https://www.angelawalkerreports.com/
https://www.angelawalkerreports.com/
The UK's in the middle of a chronic housing shortage. The government wants to see 300,000 new homes built every year, local authorities are under pressure and campaigners want to protect our green spaces. So how can we get the balance between the need for new homes and sustainability? I'm journalist Angela Walker, and in this podcast I talk to inspirational people and discuss under reported issues. My guest today is Helen Marshall from the campaign to protect rural England in Oxfordshire, and Maxwell Marlow from the Adams Smith Institute, a think tank whose latest report suggests allowing homeowners to build up to eight stories high will alleviate the housing crisis and boost the economy.
Angela Walker:This podcast is sponsored by Stretto Architects, an award-winning design-led studio based in Bristol. Stretto has a dedicated team specialising in environmentally sensitive urban regeneration. They work with community-led housing groups, housing associations, local authorities and developers to create buildings that a client-led, meet the present need and are planet friendly. Get in touch to find out how Stretto can support your housing project. Thank you both of you for joining us. Maxwell, I want to move on to you in a minute to talk about this new report from the Adams Smith Institute. But first of all, helen, we need millions of houses. Where should we build them?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:So land is a finite resource and we need it to do lots of things for us. So we do need it for for housing, but we also need it for food, for nature, for our own health and well-being and for climate mitigation as well. So we need to start thinking much more carefully about how we give up our land, and that's why CPR is called for a national land use strategy, something that starts to bring together all these different needs and think strategically about them, and the good news is the government has agreed and said it will do it, but we've not yet seen anything come forward. But really, it is a question of Brownfield first. We know that there are about 1.2 million shovel ready sites for for housing in the country, and that's where the priority should be.
Angela Walker:You're talking about Brownfield and you make it sound so easy that it's already there. Why isn't it happening? If it would be that easy to rebuild on Brownfield sites?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:I think part of it is the fact that for you know, an individual developer, it can be easier and cheaper to build on Greenfield sites, but that doesn't take into account the costs to us of that happening in the long term. So whilst it might be easier and cheaper in the short term, actually in the long term that is losing countryside that we can't replace.
Angela Walker:Maxwell, what do you think about the concept of Brownfield building first rather than on virgin soil?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:It sounds completely sensible. The problem is that we don't want to get pulled into the case of Brownfield only. We've got 4.2 million units. We need to make up to a fixed housing crisis right now and if we slow down to the future then you know we're in big trouble later on. And, as our report shows, it's costing about £160 billion a year economically not building and that's actually, if anything, an underestimation. So we're losing about an NHS worth of growth per year because we are refusing to build both on Brownfield and on Greenfield. We're not even coming close to hitting housing targets at the moment.
Angela Walker:Housing targets? Yeah, the growth is stagnated, as you mentioned. Tell us a bit more about your report. What are the highlights and how would that issue of not enough houses being built be addressed by the suggestions in the report?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, the report is really. It's the first ever quantification of the cost of the housing crisis to the British economy. It's modelled off a seminal paper from the US which has some really effective data inputs. So what we found is that, essentially, if you take the density of cities across the UK, primarily around London, it's an incredibly sparse in terms of its density. So we thought, hey, what happens if we lump together buildings, make them eight storage tall, which is actually not that far afield. Rotterdam, for example, one of the crown in the jewels of European cities, is a very, very dense and beautiful city, so it's nothing too crazy. And we found, if you did that, you could actually get up to £160 billion a year worth of growth, even if you just do London, never mind Manchester, leeds, sheffield, etc. Etc. So the recommendations are really to allow greater density in building and letting essentially, developers and home builders have more free reign to build the homes we need as a matter of life and death, rather than just solving one crisis.
Angela Walker:Helen, you know you represent a countryside charity. What do you think about this idea of building more densely in the cities to save the countryside?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Absolutely. We thoroughly agree that density is a big issue and at the moment we are, the system is very unambitious in terms of density and it's something that we've campaigned on locally in Oxfordshire for a number of years, trying to push our local authorities to set higher density targets. And where they've tried to do that, sometimes they they've run foul of planning inspectors who won't let them set those, those higher targets. So we would thoroughly agree that you know, higher density housing tends to be cheaper to build and therefore cheaper to buy or to rent, and it's also cheaper to run and better access to services, better able to support public transport and health. So for all those reasons we would agree that the higher density is good in its own right, let alone the fact that it will also take help to take pressure off the countryside.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:And I think Maxwell is entirely right that our cities could be, in particular, could be much more ambitious about housing density. And if you look at some of the places in Oxford, like you know, people may may know the area of Jericho in Oxford that is is quite high density but nonetheless very desirable to live. I guess my only caveat would be that the higher the density, the better the quality of design. That should go along with that, because people still need access to to green space and good quality housing. So higher density needs to come with good quality design, but absolutely would otherwise agree and Maxwell.
