Why should millennial homeowners be more Conservative? They’ve had to rent for longer than they otherwise would have needed to. The price of the house they eventually bought would have been higher than it otherwise needed to be, meaning they had to save for a deposit for longer, lowering their pre-ownership living standards. They’re also seeing a bigger hit to their take home pay from higher mortgage costs on larger principal amounts...
Or, in summary: They are homeowners *despite*, not *because* of Conservative policy making.
The thing that really strikes me about housebuilding is that we have made it almost impossible for small-scale development to go ahead. PP is so hard to get now, and the process so favours big builders, that the end result is almost inevitable. Big builders want big sites. Big sites are few in number and attract competition. The complexity of planning process forces builders to buy land at very high prices under option and then spend millions getting PP. By the end of that process, the land value and the legals have captured a huge chunk of value and these costs are loaded into the houses. Now you have an expensive site, with high base costs and a planning system that demands high-density housing - the result is thousands of identikit homes, built incredibly shoddily, crammed into a small area. It's unsightly and it's obvious. Adding 1000 new homes to a rural/ semi-rural/ edge-of-town area irrevocably changes its character - and people who bought in that area because they liked it the way it was are always going to resist it.
For me, the answer is to remove the politicians and others from the process as far as possible. Liberalise planning completely. Have a presumption that anyone can build on land they own, subject to minimal criteria (must meet local design standards; must meet building regs; must pay for all local highway/ services connections/ supply connections). But if you own a field, and want to put a house on it, then provided that (a) the house isn't incredibly ugly and (b) it doesn't directly overlook someone or block their light (but not their view) then you should be able to do so.
What would happen? My guess is there would be a sudden rush of planning applications, and probably a few bad houses built. But then steadiness would return to the market: people would build what they thought would sell. They would have an eye to local demand. Because people were building on their own land, they would need to look their neighbours in the eye as they built. Houses would be less dense, would fit more organically into their surroundings. Villages would expand ("sprawl") naturally. But houses would have space and where they were close together it would be by design. Land prices would fall dramatically and that would feed into the total build cost, putting downward pressure on all prices.
But the key thing is that politicians would be taken out of the equation once and for all. No more MPs grandstanding, or hypocritically demanding more housing while campaigning against it in their own constituencies. Big housebuilders would have a much smaller share of production. Competition would raise both build and design standards. Housing would cover more land but at lower density - and we have quite enough land. Housing would become nicer, more varied, and more affordable. And the absence of ugly blots on the landscape would dramatically reduce hostility in my view. If you really objected to a development in the field across the road, it might cost you £20k to buy the field yourself, rather than £2 million: the absurd prices for development land would evaporate overnight. And it would cease to become a political issue once and for all - no one could object to a government liberalising the rules with any credibility at all.
Why should millennial homeowners be more Conservative? They’ve had to rent for longer than they otherwise would have needed to. The price of the house they eventually bought would have been higher than it otherwise needed to be, meaning they had to save for a deposit for longer, lowering their pre-ownership living standards. They’re also seeing a bigger hit to their take home pay from higher mortgage costs on larger principal amounts...
Or, in summary: They are homeowners *despite*, not *because* of Conservative policy making.
Great post!
The thing that really strikes me about housebuilding is that we have made it almost impossible for small-scale development to go ahead. PP is so hard to get now, and the process so favours big builders, that the end result is almost inevitable. Big builders want big sites. Big sites are few in number and attract competition. The complexity of planning process forces builders to buy land at very high prices under option and then spend millions getting PP. By the end of that process, the land value and the legals have captured a huge chunk of value and these costs are loaded into the houses. Now you have an expensive site, with high base costs and a planning system that demands high-density housing - the result is thousands of identikit homes, built incredibly shoddily, crammed into a small area. It's unsightly and it's obvious. Adding 1000 new homes to a rural/ semi-rural/ edge-of-town area irrevocably changes its character - and people who bought in that area because they liked it the way it was are always going to resist it.
For me, the answer is to remove the politicians and others from the process as far as possible. Liberalise planning completely. Have a presumption that anyone can build on land they own, subject to minimal criteria (must meet local design standards; must meet building regs; must pay for all local highway/ services connections/ supply connections). But if you own a field, and want to put a house on it, then provided that (a) the house isn't incredibly ugly and (b) it doesn't directly overlook someone or block their light (but not their view) then you should be able to do so.
What would happen? My guess is there would be a sudden rush of planning applications, and probably a few bad houses built. But then steadiness would return to the market: people would build what they thought would sell. They would have an eye to local demand. Because people were building on their own land, they would need to look their neighbours in the eye as they built. Houses would be less dense, would fit more organically into their surroundings. Villages would expand ("sprawl") naturally. But houses would have space and where they were close together it would be by design. Land prices would fall dramatically and that would feed into the total build cost, putting downward pressure on all prices.
But the key thing is that politicians would be taken out of the equation once and for all. No more MPs grandstanding, or hypocritically demanding more housing while campaigning against it in their own constituencies. Big housebuilders would have a much smaller share of production. Competition would raise both build and design standards. Housing would cover more land but at lower density - and we have quite enough land. Housing would become nicer, more varied, and more affordable. And the absence of ugly blots on the landscape would dramatically reduce hostility in my view. If you really objected to a development in the field across the road, it might cost you £20k to buy the field yourself, rather than £2 million: the absurd prices for development land would evaporate overnight. And it would cease to become a political issue once and for all - no one could object to a government liberalising the rules with any credibility at all.
> What we find very clearly is there is no majority supporting building new houses locally in the UK. We can’t build because we won’t build
This is a very naive question, but … why can’t we build locally in the places that do support housebuilding?