Lawrence Kay is a Research Fellow in Policy Exchange's Economics Unit.
On Monday
Tim Montgomerie argued
that the Centre for Social Justice is leading the housing policy debate. The CSJ
is making a stellar contribution, but what matters is policy. It is not
sufficient to just highlight the problems. What we need is a plan for both how
to build more houses and release the aspirations of people in council housing
so that they, like people in private housing, can pick the best place for
themselves to live.
This year,
Policy Exchange showed how this could happen via our Right
to Move proposal. It takes its inspiration from the Right to Buy policy of
the 1980s and argues that, if people in council housing were allowed to tell
their council to sell the property they are in and buy an equivalent one
elsewhere, many of them would choose to live in places where they are closer to
their families or the work that suits them. In short, the wishes of people in
council housing would determine where the state funds housing. At the moment
the social planners of the 1960s still hold the whip hand. Their dreams of concrete
utopias have trapped thousands of people. The consequences have been tragic for
many years. Thankfully, the Conservatives adopted our Right to Move proposal
earlier this year.
Britain
also has a major problem in private housing: there are not enough houses for us
to live in, so both prices and the misery of living on top of other people in
shared accommodation are high. Supply could be increased by doing something
counter-intuitive: letting communities have more say in the housing
developments taking place where they live. For too long central planners in
local councils have told people ‘we are going to build 10,000 houses in your
village’ but then not given the people already living there the necessary
improvements in transport and amenities. Trust in development has thus broken
down. NIMBYism rules as a result. As shown by the communities-based approach in
Germany, this need not be the case. There, people welcome more housing because
they know that it means they can spend the financial inducements for it on
building things like sports’ centres and roads, as Policy Exchange showed in
this report.
The Conservatives have long lauded this approach. Grant Shapps reiterated
his commitment to it today.
