Let go Mr and Mrs Balls, because here comes Superbia
'Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,’ said Norwegian sustainability expert Gro Harlem Brundtland. Ian Abley agrees, and is making a plea for the recognition of suburbia's rise
Ed Balls was appointed Economic Secretary to the Treasury on 5 May 2006. He is married to Yvette Cooper, appointed Minister for Housing and Planning at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on 9 May 2005, itself replaced by the Department for Communities and Local Government on the day her husband got his latest job. Ed is Member of Parliament for the Normanton constituency in West Yorkshire, and Yvette is MP for the neighbouring constituency of in Pontefract, Castleford, Knottingley, and Normanton Common.
Mr and Mrs Balls have three children, and like any family, want the best for themselves and their children’s futures. That is at least part of their appeal to their electorate. ‘I represent hard-working people who are proud of their strong communities and who have fought hard across generations to defend them,’ said Yvette in her Maiden Speech in Parliament on 2 July 1997. ‘They are proud of their socialist traditions,’ she said, ‘… and have fought for a better future for their children and their grandchildren.’ Equally, Ed says:
‘I always like to book tours of Parliament for people who live in our area. But I was especially pleased when I received a letter from six year old Ben Williams earlier this year. He came down from Horbury to the House of Commons in July - and it was great to catch up with him in my constituency office.’
As the lad was only six it is unlikely that Ed would have had much difficulty with his questions. If his guest had been in his twenties, hoping to set up his own household, Ed may have been asked how the man was to afford even modest housing near decent employment in 2006. For as the Economist has observed, wages have fallen so far behind the cost of housing, whether mortgaged or rented, that it is only low interest rates that soften the unaffordable monthly equation.
The ratio of average house prices to average earnings stands at 6.0, higher than the last peak of 5.2 in 1989. While average payments on new mortgages account for 40% of average take home pay thanks to cheap lending today. When in the credit fuelled boom of the 1980s average payments were about 60% of average pay. For those wanting to set up home and without good jobs that is a huge problem. While for others, more established, further into careers, the fact that average house prices have increased by 175% since 1997 is a welcome increase in value.
Ed at the Treasury might be concerned at the precariousness of that situation. But there can be no right to own a home, and this property boom is popular. Frustrated house hunters or overextended first time buyers all want a part of that rising “balloon”, as the Economist saw it, even though it has risen out of reach.
New Labour’s property market balloon has arisen because house building had failed to meet the demand for household formation. There are more people wanting a home of their own than there are homes available. Prices have risen, and now speculation has taken hold. A bit more house building - and even subsidised “affordable housing” - is not going to ease that general level of speculation in increasingly unaffordable property.
The boom is based on housing undersupply, but the falling supply itself was complicated with a policy shift. Government contracted out policymaking to the Urban Task Force. The clue was in their title. Following the anxieties of the previous Conservative administration, the Urban Task Force was more concerned with the effect that household growth would have on the countryside. They set themselves against car-based suburbia as supposedly bad for the environment. Whether suburbia was what people wanted hardly came into it.
London suburbia
Calgary suburbs
Sheffield: city meets country
Since the late 1990s suburbia became an environmental problem, not the solution it had been throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the demand for affordable living space. That policy shift hardened into a presumption against developing greenfield land at lower densities, with spacious housing and big gardens. It was dressed up in the phraseology of sustainability, following the Bruntland definition, named after Gro Harlem Brundtland, a Norwegian politician, diplomat, physician, and an international leader in sustainable development and public health: She chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), and the Report of what was better known as the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, was published through Oxford University Press in 1987:
‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’
Ed and Yvette subscribe to the aspiration of the Brundtland Commission, as will many of their constituency, and the wider electorate. Before Ministers like Yvette started talking about “Sustainable Communities”, Catherine Slessor of The Architectural Review had sensibly observed that the Bruntland report definition of sustainability ‘… serves as a starting point, but it hardly suffices as an analytical guide or policy directive.’ Slessor also articulated the hopes of many practitioners when she argued that ‘… sustainability should not be seen simply as a corrective force, but as a new mandate for architecture.’ It has neither been a corrective, nor led to much architecture.
