8. Demographia, 3rd Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2007 Ratings for Major Urban Markets, Christchurch, New Zealand, Pavletich Properties Ltd, 2007
9. James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley, Why is construction so backward?, Chichester, Wiley, 2004
How many reports does it take to make housing affordable and energy efficient?
Continued...
We asked you last year to speak at our conference All Planned Out? – The Worldwide Impact of the British Town and Country Planning System. However you were busy. So we shall have to look at the creative ways of increasing planning approvals and land supply without you. I’ll write to John Callcutt in that regard too...
Something needs to change… Instead of addressing the lack of housing production Government seems to be most interested in getting more of the population to join the majority of home owners. Yet as average household incomes part company with the ability to pay for housing in the private mortgage market, you are being forced to entertain ever more contrived forms of subsidized housing, and “shared ownership” schemes. Schemes that may prove to be little more than the registered “social” housing sector off-setting its own commercial risks onto tenants desperate to get into the private housing market, no matter how tenuously. That appears popular in a buoyant speculative market, but it may be unwise as a long term social policy.
Perhaps building good homes to live in could be a popular policy? It appears unlikely in the terms set for the review that Callcutt will investigate the potential popularity of a policy of building double or triple the number of homes currently realized. By being limited to 200,000 homes Callcutt cannot begin to think of ways of reconnecting the cost of housing to incomes. Average house prices in an area should be no more than three times average incomes, as Demographia have well understood in their excellent and widely respected International Housing Affordability Survey. (8) You can download this free:
Demographia
International Housing Affordability Survey (January 2007)
470KB
The problem of housing affordability in Britain is acute, 60 years after the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act established a model of land use and spatial planning that has influenced policies worldwide. Demographia have found that 21 out of 23 markets in the UK are either severely or seriously unaffordable.
Of course in Government you can continue to talk about “affordability” in planning for new housing without raising housing production to the level needed to undermine the speculative market in existing housing. You can continue to talk about “zero carbon” without any strategy to replace the mass of highly valued but energy inefficient existing housing. You can continue to ask the construction industry to improve, while sustaining a land use planning system that is based on the denial of development rights of land owners. You can unfairly blame planners for a land use planning system that is being used instrumentally by the Treasury. You can imagine that house builders will separately provide the energy infrastructure that should be invested in as a coherent national programme.
And of course you can continue to pay for more reports. Callcutt will be consulting with all the organisations and individuals in construction that have been repeatedly consulted with before – many of whom have written their own derivative reports in various praise of the torrent of policies to improve construction since 1991. Over the last 15 years, in which British housing production has wavered between 160,000 and 200,000, the emphasis has been on partnering. The construction industry has partnered with the shifting agendas of successive governments, through all the institutional re-organisations and policy flips. Construction has become lost in what James Woudhuysen and I called the “quango quagmire” in Why is construction so backward? (9) Callcutt could easily go the same way as the rest of the main reports, in pursuit of management by endless measurement, therapeutic partnerships, and a naturalistic perspective:
1991 Partnering: Contracting without Conflict (NEDO 1991)
1993 Trust and Money (Latham 1993)
1993 Realising Our Potential: A Strategy for Science, Engineering and Technology (Science and Technology Committee 1993)
1994 Constructing the Team (Latham 1994)
1995 First Report: British Government Panel on Sustainable Development (BGPSD 1995)
1995 Progress through Partnership (Office of Science and Technology 1995)
1995 Thinking about Building (Construction Round Table 1995)
1996 Second Report: British Government Panel on Sustainable Development (BGPSD 1996)
1996 Household Growth: Where shall we live? (DOE 1996)
1997 Constructing Success (Construction Industry Board 1997)
1997 Third Report: British Government Panel on Sustainable Development (BGPSD 1997)
1998 Constructing the Best Government Client (Agile Construction Initiative 1998)
1998 Constructing Improvement: The Clients’ Proposals for a Pact with the Industry (Construction Clients’ Forum 1998)
1998 The Agenda for Change (Construction Round Table 1998)
1998 Rethinking Construction: The report of the Construction Task Force to the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, on the scope for improving the quality and efficiency of UK construction (Construction Task Force 1998)
1998 Setting Environmental Standards (RCEP 1998)
1998 Fourth Report: British Government Panel on Sustainable Development (BGPSD 1998)
1999 Towards an Urban Renaissance (Urban Task Force 1999)
1999 A Better Quality of Life (DETR 1999)
2000 Building a Better Quality of Life (DETR 2000 a)
2000 Our Towns and Cities: The Future – Delivering an urban renaissance (DETR 2000 b)
2000 Our Countryside: The Future – A fair deal for rural England (DETR 2000 c)
2000 Energy – The Changing Climate (RCEP 2000) 2001 Construction Industry KPIs Pack (CBPP 2001)
2001 Modernising Construction (National Audit Office 2001)
2001 A Guide to Best Practice in Construction Procurement (Cain 2001)
2002 Accelerating Change (Strategic Forum for Construction 2002)
2002 Environmental Planning (RCEP 2002)
2002 Respect for People (Respect for People Working Group 2002)
2003 Modern Methods of House Building (POST 2003)
2004 Design and Modern Methods of Construction (CABE 2004)
2004 Barker Review of Housing Supply: Final Report – Delivering stability: securing our future housing needs (Barker 2004)
2005 Sustainable Communities; Homes for All (ODPM 2005 a)
2005 Securing the Future: The UK Government Sustainable Development Strategy (DEFRA 2005)
2005 Improving Public Services through Better Construction (National Audit Office 2005 a)
2005 Using modern methods of construction to build homes more quickly and efficiently (National Audit Office 2005 b)
2005 Planning Policy Statement 1: Delivering Sustainable Development (ODPM 2005 b)
2006 The Economics of Climate Change (Stern 2006)
2006 Barker Review of Land Use Planning: Final Report – Recommendations (Barker 2006)
2006 Planning Policy Statement 3 (PPS3) – Housing (CLG 2006 a)
2006 Building a Greener Future: Towards Zero Carbon Development (CLG 2006 b)
2006 Code for Sustainable Homes (CLG 2006 c)
I'll give the full reference list overleaf, in alphabetical order and in Harvard. I am also sure that it is not exhaustive, and each report has spawned much secondary reporting.
That collective effort, with countless seminars and conferences, has resulted in housing production falling from below 200,000 to 160,000 per annum, only to recover again after 15 years.
Homes are not built by report writers.
Ian Abley 14.03.2007 (part 2 of 3)
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