Angela Walker:So you're really talking about loosening up of the planning regulations. Is that what you want to see?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Hopefully. Yeah, it's the belief of the Institute and myself that the worst piece of legislation ever made with the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and its successes, because it basically builds up a really terrible way of going about planning. It doesn't help the environment, it doesn't really help builders, it doesn't help the people it's there to serve, which are, which are people. So we want to see that really torn away and replace with something which is a lot more, a lot more holistic. Really, you know, we want, like regional zoning, for example, which allows developers to have consistent, high quality build whilst also providing the homes we need as well as the infrastructure, because I'm sure, as we'll come on to it, we have a real infrastructure problem in this country and there are so many different solutions to that one problem that we have got staring in the face of and refusing to do anything about.
Angela Walker:What strikes me about this concept of building upwards and making existing homes larger is that don't we really have a shortage of starter homes, of people who want to get on the property ladder, who need their first home. So how does your report address that issue, maxwell?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, totally, let's remember, this is a quantification report. It's not, per say, a policy document. We have other policy documents ready and waiting for that one. But I completely agree, we need starter homes. We need, we need to remember the property ladder moves up and down.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:So my grandmother, for example, lives in quite a nice, you know, four-bed house in Northumberland, but she lives by herself. She doesn't need, you know, all that space. You know a family who wants to grow into that house could do so, but there aren't any bungalows available. Or you know, fit city living facilities in the area, same for the first home buyers. I mean, I want to get on the property ladder. I won't be able to because of current prices, but I would only want a small flat. So, really, if you want to address those smaller problems, it's about building a wide variety of properties and that means bringing down construction costs, because it makes more sense for builders to build larger units on a square foot basis in terms of cost, but so those smaller buildings are out of the picture, really. So bringing down the cost of construction by bringing down the cost of planning is a really good way of fixing that housing crisis for those who really affect the most, which are young people.
Angela Walker:Why does the cost of planning push the cost of houses up so much, then?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, if you take, you know the overall cost of a project. So we think of, you know, housing as being always just bricks, mortar, glass and wires. You know, some lead on the roof etc. It's not that case at all. I mean, actually about 40% of the cost goes into the legal planning aspect, whether that's, you know, getting the environment sorted, going through various checks and inspectors, making sure that you know you're going through a proper planning process which can take upwards of three, four, five years, which pushes costs up, you know, astronomically and that really increases cost. Imagine if you were trying to get a phone, for example, and planning to buy a phone of over four years. You know the costs are build up over time because you're not actually being able to access that product. So that's the real problem is that it's the cost of planning rather than the cost of building.
Angela Walker:It's all very well to say let's build up and outwards in the cities, make the cities denser, but of course there are people living in the countryside who need new homes too. There are families with young people who are growing up who want to move out and they don't want to leave their village or the small town that they live in. Helen, some people would say you know, this is nimbyism. You just want the cities to get denser and nobody's allowed to a new home in the countryside. How would you address that issue?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Well, first of all, we would agree that there is a real crisis of affordability and actually people in the countryside are often disproportionately affected.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:So, as you say, they can't stay in the communities that they've grown up in and love and they're driven out by rocketing house prices and by the lack of genuinely affordable social rented homes and the boom in sort of second houses and short-term lets.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:So there is a problem there. We would say that that is best addressed by working with local communities to develop small housing sites that meet that local needs, so that focus on genuinely affordable social rent. And I think we would find that if that was done, it would be easier for developers through the planning system because they wouldn't be running up against objections. Where housing is developed in partnership with local communities, then they're much more willing to accept it. And we need to be thinking about how we can give more support to small and medium-sized builders who are more able to deliver these smaller sites, rather than the market being driven by a few big players. What we find is that villages are generally very keen to accept that small level of development that would meet local needs. What they object to is the thousand houses, executive homes, often four bedrooms. Very few of the starter houses that we've talked about, being dumped on the edge of the village with no extra investment in infrastructure or services.
