Georgia L Gilholy is a staff member at Young Voices UK.
Covid aside, if any single issue proves the Johnson administration’s ineffectiveness, it’s housing.
In 2020, then-Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick’s plans to overhaul Britain’s outdated planning system were thwarted by MPs more concerned with protecting blue-voting boomers’ pay packages than ensuring a decent future for their grandchildren.
Long before Jenrick fell out of favor in last September’s reshuffle, it was clear that the government, with its 80-plus-year majority in the Commons, wanted to make little sense, regardless of whether it risked breaking the 2019 manifesto’s pledge of 300,000 to build new houses a year to the middle of the following decade.
But now Johnson’s political lifespan is also coming to an end, and his would-be successors seem to have fallen victim to the same declinistic instincts.
First, it’s important to emphasize how urgent the problem is. The average cost of buying a house in the 1990s was around £57,000, according to land register data. Prices have now quadrupled to around £237,000 while revenue has only tripled. In London, which has a disproportionate share of in-demand graduate jobs, a down payment alone will save the buyer a whopping £130,357 less – almost double the total value of the three-bedroom house my parents mortgaged in 2003.
Meanwhile, housing shortages continue to put pressure on the rental sector, where average prices have skyrocketed 17 percent since 2019.
Is it any wonder that a quarter of 18 to 35 year olds are considering moving to make home ownership more realistic? Or that of the 80 percent of people in this age group who were able to start saving on deposit, a third believe that they will never reach their savings goal? If future Prime Ministers care about the UK’s demographic future, they will act immediately to build more houses and lower house prices.
On Thursday, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced his plans to firmly “protect” the Green Belt if Tory members make him leader. The wealthy MP has vowed to draft forthcoming planning law reforms to prevent councils from jeopardizing green belt boundaries to free up more land for property development and that planners will be forced to flatly reject such plans.
This is clearly a desperate attempt by his stalled campaign to win over older property-owning members to his side. Though Sunak has spent weeks trying to position himself as a sensible financial manager – ironic given wartime spending, he gave the green light during the pandemic – Sunak seems determined to convey his detachment from reality.
This is not only another attempt at elderly care, but also ecologically nonsensical. Only 6 per cent of Britain’s land is built up and a meager 1 per cent of the Green Belt has been invaded since 2006. These belts do not protect much of the idyllic hills and heaths of our islands, but require a metaphorical and cartographic noose around the necks of our urban centers.
This is easy to see with a cursory glance at this map of England’s green belt. If Sunak really cared about protecting our “precious” landscape, he would abolish these archaic boundaries and transfer their ironclad protection to our national parks and AONBs.
The greenbelt’s stranglehold on building restrictions is a key factor behind rising housing costs, which are squeezing housing for the next generation and making life harder for low-income individuals and families who are forced to squander their dwindling salary packets in the bank accounts of greedy landlords.
Secretary of State Liz Truss, who continues to outperform her former cabinet mate in grassroots support, has done little to outshine her rival on housing policy.
Earlier this month, she criticized councils’ statutory duty to identify sites for potential housing development. She has even bizarrely labeled nationwide housing targets as “Stalinist,” an interesting take given her own party’s commitment to such goals prior to its landslide victory in the general election less than three years ago. It’s even stranger for those of us who remember Truss’s 2019 slogan for restricting 1 million new homes in current Green Belt areas.
Just as Sunak looks to the grounded gerontocracy for support, Truss seeks to use all weapons against an imaginary Bolshevik bureaucracy without backing up her ideas with a concrete alternative.
While Truss has gratefully said she intends to relax planning laws — something she’s supported since at least 2018 — it’s likely that backbenchers — already emboldened by Johnson’s ouster — are even more likely to successfully complete such plans. as it will in 2020. It will take tremendous courage and determination to draft serious plans to liberalize planning and push them past their own MPs if Truss intends to get to grips with Britain’s housing chaos.
But with the next general election just two years away, the two candidates’ brainwaves won’t have time to bear fruit before voters go to the polls. With the war in Ukraine and an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, structural issues such as housing, healthcare and energy reforms could recede into the background as the government to be decided refocuses on the immediate term.
