Wake up Nimbys! It’s either Tory homes or Marxist social engineering

Javid must be allowed to deliver a housing revolution to rebuild property ownership

Time is running out for Britain’s housing Nimbys, who now face certain, crushing defeat. The pressure has become too great, the outrage of the propertyless too uncontainable, the need for change too overwhelmingly obvious. Denial or self-interested excuses dressed up as concern for the common good simply won’t cut it any more: we will soon start to build a lot more, and rightly so.

There was a time when the UK dreamt of “homes fit for heroes”; today, our failure to provide enough housing in the right places for the younger generations is a national disgrace. It’s not just the French or the Canadians or the Texans or the Australians who do it better than us, churning out far more, larger, better-quality and cheaper homes: even the Japanese, who also live on a cramped island, outperform us.

Tokyo, a compact, teeming city of 13 million, built 142,417 homes in 2014 thanks to its more flexible planning rules; the whole of England could eek out just 137,000. As the Adam Smith Institute points out, average flat sizes are increasing in Tokyo while prices haven’t risen much. Quality of life is going up rather than down, as here.

The only question now is who will build the millions of new homes Britain needs, and to what end. If Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, has his way, it could still be this Government. His speech this week could not have been any clearer; and the good news is that Javid wants a new generation of high-quality family homes, primarily for private ownership, including actual houses with gardens and not just flats. He appears to understand the need for beauty, comfort and infrastructure, and he has no truck with the lowgrade garbage that characterised some previous generations of new-builds.

If he’s stymied yet again by shorttermist Tories intent on precipitating their own extinction, young renters will ensure that Labour wins the next election. The mood of the country is changing, as demonstrated by the emergence of pro-building pressure groups, such as London Yimby and Create Streets. There are fewer cheers when house prices rise, and growing support for housebuilding “in one’s local area”. When polled, the public increasingly deems falling house prices to be good, rather than bad; existing homeowners worry about their children and grandchildren, and are terrified that they will never be able to aspire to what they have.

During the referendum campaign, warnings that leaving the EU would hit house prices actually encouraged many to back Brexit. Last month, seat after seat where the proportion of homeowners had fallen the most switched to Labour; and there was a strong correlation between areas of high house price appreciation and swings to Labour (it used to work the other way). As prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn would become the builder-in-chief, and all bets would be off. Forget localism: if residual Tory councils were to push back, planning would soon be completely centralised, with bureaucrats in Whitehall dictating everything to the smallest detail. A Corbyn win would be as big for housing as Clement Attlee’s 1945 triumph, which led to the nationalisation of land and planning rights (and is directly responsible for much of our current crisis).

For Nimbys, the question is therefore straightforward. The status quo is doomed, so which option do you dislike least? Tory housebuilding, or Labour housebuilding? Procapitalist housebuilding, or socialist housebuilding? A combination of densification, new suburbs and new garden cities, with some adjustments at least to the green belt, designed to rebuild a home-ownership society?

Or mass council-house building, including in leafy areas, run by Marxist ideologues, a giant social engineering programme directly aimed at growing the Labour base and killing off the home ownership dream? Just as importantly, a Labour government would doubtless hammer home-owners with much steeper property taxes: one of the most devastating proposals in Corbyn’s manifesto was to study the possibility of a land value tax.

So this is my plea to Tory Nimbys: it’s time to change tack. You are right to be concerned about congestion, the lack of infrastructure and the shoddiness of certain house-building. You are right to want green spaces and clean air. You are right that trendy planners are obsessed with ultradense living, which is only of interest to some, and hate the suburban, car-centric lifestyle that most aspire to. You are right that housing needs to work like other customer-first markets, where buyers are offered the product they want, rather than forced to put up with what they are given.

But the answer is to fight for the right kind of land-use system and the right kind of mass housebuilding programme, rather than engage in a doomed, Alamo-style attempt at delaying the inevitable and merely precipitating a Corbynite triumph. We need to find ways of growing towns and villages without ruining their charm. More generally, the aim must be to construct great communities that people want to live in, new towns and districts that are so appealing that thousands want to move there, lots of terraces and semis with gardens and, yes, in some cases, skyscrapers for those who like that kind of thing.

Crucially, Britain must study other countries. The Japanese have a deregulated land market. The French have made terrible errors in the social sector, but their private housebuilding is much better. Overall, 477,600 homes were given planning permission in France between June 2016 and May 2017, up 12.9 per cent; construction started on 397,700 new homes, up 14 per cent on the year. The UK figures are fuzzy, but the French are building at least twice as much as we are, which shows just how useless we have become. Most are built around Paris and in the South of France; there are millions of empty properties in France but nobody cares because the supply is so high.

The UK is at an inflexion point. The property have-nots have sent the property-haves a final warning: help us to join your ranks, or you will regret it. It’s a no-brainer, and a pretty fair proposition. Javid must be allowed to deliver the house-building revolution that this country needs and deserves.