Angela Walker:When we talk about planning. It's my understanding that if a local authority doesn't have a local plan in place, it's easier for developers to get their projects approved. Can you explain to us, helen, about local plans and their role in the system?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Local plans are really important because they are a transparent, democratic way of local people having a say. So they are brought forward by your local authority, either the district or unitary council in your area, and they set out the development proposals for the next 15 to 20 years, so the amount of development and also where any major development would go in the area. It's not a perfect process but it does allow communities to have some transparency and some say in it. The problem is that quite a few areas throughout the country don't have these plans in place and in those areas that means that development comes forward on a speculative basis without that strategic thinking and involvement from communities. So we're firm believers in the local plan process. There are ways in which it could be involved. We would say that communities should have a greater say, but it is a sort of fundamental bedrock of our planning system.
Angela Walker:Max, what does the Adam Smith Institute think about local plans? You have a view on it and how it helps or hinders building of new homes?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:I will take a different view to Helen here. Unfortunately, given the scale of the crisis we are in at the moment, I think local plans are the cause of it. There are too many of what we call veto players existing within the system. As I said about the cost of construction, a lot of that is doing surets and engaging with local communities and I'm all in favour of that. I think that's a really good thing. But often they are just used at local planning meetings to try and veto any sort of development and there are loads of cases of this up and down the country.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:There was quite an interesting case actually in Henley where someone is trying to put forward a local food market and make a proper established thing and it's not really within the local plan, but there's a local council meeting and everyone goes forward and people are arguing about what the health and safety hygiene requirements were because someone had to go and borrow a knife off another stall about two months ago. This is very petty and very destructive and local plans really don't help that. As I said earlier, we are in favour of regional planning allowing developers to have really beautiful, nice, high quality homes. That really should be done on a local referendum basis. There should be a referendum about what you can choose as your design and where you'd like it. But that has to be enforced, that has to be by central government in order to railroad through those local objectives, because the local objectives are what are causing us to lose, as I said earlier, £160 billion a year in growth.
Angela Walker:Where I live, which is in the Oxfordshire Berkshire border. We've got lots of villages here and I think people are really worried about all these villages being joined up, in particular, becoming almost like an overspill of Reading where I am, and this is why people are objecting.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Is that something that you see, helen, absolutely the people who live in villages have chosen to be there or it's the community where they've grown up in and they feel very passionately about that community and the importance of rural life and village life. I think that's one of the things that our planning system has achieved quite well over the years is in terms of protecting settlements and preventing coalescence and creating the character of the English countryside that is in many ways the envy of the world.
Angela Walker:Maxwell, I've been reading this report. It's quite hefty. There's a lot of tricky maths going on in there, but one of the things that it says is we seek to answer the following question what is the effect of housing regulation on house prices? Did you reach a conclusion to that question?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:It's essentially answered at £160 billion of the amount there's an overall cost, but in terms of the issue we have is there's not enough data available. The Adam Smith Institute always uses publicly available data so that we can have gender such as yourself, or even critics like Helen, who can come along and access the same data sources that we have. The problem is the data is not there to use and we could spend a lot of money on getting a private modelling company who can access terabytes of data to come along, and it's really not the way of us doing it. We didn't come to that conclusion. We did find out how much infrastructure costs per person, which I think is really interesting. We find that per person in any new community, it costs £15,000 to provide infrastructure for that person, and our question is where on earth is that money going to come from, especially when we have S106 requirements and silver requirements essentially the community infrastructure levy, which I think is completely useless at doing the job.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Helen will hear about it when she has a conversation with her stakeholders. You may notice it around Reading a Barcha and the local infrastructure we have is failing and it's because the system we have in place, which gives money from developers to local councils to provide infrastructure doesn't work. We're in favour of essentially ring fencing that as well that's still money and giving it to local developers. They can integrate it within their development plans. It's a good sell for people moving in, it's a good sell for people who want to remain in the area and it's good for future growth and generations. That's how we solve that. There are lots of other solutions.
Angela Walker:Infrastructure is such a hot topic. You only have to go in a Facebook community group and there's people saying I can't get a doctor's appointment. How do I get through the computer? Things not working and yet down the road they want to put another 300 homes. This is happening right here on my doorstep. People are really worried and upset about that. There's already a lot of traffic on the roads in the morning. Can't get doctors, can't get a dentist appointment. Tell me more about infrastructure and how your Adam Smith Institute suggestions work to help alleviate problems with infrastructure.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:There's a really great group called Britain Remade which have done some work on infrastructure provision and what the planning cost of that is and the lower terms costing. For example, the paperwork required to get that built is eight times longer than the lower terms crossing. That is an insane way of doing infrastructure provision and it's happening all over the country. It's over planned, over burdened and it's not being provided for the people who need it the most. It's the local residents. There are other problems, of course, with doctors appointments, that's NHS. That's a really integrated arms length problem for government. But if we look at the actual provision of, let's say, utilities of water, of roads, that we have a planning problem where it's too expensive to provide it and an inefficiency problem of that provision by the CIL or the S106 obligations.
