Treasury Stupid Timidity over Garden City ‘Feasibility Study’

One imagines how history would have been rewritten if instead of learning from 150 years of history and international examples and taking bold leadership things had been done the Treasury Way.

Napoleon lay down his map – ‘England is a maritime power, it gains its strength from Empire, from India, my plan is to invade Eygpt and then march overland across Persia to India, in a strike coordinated with my New Ally the Czar, surpassing even Alexander the Great, the British will exhaust themselves and leave their coast undefended by the royal Navy.  What do you think my treasury secondee?

‘Well I see two problems, I think we should conduct a feasibility study about your plan to take along 150 Eygyptolists, they are very hard to recruit’

‘Of Course I just invented Eygptology, and the second?’

‘Well it will be very expensive.’

‘If I triumph the spoils of Empire will pay for it.’

Deng Xiaoping gathered his advisors around him. ‘In order to catch up with the west we need rapid economic growth of 7+% a year, which can only be done with rapid urbanisation.  We know though from South America that if left to the market this produces slums and squalor and discontent and eventually growth slows.  From my studying of Singapore and Hong Kong however I have learned that this can be avoided through their application of the British invention’public sector housing’ if the state own the land then rents can be kept low and growth can continue.

My Treasury Secondee – your advice?’

‘Well I can see a few problems – you should conduct a feasibility study into whether or not it could be privatized’.

‘Then all the gains in wages will go to the landowners and not be saved to finace investment.’

‘Take this idiot to a very dark place’.

Noah was laying the last of his struts to his ark.

‘In a few days the flood will begin, we shall take the chosen few virtuous and sail for 40 days and 40 nights.’

‘Myu Treasury secondee how are things going with the animals?’

‘Well you know we should conduct a feasility study?’

‘This hasn’t been tried before and the prject has been hard to finance, its hard to convince the banks that the world will flood and they are all going to die. Perhaps we should try a few mini arcs as pilots first.’

‘Then we will die watching its sail away and so will the animals.’

‘Yes but do we really need Aardvarks, my NPV calculations show a negative rate of return?’

The Other Planning Reforms Announced Today – Continental Style Zoning

Page 127 of the National Infrastructure Plan 2014

Building on this progress, the government will take further measures to speed up the en dto-end
planning process, including:
• taking forward measures to ensure that the principle of development need only be established once, to give greater certainty and allow locally-supported development to proceed more quickly
• taking steps to speed up section 106 negotiations, including revised guidance, consulting on a faster process for reaching agreement, and considering how timescales for agreement could be introduced, and improving transparency on the use of section 106 funds
• keeping the speed of decisions on major applications under review, with the minimum performance threshold increasing to 50% of major decisions on time as performance continues to improve

The first is most radical.  It must being going beyond outline consents towards a system whereby once land is allocated in a local plan it is granted outline consent.  We have been saying on this site for many months that we are gradually moving towards the swifter delivering continental zoning and subdivision system.  This will be the most genuine and major planning reform since 1948 (excluding the massive retrograde moving the deckchairs of the NPPF).

Treasury Announces ‘Build and Sell’ to Hit 300,000 a year Target

Question is is whether Lib Dems have been fobbed off with a pilot and whether Osborne is serious

Daily Mail

The Government will ‘build and sell’ family homes in a desperate bid to end Britain’s housing crisis, ministers revealed today.

Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander said 300,000 new homes a year were needed but building firms were failing to meet the demand.

He said this had forced ministers to ‘think radically’ and consider using taxpayers’ money to kick start a new housing boom.

Mr Alexander said: ‘The message to the housebuilding sector would be simple: if you don’t build them, we will.’

The proposal – unveiled today ahead of George Osborne’s crunch Autumn Statement tomorrow – will be trialled at a former RAF base in Cambridgeshire and could lead to homes being built twice as fast as the more conventional route.

Launching the National Infrastructure Plan, which also includes details of £15 billion of road projects, £2.3 billion of flood defences and a range of energy programmes, Mr Alexander said the Government had to act to address the housing shortage.

He said £100 million was being made available for the new garden city at Ebbsfleet, ministers will back the development of a 13,000-home new town at Bicester, in Oxfordshire, and the extension of the London Overground to Barking Riverside will help unlock the construction of up to 11,000 properties.

The affordable homes programme will also be extended for a further two years, Mr Alexander said.

But in order to meet the demand for 300,000 new homes a year ‘requires us to think radically’.

‘An idea that I have been promoting is direct government commissioning of housing. Government – national or local – would take responsibility for ensuring the number of homes we need each year.

‘The message to the housebuilding sector would be simple: if you don’t build them, we will.’

There will be a detailed review to examine the potential of direct government commissioning and the Homes and Communities Agency will lead on delivering up to 10,000 new properties at the former RAF base at Northstowe in Cambridgeshire to trial the model.

‘Now it’s just a disused RAF base but soon it will be a development of up to 10,000 homes thanks to the pioneering action this Government has taken in trialling the new delivery model,’ Mr Alexander said.

‘This is the first time in a generation that the Government has owned land, led the development on it at this scale and considered commissioning homes directly.’

The model would allow homes to be built quicker and give the state the ability to ‘ensure developers build the most appropriate type of houses and the right associated infrastructure’.

