Are you a Nimby? It’s a question none of us can answer honestly until we receive a letter from the council asking whether we have any objections to a nearby development. We know there’s a big housing shortage: Britain needs to build about 300,000 new houses a year to ease the squeeze, which is seeing young people “hutching up”. At present, we build a paltry 100,000.
Last week’s stories about the need for more construction workers give a false picture of a housing boom. Building is up 10% but from a low base. Few of us would dispute that we need new houses. The rub comes when we have to choose where. In the event, I didn’t object to a proposed development behind my house — in general I’m in favour of using brownfield (that’s derelict or unused ground in urban areas) rather than virgin greenfield sites, so it seemed hypocritical to object to such a project. But I won’t deny I had a bit of a wrestle with my conscience: I didn’t fancy the dust and lorries and upheaval, and I was rather fond of a tree that would be whacked.
I’m not the only one. On our crowded island, few issues are more emotive than planning. But the result of our collective Nimby tendencies (particularly marked in those lucky enough to own a house) is an increasingly untenable situation. At present, most development is being allowed by councils in a piecemeal way around existing towns and villages. As one leading planner put it: “Councils look at all the villages and suburbs on their patch and look for the least attractive field where they will face the least opposition. But the result of that is that settlements get ringed by a nowhere-land of cul-de-sac developments of identikit houses which don’t flow together.”
Advertisement
Last week a sensible solution to this grisly malaise won the Wolfson economics prize, in the form of David Rudlin and his Manchester firm Urbed. Rudlin’s proposal suggests that rather than building a series of garden cities from scratch (as the government suggested last year) we should instead expand already successful towns or cities, where people are clamouring to live, including Norwich, Oxford, Rugby, Reading, Stafford and Northampton — up to 40 altogether.
For this to work, as Rudlin explained, we need to take a collective deep breath. It means breaking the old taboo and building on some green-belt land. This has become such a Nimby no-no, particularly in Tory-held shire seats, that inevitably (the election takes place in eight months) the proposal was greeted in some government quarters with trepidation. This idea is interesting not just because it suggests expanding cities by up to 150,000 people each — that’s about 70,000 homes a town — but because it proposes doing so on a grand scale, in the tradition of such admired developments as Edinburgh New Town or Bloomsbury and Regent’s Park in London.
Rudlin is suggesting a vision of aesthetically pleasing and integrated architecture and green spaces, alongside fantastic modern infrastructure with trams linking them to the main city in less than 20 minutes and one in five dwellings within reach of people on low incomes. The beauty of building pleasant, additional areas as part of existing cities is that they already have universities, theatres, shops and jobs, which are the heart of any metropolis. And many of the places suggested — particularly Oxford — desperately need more housing if they are to remain economically viable. The Oxford Civic Society has been arguing for green-belt release, and Oxfordshire county council admits it needs to build 100,000 new homes.
Danny Dorling, professor of geography at Oxford, recently said that the university would cease to thrive if there was nowhere affordable for students, junior lecturers and researchers to live. Increasingly, Oxford is becoming a London dormitory: parts are already the preserve of hedge-funders and the super-rich. Poorly paid academics, the lifeblood of the town, are being driven out. Rather than nibbling away at the outskirts of towns and villages all over the county, why not build an Oxford new town, worthy of the city’s existing architectural gems?
Advertisement
The British planning model, however, works against such grandiose, integrated schemes, which are the norm in Germany, Holland and the rest of northern Europe. The reason is economic. At present, if agricultural land is redesignated for development, the huge increase in value goes to the landowner — the farmer, land agent or often housing developer who has bought options on land that might be approved for a change of use. The sums are big: agricultural land sells for £15,000 a hectare; with development permission it is worth as much as £2.5m a hectare.
In much of Europe, when the land is designated for development, the value is frozen. The owner gets that money, plus some more as a sweetener and in compensation, but the extra value created by the change of use is ploughed back into the scheme to pay for infrastructure, superior design, green spaces, landscaping, roads and so on. As Rudlin puts it: “We need a mechanism to plough back the money that comes from changing the designated use into the development, not just to the landowner, so everyone can benefit.”
When 27 new towns — including Cwmbran, Milton Keynes and Corby — were built after the Second World War, the New Towns Act did just that. But it doesn’t happen on a large enough scale any more. The reason the Urbed scheme won the Wolfson prize is because it proposed a mechanism whereby a chunk of the profits could be hijacked to beautify and provide infrastructure for the new project. For instance, to create 70,000 homes on a green-belt site would cost about £2bn for the land at frozen prices and to build the houses, but the land could have been worth £6bn — the differential, the so-called “unearned increment” of £4bn, rather than going to the landowner, would be invested in the scheme, so it would be of much higher quality than is usually the case.
Britain desperately needs some creative thinking on planning. Rather than baulking and saying no, sticking our heads in the sand and allowing the problem to drift — the issue of more runways is a case in point — we need to bite the bullet. Rather than defending every acre of the green belt on principle, however ugly, light-industrial or unremarkable it is, we need to get real and say, well maybe we could build a lovely much-needed development on those fields, and in return we will protect those woods, that hill, those riverside water meadows that are the lifeblood of people’s favourite walks, jogging routes, pleasure and, yes, sanity.
It is possible. Around Cambridge they are building 70,000 new homes. What would be really clever would be to say, let’s link this invigorated conurbation to an expanded Stansted with a new runway. That would link the Cambridge tech hub to international markets, while with a fast rail link people could be whisked from the airport to London. It wouldn’t just be the southeast that would benefit, as Stansted is also easily accessible from the Midlands. It has all the advantages of Boris’s proposed estuary airport in terms of reducing flights over London, and it would demonstrate some really integrated thinking. How about it? Let’s get digging.