So Lets Abolish Planning Then

I try not to agree with Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times. He is, after all, chairman of the National Trust and when I waved my banana - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone - at the What House? Awards I was waving it at him and his anti-development ilk.

Writing in The Guardian Jenkins said, in reference to the Housing Strategy new homes war chest - actually it will barely fund a minor skirmish - and mortgage indemnity guarantee, it was ludicrous to hurl public money at what he calls “the sub-prime end of the mortgage market.” He may be right and he certainly has a point when he says social housing in this country is “hopelessly ill-defined.”

If he had left it at that, fair enough. But like all these misguided conservationists preserved in bucolic aspic, cycling to Evensong reciting John Betjeman poems, they cannot keep their naked prejudices under wraps. Jenkins says “Few lobbies are as powerful or persuasive as the housebuilders, sharing with bankers a responsibility for the world’s current woes.”

Ignoring the hypocrisy about powerful lobby groups considering his director-general at the National Trust Fiona Reynolds has spent the last few months sitting next to the editor of The Daily Telegraph as he draws up the newspaper’s front pages, this is as wrong as it is casually defamatory of an entire industry. He might as well say anybody who had the temerity to attempt to make a profit from their living was responsible for the world’s current woes.

In the film Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, playing a prostitute, attempting to discover how asset-stripping millionaire Richard Gere makes his money, says: “So you don’t make anything and you don’t build anything?”

Builders build; they make. They provide shelter and a profit is useful, so they can build more shelter for more people in need of shelter. No they are not Victorian benefactors; they are hard-nosed, competitive 21st century businesses and these particular drivers of growth had nothing to do with the economic train hitting the buffers.

I agree with Jenkins that much more could be done to raise the status and availability of renting and address real housing need, rather than the aspirations of home ownership for everyone, as if the opportunity to borrow hundreds of thousands of pounds is the god-given right of every school-leaver.

Government money has been thrown at various kick-start programmes to get people on the housing ladder; some more successful than others. Jenkins argues that every time the ‘lobbyists’ – his term for housebuilders – come away with money, “but the market remains unmoved.”

Public intervention in private housing may be wrong, but this is where Jenkins gets it hopelessly wrong. He baulks at the “developers’ slogan that 230,000 homes (a year) are needed nationwide, as if a home were a unit in a Leninist housing pool, rather than a flexible concept in a market responding to demand and supply.”

If you removed all intervention in housing and left it to the market, then the planning system should be abolished, which I’m not sure would go down too well with Simon’s National Trust members. The state, through planning, controls the housebuilder’s basic, essential raw material, permissioned land.

Of course whatever the likes of the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England think about the draft National Planning Policy Framework, a planning system that resists the free market of supply and demand will always be in place. Conservationists believe the NPPF will open up a ‘planning free-for-all’ – nonsense of course, but what if it did, giving birth to the acronym BAAA (Build Absolutely Anything Anywhere)?

The notion that housebuilders would swarm over farmers’ yards – cue BAAA from nervous sheep - with bundles of cash to swallow up their acres and concrete over the raw material of food production with sprawling, ugly housing estates is preposterous and would be commercial suicide. A housebuilder is not going to build something he cannot sell for a viable margin. It’s called, er, business.

Then again if they did take such a massive risk and the homes sold out at the asking prices - QED: supply and demand. You cannot have your banana and eat it Mr Jenkins. BAAA humbug.

Rupert Bates is editorial director of www.whathouse.co.uk