In Britain, defining suburbs as unsustainable has not led to architectural achievement so much as the building of a gradually increasing but still inadequate number of smaller flats, or “micro-flats”, without parking, mostly on brownfield land. The property boom based on numeric undersupply has been reinforced by the constraints on approving greenfield land for development, forcing developers to cram more flats into more expensive sites. This is surely a failure to meet the housing needs of the present, justified as an attempt to protect countryside for future generations. While building on greenfield was never a guarantee of architectural quality in the past, at least building suburbia created useful living space.
Do people want this as 'home'?
Seoul suburbs
Vancouver suburbs
Ed and Yvette are not setting out to deny people useful housing, and they don’t aim to fob people off with “micro-flats” exchanging at high prices in the ballooning property market. They will say they want more “decent” housing. Yvette attended a seminar organised by the Campaign to Protect Rural England in March 2006 themed as Housing - establishing the evidence base. In her introduction she explained that while Government aimed to increase housing supply, Ministers were also clear about continuing to prioritise new development on brownfield sites. She said she was keen to hear how “the evidence base” should be interpreted to inform Government policy.
Sadly of course, the Planning Minister already had a policy on resisting new house building on greenfield land, which agencies like the CPRE are only too keen to support with convenient “evidence”.
More of that “evidence” has just been published. With great fanfare at the end of August 2006 the Department of Communities and Local Government announced that ‘… existing stocks of available "brownfield" land could accommodate up to one million new homes.’ Patting the National Land Use Database of Previously-Developed Land firmly on the back, Yvette’s colleague, Lords Planning Minister Baroness Kay Andrews rushed to the moral high ground of sustainability.
She imagined even less new housing needed to be built on “greenfield” land than the mere 26% built currently. Her ladyship insisted that ‘… there is a real need to build more homes if we are to meet the housing needs of future generations and these statistics show that many of these could go on re-used sites.’ Of course by “homes” we know she means mostly flats, sustainably crammed by ingenious designers of “Communities” into the spectrum of land in need of some kind of reclamation or remediation; not too many houses with gardens and parking spaces. And certainly not the sorts of houses her friends live in. But that aside, space for a million new homes in England right now - that has the “WOW factor”.
The NLUD-PDL was established in 1998 by the Office formerly run by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, the man who demanded a “WOW” factor in development. The NLUD is now part of the Department of Communities and Local Government, known as “De-CLoG”, under Ruth Kelly, Yvette’s boss. NLUD have done a sterling job when you read their in depth report; Previously-developed land that may be available for development: England 2005.
The clue to what the report really tells us is in the title. This is about land that “may” be available for housing development. Through all the categories and figures it says quite clearly that of the total brownfield land of 63,500 hectares identified by the 85% of all local planning authorities that provided information, 27,600 hectares, or 44% is “potentially” suitable for housing. If that land were all developed at just over an average of 35 homes per hectare it could result in 981,000 dwellings. Just shy of the headline one million. NLUD realize too there may be barriers to development for some of this housing capacity: not all of it can be expected to come into use in the immediate future.
Well OK! Not all of that land is needed now if annual housing output remains as it is at present - lower than 200,000 per annum. In 2004/2005, 191,000 homes were built in Britain. In England that amounted to 156,000, which looks like it has increased to 163,000 this last year. So there will be a rash of commentators all saying that 100% of new housing could be brownfield, not the 74% as at present.
Assuming too that if more brownfield land comes available then that situation could be maintained indefinitely even with an increase in housing output. NLUD will be giving the brownfield boosters in the Urban Task Force, a land fetishist’s wet dream. It was Sir Peter Hall, an advocate of “Garden Cities” at the Town and Country Planning Association, who withdrew his support for the UTF out of concern for what he saw as The Land Fetish being established in British planning policymaking circles.
