect. It is informed by three roundtable discussions held across the country with senior leaders from local government.

Key findings

• The housing market needs disruption. If we take a functioning market to be competitive, efficient and meeting the needs of consumers, the housing market has been broken for at least the past thirty years. It needs disrupting. We envisage three potential market disruptions. Innovation, for instance new forms of production, need to be better incentivised to be scaled up. A more diverse range of housing providers is needed: local authorities should be provided the freedoms to finance more house building. And planning authorities should be provided powers to set the pace at which houses are required to be built.
• Affordability is not the same everywhere. The white paper rightly begins with “the acknowledgement that the housing market is very different in different parts of the country”. However a number of provisions of government’s housing strategy works against this. Firstly the definition of Affordable Housing is insufficiently locally-flexible. Secondly outside of London government-sponsored home ownership subsidies, for instance Help to Buy, do not take account of variations in affordability.
• The planning system needs to be better enforced. The planning system is efficient at granting planning permission but not at ensuring housing delivery. The rules by which the system operates do not necessarily need major change, however they do need to be better enforced. This should mean a more transparent financial viability assessment process, strengthened strategic planning across the whole country; and, methodological shifts in assessing local need and land supply.

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