98% priced out of the market

Members of the Canterbury City Council planning committee and associated officers should read “Laying the Building Myth to Rest” by Richard Thompson in the current issue of the Kent Countryside Voice.

In an ideal world, the laws of supply and demand regulate the price of a commodity; however, the housing market does not inhabit such a world. This has not stopped the government from deciding that if house prices are rising to levels that exclude many people from the market, the

obvious remedy is to build more houses.

Mercifully, their first attempt (reforming the planning laws so that developers could build anywhere without local authorities’ permission) was derailed. Now, they are blackmailing councils into granting planning permissions by fining them for not attaining the desired (grossly inflated) level of new-builds set by the previous housing minister, Robert Jenrick.

Unfortunately, the government has not woken up to the fact that the construction industry will not build enough houses to reduce the market price because to do so would reduce their profits. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) recently estimated that the major housebuilders in this country had a land bank with about a million planning consents - more than enough to abolish the so-called housing shortage. The value of this land makes their annual accounts look very healthy indeed!

Mr Thompson focusses on the housing position in the Canterbury City Council area using data supplied by the council. Many of his conclusions make for uncomfortable reading.

I must not steal Mr Thompson’s thunder but would give one example: the cost of a new-build in the Canterbury area as of September 2011 was £160,476. This figure rose to £317,381 in

September 2021. Canterbury City Council estimates that an annual income of £75,000 was needed to buy a new-build in 2021. On these figures CCC has calculated that 98% of Canterbury residents are priced out of the new-build market!

His conclusions on “affordable homes” are also very worrying.

The city council’s record on providing what were once called “council houses” is lamentable and it needs to focus on the needs of the homeless and those folk who cannot even think of entering the “affordable” market.

Would that every local authority summoned the political will to rise up and tell Boris Johnson and his erstwhile Minister for Housing where to go, how to get there and what to do on arrival. One might also give the Planning Inspectorate its marching orders - a body which during the last few years has abandoned its impartiality and settled instead for a life of subservient grovelling to its Whitehall masters.

Peter Osborne

Stour Street, Canterbury