Angela Walker:Do you want to come in there, helen? What do you think about infrastructure?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Well, I would agree that infrastructure is creaking at the seams for many of our rural communities, but I think the thought of putting developers in charge of solving the problem is pretty laughable and I don't think we'd have much credibility with those local communities, because we see time and again where developers have promised infrastructure that that doesn't come forward and they are long gone over the hills and the promised green space or village hall or various other bits of infrastructure is yet to be seen, and we see that in communities time and time again. So I would agree that there is a problem. I think that perhaps in way brings us back to the argument in favour of higher density and building, you know, intensifying the density of our bigger towns and cities, because I think that puts people in much better place in terms of access to services and supports things like public transport.
Angela Walker:How can we hold developers to account if they, you know, build a housing development and then push off before they've done all these things that they promised, like putting in parks and improving the infrastructure? Is there not a regulation in place to hold them to account?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:It's a really good question and it's partly where our local authorities are under pressure at the moment, because we know that they are very strapped for cash and the enforcement teams are very under resourced. We're hearing that in many councils they will now only address issues, that they have a sort of triage system and will only look at really, really critical issues. So there's lots of low level concerns that are just not addressed, and even where they are looking at the more serious breaches, it can be a long process to hold people to account.
Angela Walker:And it's hard to prove as well, isn't it? I mean, I've done reports, several reports on housing development that have been built and then later on, nearby homes have flooded and the people living on those housing estates are convinced it's because of the displacement of water and so forth that's caused flooding where they live. But it's very, very hard to prove and it's very hard to hold developers to account when that happens. Max, what could we do about that kind of thing?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, we already have a mechanism that's called the market. So if a developer behaves badly and doesn't provide what it's or what obligates to do, it's unlikely to receive future contracts. You can see this, for example, of various different housing developers who provide really great service and then they don't have a problem in other councils because they've heard how great the service is. The inverse is true as well. If I don't want to name names, but person in homes, for example, has a lot of trouble getting new housing development done because of the quality of their work which is kind of well known about in the kind of housing communities there's not being up to standard, whereas there are other companies and I can't name names there in case I sound like favoritism of my favorite housing developers.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:But let me tell you there are some really good ones out there who have very different problems getting plans put through. But I just think it is a case of reforming SIL, because I think the local councils, yes, they're overstretched, but their oversight of a project obviously isn't working. So we need to have another look at the regulations that govern the governing of local infrastructure provision. So that's why we advocate, as I said, for S106 and SIL reform that could really transform the way in which our houses and our communities can access that infrastructure they so badly need.
Angela Walker:Now, the government's consulting on changing building regulations at the moment, isn't it? It wants to see significant carbon savings new homes and non-domestic buildings that are high quality and affordable to run over the long term, and new homes and non-domestic buildings that are zero carbon ready. They sound like really great ideas. Are they achievable, Max? What do you think?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, let's look at what the housing stock we have at the moment is. It's some of the oldest in Europe. It's some of the bleakest, it's the most dangerous for health, it's the smallest in Europe. So we have some serious problems when it comes to our current housing stock. One issue, though, with zero carbon homes is that who's going to pay for it? Now, I've already said, the cost of housing, the cost of building that is, is really really high. The problem is we don't yet have those mechanisms in place, but someone's got to pay. So it's either going to be the developer, who probably doesn't want to take it out of his margins it could be the person buying the house, which they're already very high prices, so good luck with that or it's going to be the taxpayer, who's going to come over.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Subsidies Again, very problematic. Tax burns are all time high and we can't afford to do that. As we've seen just today, labor has just dropped there a £28 billion a year. It's investment figures. So I really think that's a big, big problem. So we have to think about the cost of it. Conceptually, that's fine, but you know, when it comes to the cost, I think we have to really have a really honest conversation about who's going to pay for that and if we could maybe change things around the periphery, like the planning system, in order to bring down the cost of planning to compensate for an increase in the cost of building.
