1. 'Home Office, Burial law and policy in the 21st century: the need for a sensitive and sustainable approach', London, Home Office, 2004, and posted on www.homeoffice.gov.uk
2. 'Sustainable Communities - Building for the future', London, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2003, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk
3. 'Making it happen: the Northern Way', London, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2 February 2004, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk
4. Richard Rogers, 'Design urban renaissance', Financial Times, 19 January 2004, and posted on www.ft.com
5. 'Competitive European cities: where do the Core Cities stand?', London, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, January 2004, Figure 3.1, page 18, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk
6. 'Competitive European cities: where do the Core Cities stand?', London, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, January 2004, page 18, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk
7. William Hall, 'Developers have grand design on old blocks', Financial Times, 7 February 2004, and posted on www.ft.com
8. Juliana Ratner, 'Offices-as-homes conversions slow as market recovers', Financial Times, 7 February 2004, and posted on www.ft.com
9. Egg, 'House prices to tear apart "social fabric" of Britain', News release, 22 August 2002, and posted on journalist.egg.com
10. Kate Barker, 'Review of housing supply: Securing our future housing needs', interim report, London, HM Treasury, 10 December 2003, page 135.
11. ODPM live tables of Housing Statistics, Table 204 Housebuilding: permanent dwellings started and completed by tenure in England, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk
12. 'Total Housing Completions in Great Britain 1920 to 2001', DTLR Housing Statistics 2001, and posted on www.dtlr.gov.uk
13. Tim Venables, James Barlow and David Gann, 'Manufacturing excellence: UK capacity in off site manufacturing', London, The Housing Forum and Constructing Excellence, January 2004, page 25.
14. Kate Barker, 'Review of housing supply: Securing our future housing needs', interim report, London, HM Treasury, 10 December 2003, page 47.
15. James Barlow, Ken Bartlett, Alan Hooper and Christine Whitehead, 'Land for housing: current practice and future options', Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 26 March 2002.
16. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, quoted in James Harkin, 'The Buddha of Balmoral', FT magazine, 7 February 2004, page 16, and posted on www.ft.com
17. James Harkin, 'The Buddha of Balmoral', FT magazine, 7 February 2004, pages 19 and 20, and posted on www.ft.com
18. Prince Charles, quoted in James Harkin, 'The Buddha of Balmoral', FT magazine, 7 February 2004, page 16, and posted on www.ft.com
Britain's grave crisis
Now that New Labour has established that there's no room even to bury the dead, its obsession with protecting the land promises to drive house prices still higher for the living, says James Woudhuysen. This article first appeared on spiked! on 12 February 2004. It follows the publication of his book, written with Ian Abley - Why is construction so backward? - and accompanies the series of launch events at which James is speaking around the country.
The government is worried. Home Office minister Paul Goggins says that there is so much pressure on space in this country, we may have to start burying people four deep. With the White Paper Burial law and policy in the 21st century: the need for a sensitive and sustainable approach, he has launched a six-month public consultation - complete with no fewer than 37 separate questions demanding a response - to ensure that proposals to re-use burial grounds do not inflame religious feeling. Whatever the outcome, it looks likely that a new inspectorate to ensure that the 25,000 burial grounds in England and Wales are properly maintained and comply with standards. (1)
As in the accommodation for corpses, so in the accommodation of the living. Just as David Blunkett's Home Office refuses to countenance graveyards in the Green Belt, so the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) regularly indicts 'suburban sprawl'. Instead of building anew on Britain's plentiful green fields, John Prescott wants the re-use of old houses built on cemetery-like brownfield sites. It is all set out in a White Paper, Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future, published in February 2003. (2)
The latest commandments from the ODPM, in the shape of this month's 103-page report on England's northern cities, Making it happen: the Northern Way, reveal Prescott's agenda very clearly. Straight after his self-congratulatory Foreword, the report proclaims:
'At Manchester Salford alone, by March 2006 we expect the pathfinder to deliver 1,000 new homes constructed and occupied, 13,400 homes refurbished, repaired or improved; and 1,700 redundant and obsolete properties cleared.' (3)
Here 'the pathfinder' is just one of New Labour's myriad of confusing urban initiatives, each with its own brand, pot of funds and pot of officious bureaucrats in planning and design. But the point is clear enough. In Salford and no doubt elsewhere, new homes can only be allowed to account for something like 1000 - 6.21 per cent - in every 16,100 dwellings put up, done up or knocked down. New kinds and new numbers of houses cannot be allowed to desecrate our beloved countryside.
