1. Fabian Society, Hazel Blears' speech on building communities , April 2008, posted on www.fabians.org.uk
2. Anne Power, Estates on the Edge: Social Consequences of Mass Housing in Northern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998
3. Suzy Jagger and David Brown, 'Huge profits from sale of homes renovated with taxpayer's money', 9 May 2009, The Times, p 8 and 9
4. Matthew Parris, 'Pull the bath plug and let out the dirty water', 9 May 2009, The Times, p 17
5. Andrew Porter, 'I've heard the outrage - now cheque is in the post, says Blears', 13 May 2009, The Daily Telegraph, p 2
6. Phillip Webster and Rachel Sylvester, 'Brown faces Cabinet split on future of Hazel Blears - Europe Minister issues warning over reshuffle', 23 May 2009, The Times, p 1
7. David Ottewell, 'Labour Hold Salford Seat', 21 May 2009, The Salford Advertiser
8. Brendan O'Neill, 'Beware the vultures circling the Commons', 19 May 2009, sp!ked online
9. Tim Black, 'Paying politicians is good for democracy - Forget the expenses scandal: politics was far more rotten when only the privileged few could afford to be MPs', 14 May 2009, sp!ked online
Hazel Blears is the most unbelievable of Ministers because of the poverty of her planning law
After the New Labour housing bubble had burst the Fabian Society launched a Housing and Community Policy Network in April 2008, with a lecture by Hazel Blears, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. Blears told the Fabian Society '... you cannot leave development, regeneration and planning to free markets, which by their nature create overcrowding, chaos, jerry-building, and property speculation.' The fact that the housing bubble has led to overcrowding, chaos, jerry-building, and above all property speculation, did not phase her, or the Fabian audience. In 2009 it is evident that Britain has an unfree development market run by the likes of Blears at the CLG.
Yet she also told them '... people must come first.' (1) She does not explain which people come first. Blears has a simplistic New Labour appreciation of the politics and economics of development. She confidently collapses the social history of three centuries of industrial Britain, based on the myth that a capitalist "free market" once existed:
'Look at the urbanisation of the 18th and 19th centuries to see what an unfettered approach to building delivers: poorly built slums, which were breeding grounds for disease, crime and degradation, existing alongside ghettos of the wealthy, living separate lives. It was only because of social movements to create public parks, clean water, and improved drainage, and because of enlightened philanthropists such as George Peabody and housing reformers such as Octavia Hill, that the Victorian cities were civilised for the majority of people.' (1)
A "free market" never exists under capitalism, because development requires capital. Capitalism only requires the freedom to employ the majority who must work, and to pay less in wages than the value that workforce has collectively produced. In construction that freedom to exploit a workforce of building operatives is tangible. In development the process of capital accumulation is obscured through the imposition of the planning system. The underlying fact of exploitation still operates but is mediated through established but changeable processes of property speculation that are subject to the winning of planning approvals.
The development of housing is additionally different to the development of other kinds of buildings. A home is not itself capital. It is the place we live, and a necessary shelter. However housing has generally been appreciating in value, and in the bigger ups and smaller downs of the market many try to turn any "equity" in housing into an asset, if not capital. This transformation of a more or less useful home into a financial investment became most evident in the early 1970s. It seems quite normal today in Britain, with mortgage lending being such an important aspect of the financial system. Yet the development of homes need not be confused with the capital accumulation processes that operate in the development of other kinds of buildings. The post-war planning system made no distinction between residential and non-residential land uses.
It is possible to imagine how such a distinction could be made, so that people might be free to build housing on their own land, but not free to build other kinds of buildings. However having the freedom to build a house also suggests having the freedom to build a place to work from. What would then be the difference between self-employment and having the means to employ others? Making a distinction between home and work under capitalism is possible, but not easy for planners to regulate.
No distinction is attempted. In twenty-first century Britain, and since 1947, development rights are denied to everyone wanting to build anything. The planning system works to confuse housing with other forms of development. Mortgage financiers based in The City of London would have it no other way. Without planning people could buy cheap farmland and build at cost plus a percentage profit on construction. There would be no need to borrow the larger sums of finance that even now, in 2009, developers charge on the CLG regulated market for planning approved housing schemes.
We must remember that Blears is in charge of the planning system at the CLG. Platitudinous CLG planning policies implemented more or less by local authorities mundanely stop development in a nationwide effort to protect some ill-defined "community". The negativity within the planning system no doubt annoys Blears, but she can't do without it. She cannot make the planning system a postive force in 2009, to drive down the cost of housing for instance, assuming she wanted to encourage widespread development. She does not want so much development that she risks further collapse in the property market. Blears doesn't even want to be seen to advocate the sort of executive planning she associates with the Cold War pre-1989, or which characterised the post-war Welfare State.