Mr Alexander said: ‘We are examining in more detail the idea of direct commissioning as a solution for the whole country and piloting it on this enormously important site.’

Asked whether the need to build more homes would require the development of greenfield sites, Mr Alexander said he did not ‘necessarily accept’ that would be the case.

‘That’s something that would need to be worked through in delivering this,’ he said.

He said redeveloping public sector land, such as Northstowe, could help meet the demand: ‘We have released sites in this parliament for about 100,000 homes, we think. We want to see a much more ambitious approach in the next parliament.

‘I think that is something that can really help to meet this agenda.’

Meanwhile Treasury Commercial Secretary Lord Deighton said the compulsory purchase scheme could be changed, making it easier for people’s homes to be bought to clear the way for major infrastructure projects.

He said: ‘We will be publishing a consultation paper at the next Budget to streamline and update the compulsory purchase regime to make it clearer, faster and fairer.’

Is this so different from Lyon’s ‘guaranteed delivery’ not really.  Note how the Libs have announced Northstowe (cambridge lib seat) and Cons Bicester (con seat) as if they were different programmes but from same pot of money.

Northstowe – At Last A real Garden City – Treasury Finally Gets How to Deliver Real Growth

Why not announced as a Garden City – as its the only site with value capture? The Treasury is stepping in because it has finally worked out the private sector cannot deliver more than about half of the homes we need even with an entirely permissive set of planning reforms.

Do this 40 or so times and we would guarantee 300,000 homes a year, almost eliminate the housing credit cycle and solve the secular stagnation/profits puzzle problem of limited real wage growth due to wages being spent on rent and profits being spent on asset bubbles rather than investment in production.  At almost zero  interest rates it really is a no brainer and would pay for itself rapidly in reduced housing benefit payments.

Planning Resource

The pilot programme, announced in today’s National Infrastructure Plan, would see government housing and regeneration quango the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) lead the development of 10,000 homes on the government-owned former RAF base in Northstowe, near Cambridge.

The Treasury said the pilot signalled “the first time in a generation that the government has owned land, led a development on it at this scale, and considered commissioning homes directly for sale”.

It added that it would assess the feasibility and economic impacts of rolling out this model in a bid to support and accelerate housing supply.

Northstowe was one of the eco-towns proposed across England that were announced in 2009.

A masterplan for 10,000 homes at the site was approved in July 2012. Outline plans for an initial phase to deliver 1,500 homes was approved in October 2012, while an application for a further 3,500 homes was submitted in August this year.

When asked for further details on the plans, an HCA spokesman said that the quango would be “working on the detail with DCLG”. The Treasury was also asked to provide more details but had yet to do so at time of publication.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reported today that Bicester in Oxfordshire will become a garden city, with the Autumn Statement pledging £100 million of government funding to support the plans.

A government statement, published alongside the National Infrastructure Plan, said that it would “work with Bicester to support its plans to become a garden town, to support the construction of up to 13,000 homes”.

The local authority, Cherwell District Council, said in October that it was “currently reviewing the requirements for a bid” to become a garden city.

The government is currently accepting ideas from local authorities “for how they wish to develop garden cities” and “how they wish to make use of the existing central government funding and support” as part of its garden city prospectus.

Work on the Bicester scheme is already underway. The development was also one of the last government’s eco towns.

Osborne will Today Reannounce a Brown Ecotown as a Garden City

George Osborne will attempt today to launch Bicester as a new ‘Garden City’.  He will stress the new Gravel Hill MOD site, but in truth this is only 1,900 homes of the 13,000 planned.  By far the biggest site in Bicester is the NW Bicester site (7,000 units) already announced by Gordon Brown as an Ecotown.  Indeed the Gravel hill site was announced as part of Chilterns Local plan modifications many months ago prior to the Garden City Prospectus launch.   In fact both of the ‘garden cities’ announced so far add not a single units to planned housing numbers and simply make up lost ground from  the NPPF, Ecotowns cancellation and RSS revocation damage. They are supposed to provide incentives to bring new sites forward but so far only safe brownfield sites already in local plans have been announced.  Both address local need and not overspill need from conurbations.

This will only be an incentive if:

a) a long term  pot of money is announced

b) the government signals its intent through granting money to a brave new site that adds to housing numbers in an area where brownfield is in short supply – the only areas where there is an allocation problem.  The definition of a mistargeted incentive is to spend public money on something that was happending anyway.

c) value cpature is used to incetivise authorities that there will be a long term revenue stream.

Cameron’s legacy will be not a single net new Garden City house.

Ryan Avent sums up the Economic Argument Against Localism

He normally writes for the Economist

Cato – referring to US but could be anywhere.

metropolitan areas may need institutional reforms that better balance the economic interests of the metropolitan area (and the country as a whole) with the interests and preferences of those living in neighborhoods that are likely to be affected by new development. When land-use decisions are made at a hyper-local level — giving local council members or commissions extensive influence over which projects are approved, or focusing negotiation between residents and developers at the street level rather than the metropolitan level — the result will typically be far too little development. Those living immediately around a project enjoy some of its benefits but bear nearly all of its costs, in terms of disruption and congestion; they are therefore highly motivated to block projects and can succeed when local institutions enable them.

http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/12/01/cato-institutes-brink-lindsey-running-economic-growth-conference-wekeend-honest-broker-week-november-28-2014/