Prescott's chief adviser on urban affairs, the architect Lord Richard Rogers, has said as much. For him, people have despaired of British cities and are flooding out of them. In the process, they use the countryside up with wasteful, low-density settlements by Barratt or worse. What government must do is get people back into cities, he insists. (4)
In fact, the evidence for a real urban exodus is mixed. Here is how the ODPM's initiative on England's eight 'Core Cities' reports the latest figures for the relative changes of population, as a percentage of population change from 1991 to 2001: (5)
- -7.0% Liverpool
- -5.0% Newcastle
- -3.6% Nottingham
- -3.3% Manchester
- -2.2% Bristol
- -1.9% Birmingham
- -1.3% Sheffield
- +1.3% Leeds
For a most cities, the departures have been pretty negligible. Moreover as the report makes clear, '... the rate of population decline is slowing and in several places the trend is starting to be reversed'. (6)
Thus, in the Core Cities, Glasgow, Reading, London and elsewhere, empty office blocks have lured noughties yuppies back to the inner city with luxury apartments. (7 and 8) But with single-person households multiplying, immigration buoyant and Britain's romantic love-affair with GM-free land at unprecedented levels, the long-term prospect for house prices looks grim. No doubt the Internet bank Egg has its own reasons for wanting young people to save more for their first house. Yet Egg may be right that, by 2011, the age of the average first-time British buyer will rise from 34 to 36 - or that the average deposit on such a house will be £32,000, or 85 per cent of what a 36 year old might expect to earn then. (9)
What Frederick Engels described as The Housing Question has
now become so troublesome that Chancellor Gordon Brown himself has commissioned
a report into it. At his behest, Kate Barker, a member of the Bank of England's
Monetary Policy Committee, has already found out something very interesting
about the 707,000 homes planned for the Rest of South East (RoSE) area by 2016.
Far from concreting over vast expanses of undeveloped land, that many homes
will take up just 1.5 per cent of the RoSE area, even with accompanying
infrastructure. (10)
Much, though not all, of Barker's analysis leads to the conclusion that it is Britain's reactionary planning system that accounts for this country's shortage of homes. Much, too, suggests that fault lies with weak production volumes and weak innovation on the part of its building industry.
More than burgeoning demand and faltering supply, therefore, lie at the root of extortionate prices for new homes, old houses and - by far the biggest component of the building trade - the refurbishment of old houses. Investment in normal capitalist companies has not been very attractive since the millennium; so, for financial institutions, it has made more sense to put funds into fleecing consumers on the mortgage market. Still, the state of housing supply in Britain reveals not just the collapse of local authority construction over the past 40 years, but also where New Labour's biblical commitment to land and environmentalism has brought everyone who might ever want to buy a house.
The state of housing supply tells us a lot about the lack of
innovation in the building trade. We are building 130,000 new homes a year in
England. (11) In the 1960s, the annual national total for all forms of tenure
exceeded 400,000. (12) Things have got so bad that the Government has even
begun to breathe what a conference, held in London's Docklands on 3 February
2004 by The Housing Forum, heard described as 'the P-word': prefabrication. The
idea is that, to brush up its modernising credentials, New Labour should
coquette with the unrecognised pioneers of off-site manufacturing (OSM) of
homes in this country.
It is all very duplicitous.
Ministers fear that to fund an investment in houses on the scale required would mean subsidising house factories with billions of pounds. As if that kind of Wilsonian socialism isn't anathema enough, ministers also fear that any such puncturing of the house price bubble could lead disastrous economic and political consequences.
The result is that the official approach to OSM is to praise it a little, but spend a lot more time pointing out its faults. Condescension, not construction, is the watchword.