Angela Walker:Helen, what do you think about these ambitious ideas that the government wants you know? Carbon savings, zero carbon ready houses, that kind of thing. What do you think about it?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Well, certainly in terms of rooftop solar. We think it's long overdue making that mandatory on new houses. It seems to us completely crazy that you know, for example, we've got big solar farms coming forward in the Oxford Greenbelt, several hundred hectares and then these are being put in right next to housing development of 3000 houses coming forward in the Greenbelt and there just seems to be a complete lack of joined up thinking there. And the cost of installing rooftop solar as part of construction of a house, especially on a large site, would be would be pretty marginal and especially compared to the loss of Greenbelt and Greenfield land that would otherwise be required to provide those solar panels. So we really welcome the government's current consultation. We would absolutely support mandatory solar panels on on new build domestic and non commercial where possible.
Angela Walker:Yeah, it sounds like a bit of a non brainer, max. Well, why aren't we putting solar panels on on new houses? If it was made mandatory and you say, oh, who's going to pay with it? Well, it would just have to be absorbed as part of the building cost, surely?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Yes, and that's the problem, you know it would build as our rational they want to reduce costs as much as possible and increase prices where they can. It's a you know, it's a simple facet of human psychology in the economy. So that's the main problem. There's also cost maintenance, which is also quite, quite high. If you don't really know what you're doing, you've got, you know, solar panels suddenly on your roof and you know, as people we are so living cost living crisis. People don't have the money spare to begin the maintenance cycle on these solar panels.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Again, not opposed to it in conceptually, but I'm looking at the real problems here. I don't have a problem with building large solar farms, for example, because it's run by a professional company who know what they're doing, and we're in the middle of a very serious energy crisis at the moment, to the point where we're thinking of importing our energy from Morocco from their solar farms. So kind of exporting our problem, and I'm not really sure why we're doing that when we have so much space to build on. I mean, just to come back to the green belt thing.
Angela Walker:I'm green. I want to talk to you about that. You're saying, oh, we've got so much space to build on, but once we build on it it's gone. It's not a green space anymore. And, helen, you're shaking your head. You're from a countryside, charity Maxwell says we've got so much space to build on.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:That's just not true in my view, particularly in the southeast of England, where we have such a high density of population you know sort of the part of the highest density across Europe and, yes, you know, not all of it is necessarily got a house on it or a building on it, but the countryside is impacted by roads and all the other developments, so there's very little tranquil space left in the southeast and we need to preserve that and protect it. And, as I said at the start, you know we need our countryside to deliver lots of things for us, including food, because food security is an increasing issue, including nature, because we're in the middle of a biodiversity crisis as well as the climate crisis, and we need our countryside for climate mitigation, for things like planting trees and natural flood management.
Angela Walker:But of course you know solar is a greener energy. You know it's better than fracking. Some might say you know how can you be a green campaigner and not supporting solar? Some people might not.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Well, we absolutely support solar energy, but it's got to be in the right place, and that right place is rooftops, and it is a no brainer. Why should we not be putting solar panels on a, particularly on new build, but also retrofitting? And that's where we need government to put in place these regulations as soon as possible.
Angela Walker:What about the limitations that Maxwell mentioned? I mean, I've looked into getting solar panels from my house and it was quite expensive, the maintenance was an issue and they don't really last forever, do they? So that's put me off personally, and I'm sure a lot of other people are like that, and we don't really seem to have any subsidies in place to encourage people to sort of retrospectively put them in. I mean, there are limitations to solar, aren't there?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:There are limitations to solar, but it definitely has a part to play in meeting our energy needs for the future and I think that's where we would like to see the emphasis in terms of subsidy and a genuine brownfield first approach, because I think technology is moving fast and solar panels are improving all the time. I think there are lots of people who now run them quite happily and have got their heads around it and have are finding that it works for them and you know, obviously with energy bills going up, it is a real way for people to look to long term and to provide their own energy security and to keep on top of those bills.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, I mean we could put it on buildings and put it and have solar farms. I don't see why you can't have both. You know, I think it's really important. I mean, we speak about the density we have. How much green space do we have? We have just as much well, really quite similar amount of green space we did in the 40s because green belt's grown and grown for some reason, even though the majority of it isn't that green, and we still have those nice areas of outstanding natural beauty. They're not going anywhere. I can't see person going up to the Lake District to start dropping red bricks all over Lake Windermere. I don't see that happening. But especially in the Southeast, we still have loads of space, right, I mean, only 7% of the UK is actually built on. The rest of it is actually kind of green or brownfield site. I think that's really important to remember.