in heated discussions with No10, Mr Hammond has insisted a solution to the housing crisis must be multi-pronged and include boosting the construction labour force too.
He is also expected to slash stamp duty for first time buyers next Wednesday to help younger people get on the housing ladder and tackle anger over inter-generational unfairness.
But a row with Theresa May over two other major prongs to their plan will go to the wire.
It emerged that there is still no agreement between them over it with just eight days to go.
The government’s two most senior figures are locked in a row over how many billions to plough into a new bid by the Sajid Javid for the government to build its own houses.
The Communities Secretary has asked for £50bn and the PM has backed him, but Mr Hammond insists it will send the UK’s debt mountain spiralling.
And Mrs May is refusing Mr Hammond’s demand to rip up strict planning rules to allow councils to build on the green belt
Day: November 13, 2017
The Budget Plan for Crude Upzoning will Make London Like Kabul – And Kabul recognises it’s a Disaster @sajidjavid @GavinBarwell
Nick Boles new Book
The relatively low density of English cities stems in part from the welcome presence of large parks in our city centres, but mainly from our greater reliance on two-storey houses rather than the multi-storey apartment buildings that are common on the continent. To maximise the use of already developed land and the associated infrastructure, we should introduce a new permitted development right for any residential property in an urban or suburban area but outside a conservation area. This should allow the addition of one or two storeys up to a maximum of four storeys without the need for planning permission but subject to a design code specifying architectural style and materials so that the character of an area is maintained. Pimlico and Kensington are some of the most desirable and expensive parts of London. They are characterised by four and five storey terraces. There is no reason why building up to this level should blight an area. People could use the new freedom to add bedrooms for a growing family, to build granny flats for elderly relatives or to create separate living space that can be let out to tenants.
Developers and home owners would be allowed to extend the height of properties without planning permission, under plans being considered for the budget by the Chancellor.
Philip Hammond is weighing up proposals to relax planning laws to enable houses and blocks of flats to be raised to the height of the tallest building or tree in the same area without the cost or delay of seeking council approval.
The “build up not out” plan, which is backed by several former ministers, together with David Cameron’s ex policy chief, is being pushed by MPs as a way to help solve the housing crisis without building on greenfield land.
It mirrors similar proposals originally made by Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, and George Osborne, Mr Hammond’s predecessor, for homes in London, and offers a solution to an impasse between the Treasury and No 10 over proposals by the Chancellor to relax rules restricting…
Earlier this year I was in Kabul meeting the Mayor of Kabul and Minister for Housing, talking about the desperate need for zoning in the City. Interesting to be fed in the bombed out palace (designed by Albert Speer), which you can also explore in computer games like ‘The Phantom Pain’.
It has a Soviet era masterplan, recently updated by the Japanese, but no Zoning laws. The civil war caused the population of the city to double, with influx from the countryside and hostile areas meaning that two families typically occupy a house built for one. In those parts of the city where certain clans had got favorable aid and other contracts there was a chaotic picture as plots originally designed for one house were now randomly occupied by anything up to 15 storeys – typically without lifts and built to zero safety standards. I have seen the same situation in many emerging economies where there is some money (believe me I have seen far worse in some cities, in places like the Congo) where there is none.
Except in places like Britain with strict planning controls but little positive planning the poor will find housing, as the landowners will always find a way of providing it and extracting rent. However with a lack of zoning and zoning enforcement it produces chaotic results. Kabul’s population should be absolutely capped as there is no way to provide a water supply and sewerage system for more than 3 million people (its population has now exceed that) so rightly it plans another New Kabul nearby in another river catchment, but without the money to build it. Informal upzoning here has simply encouraged more rural urban migration in a city which does not have the infrastructure to provide it.
Boles and Co are right to consider that Britain’s Cities need upzoning, but adding two storeys will make every neighbourhood like Stamford Hill, ironically the London Neighbourhood most like the situation in emerging economy cities given its average household size. if done on a large scale it would require the expensive upgrading of London’s aging water and sewerage systems. London had it easy for several generations as its populations declined, meaning we didn’t notice as it creeps up again its infrastructure limits. Even though if London approached again the population it once had, 9 million (we are only now 300,000 short), that still leaves another 5 million houses to find over the next 20 years. Doing this without any loss of greenfield is almost impossible – consider the figures i’ve produced on this blog. For the implications of the new London Plan producing a predicted overspill of over 1 million dwellings.
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1,260,000 dwellings = 10,500 40 Storey Tower Blocks Hong Kong Worlds Tallest urban agglomeration has 1,303 = up to 7.9 Hong Kongs of Tower Blocks Do we want to see this Asian Style Vertical Sprawl?
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Evidence strongly that at these densities diseconomies of congestion strongly outweigh positive urban agglomeration effects (Rappaport 2008)
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Mayor of London – Post Grenfell – looking at alternative to tower blocks in Revised London Plan.
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At 10 Storey Olympic Village Density – 335 DPH needs 1,791 Ha – 112.5 Olympic Villages, 131.8 Aylesbury Estates – 14.5 sq miles – Westminster=8.29 Sq miles
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Much greater than All Large Scale Housing Estates in London Capable of Demolition 1,750 HA (Complete Streets/Savills for Cabinet Office 2015)
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At Least £5 billion cost of demolition plus cost of rehousing – we know post Grenfell nowhere to decant to.
