Julian Dobson

A big fanfare, if you will, for the Homes and Communities Agency. The putative Communities England, nipped in the bud before you could blurt out ‘merger of English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation’, is re-emerging as the HCA, it was announced earlier this month.

While the title is nothing if not uninspiring, it does signal a clear shift to the prioritisation of homes. To underline the point, housing minister Yvette Cooper has announced a new ‘housing and planning delivery grant’, a £500m sweetener for councils that speed up the process of identifying housing sites and granting planning approval.

There’s no doubt that we need new homes, and that affordability is at an all-time low – I’m thinking of renting out my cellar to the kids when they leave home. But we need to put the ambition of building three million new homes a year by 2020 – 240,000 homes a year – into context.

Anne Power, professor of social policy at the London School of Economics and a member of Richard Rogers’ urban task force (remember that one?) quotes Nye Bevan, Labour’s minister of housing in 1945: ‘We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build. We shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.’

His vision of high quality new council houses soon foundered as successive governments, Conservative as well as Labour, played the numbers game, throwing up all the high-rise monstrosities we’ve spent the last decade knocking down.

Yvette Cooper hopes the mistakes of the past won’t be repeated, with a pledge to observe best environmental practice and a welcome focus on releasing previously used land. However, the emphasis on speed creates a perverse incentive and always has done. And the emphasis on numbers throws additional hurdles in front of those who favour careful planning in small sites that can fit into existing communities – far quicker to grab a large plot and build at volume.

Anne Power’s latest book, Jigsaw Cities, argues passionately against repeating the mistakes of the fifties and sixties within the government’s current plans for housing growth. There was a time only a few years ago when such an argument would have been considered otiose – nobody would have thought otherwise. Memories are short indeed.

Taken from the blog, Living with Rats