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:We have loads and loads of space that we're just choosing not to build on and it's partly the Nimbism of saying I'm sorry, helen, you know we should have X, but it needs to be in the right place or your housing needs to be affordable.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, we actually have some of the highest numbers of social housing per capita in the UK, and the fact we're not building enough private housing means that no matter what housing you build will be unaffordable unless there is considerable subsidy from money we don't have. So it's a case of essentially saying we need to run through these Nimbia problems, build the damn thing, sorry to say, and get on with it Because we don't have the time, we don't have the money, and I'm not getting any younger and I'd like to buy my own house, please, you know, and it's so shared across my generation and it's not going to be the case if we keep objecting to things over you know, not the right place or unaffordable. It makes me really upset, to be honest, because this is, you know, this is dealing with my life and it's making me poorer.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:I find the term wouldn't be quite offensive, actually, because I think it's just a cheap job and doesn't really take into account the fact that the people who care about these things and get involved are those who care most about their community and their local environment.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:And if they don't care, then who should? I think we all accept that there is a housing affordability crisis. The way to deal with that is to focus on bringing forward housing that is for social rent and in perpetuity, so that it is prioritised for local people in perpetuity. We need to think much more carefully about Brownfield first and focus on those 1.2 million shovel ready Brownfield sites across the country. We need to think about density and being much more ambitious about density across the piece, so both in our cities, but also upping the density on Greenfield sites as well, where they are allocated for development, we should be maximising the use of those sites. If it were easy, we would have done it already. I think that the planning system does need some reform, but the idea of virtually dismantling it all together and just letting the market have a free-for-all and those with the most money dictating doesn't seem to me to be the right solution at all. I think we think that the planning system actually does need reform, but that should be to put community and nature at its heart.
Angela Walker:Maxwell. Helen wants to see Brownfield sites built on first. I know it's easier for developers to start on a fresh site. Can't we just bring in some regulation that means that they have to build on the Brownfield first? Why can't we do that?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Well, there's some exciting stuff you can do. So, for example, cleanup costs are very high and the way in which the government company manages cleanup cost compensation is they pay at the end of the project. So if you're a developer who comes into cleanup a site an ex-industrial site, let's say they used to make car batteries there you have to do a lot of industrial waste clearance and sanitation. There is actually a subsidy in place to do that, but it's paid at the end of the project. That doesn't make any sense if you're a housing developer, because then you've got to pay all this money and all this time to clean it up to very high environmental standards and you're losing loads and loads and loads of money over that period. Economically it doesn't make any sense. So we suggested just flip it, pay the money at the start and then clean it up, and then, if they don't clean it up completely, money has to go back to the government. Really simple stuff like that.
Angela Walker:Oh, hang on. How would you claw back that money when we've already got a system where, if people make a substandard building that causes flooding in the next village down, we're already in a situation where people are not being held to account when their problems arise. If you give a developer money to clean up a site and they take the money and don't clean up the site, how are we going to be able to claw that money back from them when we can't seem to get money back for other things that developers are failing to do?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:This is quite a simple contractual obligation that can be upheld within the courts. The government's not afraid of using its judicial power to push through and punish those who undermine it, and that would certainly be a case, because the way in which this contract is usually done is through DEFRA rather than D-LUC, so they're quite happy to come in with a large legal hammer to bash developers who are very biddly, badly paid and essentially defraud the state, and I'm sure journalists such as yourself would be all over it if it were the case and we'd have quite a nice bit of justice there. It's a trust problem, don't get me wrong, but it's something that we can very easily sort out. But it's an economic problem of why are we cleaning up Brownfield sites to build on? It's because the incentives are misaligned. So we're relying the incentives and we can start doing a lot more at Brownfield first, but again, that only does 1.2 million houses. We've got 4.2 million houses to build to solve the crisis. So that's a quarter of the way, and every day we wait, that crisis gets worse.
Angela Walker:Yeah, this is a crisis that's getting worse and worse. Helen, what can we do now so that we can start building the right homes in the right places and start housing people and maybe bringing housing prices down and so on?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:What I would say is that Brownfield sites aren't a finite resource. So there are new Brownfield sites that come available over time. So, although there are 1.2 million shovel ready sites in the country at the moment, that's just the tip of the iceberg and there are more sites that could be brought forward and, as we know, with things like the changing retail picture, it's almost a renewable resource as things change over time. But what we could do most now I think one of the most interesting things that we could do very quickly is to move to increase density of development where it comes forward and we would absolutely support that.