At The Housing Forum conference, delegates learned just how modest Government ambitions are with OSM. As Tim Venables of Imperial College, London, pointed out, Britain's existing specialists in OSM don't so much manufacture complete houses at all as supply parts of homes to Wimpey and other on-site builders of the old school. That is not their fault; nor is it their fault that they are responsible for only 17,000 homes a year. As a report by The Housing Forum makes clear, capacity utilisation in the OSM sector is only 70 per cent, in the main because factory owners are not confident of sustained demand and are not confident, either, that, public perceptions of their product will be favourable. (13)
Given John Prescott's commitment to build just 4000 homes under the rubric of the P-word, his continual denunciation of any 'one size fits all' approach to housing, and his relentless insistence that all design be local, local and local in orientation, the OSM industry's cautious attitude to any putative boom in mass-produced housing is no surprise. Indeed at the Housing Forum conference, even the word 'standardisation' was deemed likely to put people off mass-produced homes; instead, the term 'interchangeable' was preferred, as a means of bringing out the potential for the customisation of off-site manufactured house components to personal taste.
At the conference, speakers fretted over how off-site methods do not allow home buyers to change the location of electrical power points at the last minute. They worried, too, that bricking over the facades of manufactured homes once they arrive on site would divert scarce and expensive bricklaying skills from conventional housing developments. But these objections are so much chaff.
People have a right to insist on late changes or brick facades, but that is their financial responsibility too. To the extent that there is a shortage of skilled trades such as bricklaying, higher wages and an end to government/union witch-hunts against immigrant building workers would make a big difference.
The fundamental point is this: for customisation to be an economically viable, production volumes must be high. And for public perceptions of mass-produced homes to be favourable, people must be able easily to buy large, very advanced ones, stuffed with IT connections, not subject to punitive Stamp Duties, and not subject to arbitrary veto through Britain's Byzantine planning system, either.
It must be done: if real house price inflation is to be brought down to zero, Kate Barker says, Britain needs an extra 240,000 homes a year. (14) Meanwhile, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says 225,000 new homes a year are needed in England alone. (15) And it can be done. Nearly 60 years on from the Attlee Government's leaky 'prefabs', a 21st century mixture of car industry robotics, clever IT and funky new materials makes prefabricated houses a completely different proposition.
If the Norman Foster Toyota Mark 4 were to compete on global markets with the Richard Rogers Ford Dagenham Mark 5, new houses could and would have to be better insulated, more wired up and more durable than any on-site brickie, scaffolder or plasterer could make a one-off.
Would that mean a one-size-meets-all approach? Looking at the variegated componentry, colours, textiles and finishes available in Japan, and in the world motor industry, our Post-Modern worriers should sleep easy.
The issue with UK housing supply is not so much technical, nor even economic, as political.
In a brilliant cover story in the FT magazine, James Harkin has spelt out just how much John Prescott is captivated, not only by the virgin fields of Lord Rogers, but by the Buddhist visions of Prince Charles. In the twilight of Margaret Thatcher's famous property-owning democracy, the demand that the monarchy be abolished has never been more relevant.
Prince Charles's own version of a Disneyland Shangri La, the hand-built Poundbury model village in Dorchester, has raised the level of three things, according to Prescott: the architectural expectations of the public, those of building industry professionals, and the overall 'quality of architecture, design and planning' in the UK. (16) What Prescott means, as Harkin makes clear, is that Poundbury's crafted buildings, such as its new outlet for excellence in complementary medicine, should be and indeed already are an architectural and communitarian inspiration to us all.
Similarly, Poundbury's prominent displays of Duchy Originals in its village shop must, no doubt, have improved public debate about and the professional practice of design. As for planning, the injunction to Poundbury's aged inhabitants to have more children shows, we can be sure, an exemplary mix of discretion and foresight. (17)
As the Prince himself maintains of his architectural preferences, '... I'm beginning to think that I'm a little avant garde'. (18) Already government's environmental police forces - such as the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment in England - ensure that all new buildings, few though they may be, are interrogated over their relatively miniscule carbon emissions. The rhetoric of local, local, and local control over planning decisions will run right through New Labour's forthcoming election manifesto.
From start to finish the priorities of the Prince are those of the New Labour Government. Those priorities highlight anything naturalistic or spiritual, and always downplay the need for serious investment in new, off-site housing processes and products that will disrupt the inflationary status quo.
For all Prescott's inclusive talk of affordable housing, his royalist commitment to the Poundbury one-off sort looks set to condemn a generation of young people to impossible house prices - and to spending much of their adult lives living with Mum and Dad. James Woudhuysen 12 February 2004
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