'You can see the consequences of central planning in the soullessness and social problems of the cities of the Soviet Union, China, or in the post-war estates built on the edges of European cities, described and analysed so expertly by Anne Power in her Estates on the Edge. (2) This top-down approach, characterised in the UK, I'm afraid to say, by some of the Fabian thinkers, seldom, if ever, results in the utopias their originators sought.' (1)
Blears is a planning minister who doesn't want to plan like they did in 1947. Also the Fabians were very far from communists, of course, as Blears vaguely recognises. 'Perhaps it is unfair to blame the Fabians for soulless post-war housing estates, because I know that for every Fabian statist centraliser, there has been a Fabian localist decentraliser!' (1)
The Fabian's lacked any ambition to be anything except reformers, and today political ambition is almost generally lacking. At the same time Britain cannot afford to plan and implement re-development on the scale attempted post-1947. Britain is a low wage economy, and housing has become both conspicuously unaffordable and a speculative "investment".
Britain doesn't add up 11.03.2009
In May of 2009 Blears was caught up in the moral outrage that followed revealations in the press about the system for MP's Expenses. Her record for claiming expenses "within the rules" of the parliament wide system was painfully exposed. Excrutiating details of public payments made for mortgages and improvements on second homes, later sold at a substantial profit in the New Labour housing bubble, substituted for news all over the media. (3) Most MPs were working the public expenses system to engage in what all homeowners do in Britain in the twenty-first century - speculate on domestic property to augment household income.
Now obviously Blears is working the public expenses system "within the rules" in ways that most of us will never get a chance to do. Just like most people in Britain will never be among the top 20% of earners and alongside MPs. However the need for MPs to claim for all these expenses is an indictment of Britain's economy, just as the obsession with these paltry sums is an indictment of the lack of politics. Matthew Parris was nearly right in The Times when he suggested the expenses system should be scrapped as a demeaning public display of private expenditure.
His answer was to pay all MPs another £30,000, and let them live within that without expenses. Parris recognised that the expenses system had become a way of MPs augmenting unremarkable incomes, making more out of the housing market in the process. (4) Pay MPs £30,000 more and hold them to account for their politics and the economy, not expenses.
However Parris misses a simple point. £30,000 is the average household income in Britain. We should all be paid £30,000 more immediately. The fact that we can't be paid another £30,000 collides with a political class that refuses to act like the social elite it has the power to be. MPs, like Blears, want to appear populist, claiming that "people must come first", even when it is unsurprising that MPs come first in the top quintile of Britain's households. In their desperate attempt to appear "ordinary" an entire class of politicians have managed to show themselves to be living extraordinary lives whilst denigrating politics. Politicians like Blears give politics a bad name, because they have more interest in working "within the rules" of expenses claims than in raising a political contest about which rules, or which wars, are worth supporting.
At work we all take working "within the rules" as far as we are able to and Blears is no exception. However Blears seems to have spent more time at the CLG in creatively claiming expenses and investing them in property than in raising levels of British housing production. That she took personal advantage of the housing bubble that New Labour planning policies sustained since 1997, and most recently through the CLG, is irritating. However a revised expenses system is an irrelevance.
As the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government with responsibility for planning Blears should be criticised for failing to plan the production of affordable housing for all. As the minister responsible for the Thames Gateway she should be criticised for that policy failure. A failure that funded numerous regeneration quangos staffed with New Labour acolytes, many in the top income 20%, and all with their expenses accounts. Blears effectively funds an entire constituency of planning professionals and design consultants busy working "within the rules", and in the business of refusing planning permissions to all except the people they approve of. People like "responsible" architects and developers interested in "design quality", able to work "within the rules" of the planning system under Blears.
Thames Gateway - Closed 11.07.2008
When Blears says "people must come first" she does not remotely intend to get rid of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. That is the legislation that underpins her authority at the CLG. That national denial of development rights is "the rules". Planning law ensures that to be allowed to build anything on their own land the majority of people have to apply to those supposedly interested in "design quality", who claim to be representing the "community". If Blears is to believed in 2009 a Britain without 1947 planning rules would collapse into overcrowding, chaos, jerry-building, and property speculation.
Blears is unbelievable, and not because of her expenses claims. Her 1947 planning laws should go. People should be free to build.
It is time to attempt to do without the likes of Blears, the 1947 planning law, and the "design quality" experts. A social majority will manage perfectly well without the rules of the planning system.