Angela Walker:We're both in agreement there, which is nice. I want to ask we've talked about planning where to put houses and so on. Let's talk about actual sustainable housing projects. Do you think that the current housing that's being built is being built to higher, green enough standards? Are we building sustainable right now? And if not, why not? And how can we get to that place?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:We're not building high enough quality houses at the moment. It seems to me pretty disgraceful, but at this point in time, we are still putting houses on the market every day that are going to need retrofitting in terms of energy standards, and that is something that we need to move to address really quickly. We hope that the government's current consultation on building standards will go through quickly and that they will then move to act rather than continually kicking the can down the road. And we can see from other countries in Europe that are way ahead of us. Sweden, for example, has been building well-insulated, high standard homes for 50 years or more, so we are completely lagging behind and we need to get that sorted and to be building houses that are fit for the future, because the people that live in them will otherwise pay the costs.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Maxwell yeah, I somewhat agree with Helen. Actually, the main issue is that the cost of planning is too high and it puts out the window the idea of sustainability, because you can't even get the shell built for less than £300,000. So try adding all the insulation, the high-tech glass, the heat pump, etc. That's just uneconomical and we can't be expected to build low-price homes at that cost. So we need to reform the planning system so that we can bring down the overall cost of building in order to put in the sustainability aspect, which, again, not too concerned really about government coming in and saying we should do this because it makes more economic sense in the long run.
Angela Walker:There was a whole housing estate that had to be pulled down the other day before they'd even finished building it, because it was so substandard. Did you hear about that one, maxwell?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:I did indeed, and we shouldn't be allowing the building of substantive homes. It's a disgrace, but we actually need to build homes as well. I'll bring up the number again 4.2 million units. It's really, really important we fix this problem, because it's costing us an entire NHS worth of growth a year.
Angela Walker:Maxwell, were there any other interesting points that came out of this recent report that you've released?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Oh, loads of stuff. We found that if you apply the house price index to chicken if you bought a chicken in 1971, you apply the house price index from 1971 to now the chicken would cost £82. That's the scale of the crisis we're in. Chickens don't cost £82 now in real terms or nominal terms, unless it's a really, really, really nice chicken. But we're talking about classic houses here. The scale of the problem is ginormous and it's really.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:We believe it's silver bullets. They could save the British economy. When we look at America, for example, I know we always like to demonise America for various reasons. They are rich, they are happy and they are building at insane rates where everyone's going to pay more. If we were to take the UK and pull London out of it, compare the wages we get we would be poorer than the poorest American state of Mississippi. This wasn't the case 24 years ago. It is the case now. A lot of that is because our planning system has just continued to grow and pull back development and investment. Phoenix has doubled in size over the last couple years and they're now wealthier than a lot of people in the southeast of England. You have bus drivers who have paid better than the Prime Minister over there, we really have to have a proper look at how much this is costing us, and it's all down to planning.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:I just don't recognise the picture that, with all those problems, you can put it all on the door of the planning system. It seems to me that the planning system is there, when it works well, to adjudicate between different interests between the economy, between environment and between communities. That's why it's there to stop a free-for-all and those that happen to have land or happen to have money being able to do exactly what they like. If we don't think that that's right, if we don't think that anybody should be able to build what they like wherever, we need some kind of system of regulation. That's what the planning system is there for and why it's important. Does it need some reform? Does it need to be brought up to date? Does it need to be restructured in a way that it is there to address our climate and nature emergencies? Absolutely, but the thought that we should scrap it all together just seems to me to be opening the door to a future that none of us would like to see.
Angela Walker:Max, do you want to scrap planning all together? Do you want a free-for-all, so that people can build wherever they want?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Not at all, but I think we need to have a serious conversation about why the planning system is so bad. If we want to, I'll just tell you this point that she doesn't believe it's a silver bullet. We can't build bridges, we can't build railways, hs2, the problem with that was planning. We can't build new businesses. We haven't gone off lab space, so our key sectors of R&D can't grow. It affects our farming. It affects our food. It affects where people like me can live.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Professionals who live in a city maybe want to move out. I can't move out and enjoy more country space because it affects the cost of housing. It is a panacea. We published a report called the Housing Theory of Everything. I really do recommend it. If you can't build, it increases your pollution because essentially you've got to drive everywhere and because the local infrastructure is underfunded because we can't get more builders in to generate more SIL money and S106 money, then it continues to be underfunded. It is a rolling crisis that touches everything in the economy. If we don't fix it by having a fundamental look again at the planning system, which isn't laze fair still. There has to be some regulation there, but it needs to be much more free to adapt and inevitably change to the needs of the entire country, not just those isolated communities.
