Letter: There’s no silver bullet that can solve England’s housing crisis

As a town councillor in a rural area, drafter of its neighbourhood plan, and chair of a social enterprise that regenerated a closed community hospital as affordable housing and community space, my experience has taught me that there is no silver bullet to England’s housing crisis.

Instead, a bundle of interrelated policy changes are required (“Gove weakening of housing targets frees councils to axe developments”, Report, March 21).

The way to make housing targets palatable to communities is to give them a say in the design and location of new housing. This means simplifying the overly complex neighbourhood plan process, which currently sucks up resources without delivering the anticipated benefits.

It is possible both to streamline the planning system and obtain local buy-in to new housing if we also prioritise high quality design and environmental sustainability. This can only be achieved if we restore the eroded capacity of planning authorities so that deep-pocketed developers cannot out-gun them into diluting the rules.

Currently, our system relies on private developers to build affordable housing. They cannot do this efficiently or at scale. Instead, local authorities should be given the tools to take the lead. This includes the power to purchase at low-cost consented sites that are not being developed. Ditching “the right to buy”, a short-sighted policy that benefited one generation of working people at the expense of their children and grandchildren, is long overdue.

In rural areas, the easiest way to increase housing supply quickly is to end the taxpayer subsidy of holiday letting and otherwise encourage landlords to rent to full-time tenants. Brexit is contributing to construction delays and costs. To get house building rolling, we need to open our doors to immigrant labourers and, at the same time, create schools to train our own young people in building trades.

Last but not least, we need a government that can link the dots between housing, productivity and economic growth and a housing minister of Nye Bevan’s gifts, who can bring out the best in our civil servants who will be tasked with working out the devil in the detail.

Jessica de Grazia Jeans
Southwold, Suffolk, UK

Letters in response to this letter:

With LVT, there’s no need for crazy property levies / From Carol Wilcox, Christchurch, Dorset

Harvest the low-hanging fruit to ease housing crisis / From Carroll Reeve, Lavenham Community Land Trust, Lavenham, Suffolk, UK

Local authorities must be empowered to buy houses / From Martin Johnson, London SE1, UK