By Wednesday 13 May 2009, after a concerted effort by the British media, largely led by The Daily Telegraph, hardly an elected politician at Westminster in any party was without criticism for claiming expenses "within the rules". Blears was caught out over which of her homes she claimed as her second home. She changed her story to the Inland Revenue, and offered to repay £13,332 of Capital Gains Tax she had previously managed to avoid on a property deal. Blears blathered:
'I have heard absolutely the outrage and the anger that the public feel about what has been going on. I would never do anything to let down the people that I represent and serve and that is the most important thing for me... What is really important to me is what people think about this issue and what they think about me. I know this isn't enough and people are angry and it will take time.' (5)
It seemed that the tax avoidance was "within the rules" and the payment was not legally due, so Blears was willing to give the money to a charity.
This was all very dramatic, but distracting from the wider context.
As the Secretary of State at the CLG since June 2007 she has inherited the housing bubble, and seen it burst. She will strengthen the planning system that underpins the housing market. With her Treasury colleagues Blears is ensuring there will be another housing bubble. She has let the majority down, and will do so again. Her attempted Capital Gains Tax avoidance is almost normal. The normality of this sort of financial activity prompted the current Europe Minister Caroline Flint, the most useless of former Housing Ministers, to publicly support Blears. Prominently on the front page of The Times on a Saturday Flint warned Brown not to get rid of her friend Blears in any Cabinet reshuffle. (6)
The tax avoidance furore shows that like the majority of the population Blears too is supplementing her income from an unaffordable, inflated housing market that would be impossible if the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act did not exist. If Blears is dramatically disciplined over expenses as an example by Brown the planning system will remain.
The trouble is that most people are not angry about being denied their development rights. Many moan about planning, but don't want to do without a system that leaves the likes of Blears to decide who can and cannot build on their own land in the twenty-first century. It is pitiful that Blears is criticised for housing market speculation while the democratic freedom to build on Britain's ample land area is accepted as "for the benefit of the community". If all we are is a democracy of residential property speculators then Blears has her authority... plus expenses.
She claims to have kept constituency support for Labour, but local council elections in May had less than 20% of voters turning out. (7) People were not making a principled choice to withold their vote. This is voter apathy and a sign that politicians like Blears don't inspire an electorate bored with their little dramas over mundane financial affairs. That the widespread boredom and public disconnection translates into political power for Blears and her colleagues is a serious problem. They are worse than useless. They stay in office, deluded about their policies.
The Members of Parliament are uninspiring, and people see neither a compelling reason to vote, or to refuse to vote for a principle. There are no political principles being discussed. As Brendan O'Neill appreciates, the problem with Parliament is that it not democratic enough. However the expenses scandal suggests that MPs should be forced to act "within the rules" by an "independent" unelected authority setting new rules:
'As more and more MPs are exposed for having used the House of Commons expenses system to buy everything from plasma TVs to horse manure, the argument put forward by scandal-mongering journalists and various unelected officials is that the Commons, the elected part of parliament, has been too free to set its own agenda, too independent, too unchecked by external authorities. What we need, apparently, is more police, media and monarchical intervention in the workings of the Commons in order to ensure that MPs behave responsibly and cleanly.'
As O'Neill rightly says, Parliament is '... a democratic façade for British state power, resting on the ultimate authority of a body of armed men. And with the unelected House of Lords attached, there are so many undemocratic checks on the decision-making powers of the elected Commons that the things we vote for can easily be thwarted by lords and priests.' (8) It is annoying but expenses fiddling by MPs should not be made into an offence. Give them a pay rise and take the expenses away.
The elected part of the Parliament is worth supporting against the interventions of unelected authorities. Unfortunately every useless unprincipled MP in Parliament has been too scared to argue for a pay rise of £30,000. As Tim Black points out '... an MP’s wage currently stands at £64,766. It’s comfortably above the national average wage of £24,000, but it’s less than, for example, the average secondary school headteacher or family doctor would expect.' (9) MPs need more.
Instead of arguing for pay MPs have sought to make the most of possible expenses claims "within the rules". A few have simply bent or ignored the rules, but what they have been doing is mundane. The media fuelled moral outrage at ordinary examples of commonplace speculation on housing deals is letting the unelected enemies of even a facile British democracy strengthen their grip over the House of Commons.
Of course Britain is a democracy of residential property speculators, and the planning system is unchallenged. In my view Blears should have kept the money! And as O'Neill says, it is time to think about politics:
'By demanding the abolition of the monarchy, the abolition of the House of Lords, the complete expulsion of the police from parliamentary affairs, the injection of some serious ideas into media debate, and a full-on discussion about how to make parliament more – not less – democratic, political, partisan, inspiring and independent.' (8)
Blears will be no help in that. There is nothing democratic in Parliament making and enforcing planning law supposedly "for the benefit of the community". Which community does Parliament represent?
Planning law is an expression of the democratic façade of Parliament.
Ian Abley 10.05.2009, updated 30.05.2009
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