Angela Walker:Helen, what about a massive overhaul of the planning system? What parts of the planning system would you be happy to see relaxed?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:Well, I think what we would like to see change in the planning system is to put communities at the heart of decision making. For example, neighbourhood planning, which has been coming to the fore in the last 10 to 20 years, we think is a really good way of allowing communities to have a say in what they want for their local area. I think if we could invest more in neighbourhood planning and bring that to the front, that might actually facilitate more building and more development, but in keeping with the wishes of the local communities. We are big fans of neighbourhood planning, but that needs to have some protection within the system. So allow people who have invested time in neighbourhood planning to know that those neighbourhood plans will be followed and not overridden by development applications coming through on a speculative basis.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:I think it needs to be part of a bigger conversation as well about how we use land, which is a finite resource and which we need to deliver all sorts of things for us. Yes, we need housing, but we also need food. We also need nature, not just a nice, pretty nature that is lovely to look at, but actually nature that delivers so much for us in terms of clean air and clean water and all sorts of other benefits. We do need that conversation about how we use land in a small country where land is a scarce resource.
Angela Walker:Any final thoughts, Maxwell?
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:I want to bring up a statistic that I found out about I'm a part of the research paper. Essentially, if you take the gross value of all the buildings in the UK in comparison to the gross value of all the companies in the UK, it's three to one. So that means we have three times more value held in property and real estate than we do in any of the productive assets in the industry and the economy In America. That's one to one and you wonder why they're so much richer. Planning is at the heart of that and I'm really you know you'll just as well know. If we do not fix planning to make it work for everyone, not just the communities, not just nature, but for the economy and for young people specifically then we're going to have a really hard time growing and being a wealthy country, a happy country and a healthy country in the future.
Angela Walker:I want to just pick up on that, really, because we've lost a lot of industry in this country. We've lost a lot of factories. We're importing lots of stuff. That's not down to planning, is it? That's down to the world economy.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:Of course. So now we need to start specialising where we can, which is in financial services, it's in the general service industry, it's in lab space, r&d. The Oxford Cambridge Art was vetoed for planning reasons and we could have created what could have been equivalent to the California hyper tech space. That could have had our own Silicon Valley in England, but we said no for planning reasons. It drives you mad at how wealthy that could have made everybody in the country, but we've decided not to do it because of planning. So it's stuff like that.
Maxwell Marlow, Adam Smith Institute:So, because our planning system does not allow us to adapt quickly, it means everyone's poorer later on, because all this stuff requires capital, it requires investment, it requires infrastructure and the planning system exists to stop that. If you read Hansard when it was first brought in, if you read the current, in a Greenbelt documentation done by the government, they don't mention nature, they don't mention the environment, they mention stopping urban sprawl and stopping economic growth. That is the problem and that is why I, as an economist, I'm really upset by the planning system and for the and, as a young person, for my future and the future of my friends and family in general.
Angela Walker:Any final thoughts Helen?
Helen Marshall, CPRE:I think, if we're going to talk about the Oxcamark, I would say that that was stopped because it was a purely economic driven project and it didn't take into account the environment or the social aspects and therefore it wasn't sustainable development in the. In the broad picture of things and and actually there is you know, we need to be more creative and innovative. I mean, one of our examples is that, yes, you know, for example, oxford is is renowned for its science and technology in leading the way. Does that mean that every spin-off company or every sort of technology development that is driven by Oxford University has to be delivered in the city of Oxford? You know, scientists are able to collaborate all around the world together these days. And what to stop Oxford? You know, if it can have campuses in China, why can it not have campuses in in north Wales? You know, I mean there are things we could do around twinning and sharing economic benefits that that certainly should be looked at.
Helen Marshall, CPRE:My final thought is that the countryside and the rural character of England is part of what makes England. You know, if you ask people, they might talk about the NHS and then probably the countryside. But we really need it. We really need the countryside, not just because it's it's pretty and nice to look at in places. It is part of our economy, it is part of our social fabric and obviously it's part of our of creating a healthy environment. So we need to be mindful of all those things before we we squander it on development. And where development does come forward, it should be the right development in the right place, and I know that's easy to say. It's less easy to deliver, but that doesn't mean that that isn't what we should be aiming for.
Angela Walker:Thank you both so much for joining me Helen Marshall from the CPRE, oxfordshire and Max Will Marlowe from the Adam Smith Institute. Thank you, you've been listening to Angela Walker in Conversation. I hope you've enjoyed the show. Please do check out my website, angelawalkerreportscom for more news stories and don't forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel Angela Walker in Conversation. We're all at the mercy of the algorithm these days, so please do share and rate my work if you're enjoying it. Thank you so much. Until next time, take care.