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At Complete Streets favoured mansion block density 135 dph only capable of 1/5 this number
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Equivalent to 18 Park Royals at Complete Streets Densities
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So at Complete Streets densities need to knock down all of London’s Large Estates, All its Strategic Employment Sites and then start knocking down large parts of semi detached London
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Every City that has tried development on this scale and density in recent years – e.g. Moscow, Harare, Seoul has seen mass protest, mass corruption, failure of developers after mass demolitions, overcrowding from decants and political climbdowns. Unlikely to be possible in a democracy.
Yes lets have upzoning but in a planned way. this is a wheeze, a gimmick like ‘part q’ the notorious and failed’beds in cowsheds’ clause which because of its complex and unworkable rules trying to make a development plan rezoning on a national scale has completely clogged up the planning system in rural areas and likely resulted in a reduction in housing from this source because of the gigantic waste of effort and extra scrutiny given to new agricultural buildings and the colossal waste of officer and agent time.
Boles is right that if your are going to upzone you need to do it in a development code – a form based code, but this code needs to specify not just the elevational appearance but the height and bulk zoning of a site, street by street, to work, with rules which adjust depending on the size of the plot but also the adjacency of other buildings and uses. Effective zoning codes like this take years to prepare, they are worth doing and I think must be done in british cities as we inevitably move towards a zoning and subdivision based system. But there are few shortcuts, and all experience internationally suggest that anyone trying to do it with a stroke of a pen or by dictat are thrown out of office unless they happen to rule in an autocracy.
Why we wont have a ‘Macmillan Moment’ to Build More Houses in The Budget
George Freeman Chair of the Conservative Policy Forum
in the 1950s …the Conservative conference challenged its leadership to build more homes – an instruction that Harold Macmillan obeyed – and …the membership now wouldn’t be pushing for mass housebuilding as it once did. ‘Given how our membership has declined and aged, inevitably I think if we had a vote on the floor of the Conservative Party conference now, no [they wouldn’t push for more homes]. They are more seized by the damage of uncontrolled house dumping by the big national house builders exploiting the National Planning Policy Framework to do lazy development in the most sought-after shires rather than providing what we really need, which is a revolution of affordable entry-level shared equity housing, rented and owned housing for a new millennial generation carrying tuition fee debt and in a much more insecure workplace’.
FT Hopes for Big Budget on Housing Dashed
hopes of a revolutionary new housing policy in the Budget — after prime minister Theresa May last month vowed to fix the “broken housing market” — look set to be dashed on November 22. Ministers have failed to agree on proposals by communities secretary Sajid Javid for the government to borrow billions of pounds to finance a big new housing programme. They are considering other measures for inclusion in the Budget — for example, ways in which the government could commission the construction of more homes on state-owned brownfield sites — but these are not expected to provide a comprehensive solution to the housing crisis.
Nick Boles Backs Land Value Capture in new Book
We should give councils new responsibilities to bring land forward for development and new powers to ensure that development benefits the wider community. Currently, councils play a reactive role. They wait for landowners and developers to propose sites and then respond by granting planning permission subject to a large number of conditions and the negotiation of a Section 106 agreement, which is meant to secure reasonable financial contributions from the developer to the cost of improving local infrastructure. The process is tortuous and expensive. Developers are adept at keeping their financial contributions to a minimum. As a result, necessary improvements to local infrastructure are underfunded and local people become even more hostile to new development.
We should move towards the system that operates in Germany, which I first got to know when, as planning minister, I visited some of the superb new extensions to the city of Freiburg in 2013. There, local councils take the lead in acquiring land for major developments and putting in the necessary basic infrastructure – roads, sewers and utilities as well as parks and schools – before selling off serviced plots so that private developers can start building houses. They have the power to purchase land compulsorily at a value that relates to its current use and not its future use as a development site. As a result, councils are able to capture most of the increase in land value and use the money to fund the infrastructure that unlocks sites for development and offers benefits to the wider community.
To introduce a similar system in England, we will have to change our laws on compulsory purchase, specifically the 1961 Land Compensation Act, and give local councils (and their development corporations) the power to buy land at its ‘current use value’, if it is going to be used to meet the community’s need for housing or other kinds of development. It would be a mistake to restrict the new powers to brownfield sites, as was proposed in the last Conservative manifesto, as large urban extensions will usually involve a mixture of brownfield and greenfield land. Instead we should seek cross-party support for a broad reform to the land market which ensures that the interests of the community in meeting housing need and maintaining high quality infrastructure are balanced against the rights of landowners to receive fair value for their property (1).
But the Manifesto not say that – rather the press notices only focused on Brownfield. The manifesto said:
we will work with private and public sector house builders to capture the increase in land value created when they build to reinvest in local infrastructure, essential services and further housing, making it both easier and more certain that public sector landowners, and communities themselves, benefit from the increase in land value from urban regeneration and development.
No Oxford Comma ar regeneration, so ambiguous. Looks like bd editing from Nick Timothy, however the subject of t sentence is ‘increases in land value in urban areas, so could legitimately argue the general principle was included.
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions 