Let Britain build more houses, or face an explosion of social anger

Homeowners must allow Theresa May to make radical changes to our failed planning system

Every prime minister, when first appointed, pledges to fight against injustice. Some deliver; most don’t. If Theresa May is serious in her desire to govern for the have-nots as well as just the haves, she must tackle one of the greatest injustices of our our time: Britain’s horrendous, corrosive housing crisis, the one issue that could yet bring a populist, hard-Left Corbynite party into power at some point in the 2020s.

Home ownership is moving beyond the reach of millions of aspirational families, undermining one of the foundations of a stable, conservative society. Homeowners, who have a tangible stake in society, turn into Tories as they grow older; renters tend to stick with Labour. The privatisation of council houses was the right thing to do, but it failed to address the core problem: we remain saddled with an idiotic Forties land-use system dreamt up by an Attlee government in love with central planning.

There is only one way this crisis can be resolved: the current rules need to be junked, more land must be allocated to housing, and we need to double home building, as soon as possible. The current situation is catastrophic: just 142,890 new homes were built in England in 2015. Home ownership rates have fallen back to 1980s levels and are now lower than France’s on some measures. We have the smallest new homes in Europe, according to a Cambridge University study by Malcolm Morgan and Heather Cruickshank. The average newly built home is just 76 square metres, compared to 137 square metres in Denmark, 109.2 in Germany, 112.8 in France and 115.5 in supposedly crowded Holland. This is a scandal: we are one of the wealthiest, most powerful countries in the world, and yet our protectionist policies mean are forcing millions to live in noisy, stressful rabbit hutches.

Mrs May should therefore put more and better housebuilding at the heart of her Conservative Party conference speech next week. Simply tweaking the rules, or subsidising small builders, or allowing municipal socialists to borrow more to build council homes won’t work (the Sixties, the last time we tried that, was a disaster). Instead, a revolution is required: a genuine break with the past similar to Mrs May’s other two flagship policies, Brexit and the return of selective education.

For a new housebuilding agenda to have any chance of succeeding, we need a grand bargain between the government and the country’s existing homeowners, who in the past have blocked change. The nimbys must relent, for the sake of their children and grandchildren, as well as their own self-interest: the day homeowners become a minority, they will face allout warfare, including wealth taxes. They need to concede that not all housebuilding can be confined to brownfield sites (though of course the rush to develop these must continue). We will also need new towns, new and bigger villages, larger suburbs – and yes, that means that the the uglier, brownish bits of the Green Belt will need to be developed (though forests and real environmental amenities must remain protected). Britain must even learn to love a new, civilised version of urban sprawl.

In return, the government has to promise that the new homes will be very different to what has gone before: the priority must be sustainable communities, with great design and new infrastructure. More homes must no longer mean congested roads and GP waiting lists for existing residents: a new system of allocating public spending according to population growth needs to be put in place.

The other non-negotiable is that the public must be given the sort of housing that it actually wants, where it wants it. There is room for more skyscrapers in city centres, certainly, and for some densification in suburbia. Plenty of people, including older downsizers, want to live in flats. But as Nicholas Boys Smith, boss of Create Streets, has pointed out, most people dream of living in houses with their own front doors and back gardens.

In the most recent national survey, 80 per cent wanted to live in a house, 6 per cent in a flat in a small mansion block and just 3 per cent in a large block. Even in London, many people want a much more diverse mix of new homes, with terraced houses most popular. There should be plenty of freehold options, not just leaseholds with expensive service charges.

If we want the public to accept a massive increase in housebuilding, it must be offered a greater choice, just as it is in every other area where capitalism, rather than top-down planning, is allowed to function. That will mean expanding suburbs, with semis and terraces built in cul de sacs, as well as building upwards. It will also require turning under-performing retail zones and even high street shops into housing. The new developments should not be council homes; they should be led by private developers but also continental-style self-builders.

Instead of rigid, arbitrary Green Belts, we need green fingers, mixing parks and forest with new developments. New streets need to be encouraged to become self-governing, with their own resident associations in charge of communal spaces; Mark Pennington, a professor at King’s College, London, argues brilliantly that private covenants, deed restrictions and the establishment of proprietary communities are the best way to give locals control.

And instead of being forced to live with new developments, residents ought to be given incentives to embrace them. In Lavenham, Suffolk, locals have backed a substantial house-building project on the condition that a third of the homes were cheaper and reserved for young people to buy.

Slowly but surely, the electorate is becoming more receptive. The 2014 British Social Attitudes survey showed that 56 per cent supported new homes in their locality (rather than a million miles away, as is usually the case), twice as many as in 2010.

My plea to the Prime Minister is simple: make it your mission to fix our housing market, and to ensure that homeownership remains an integral part of the British dream. As to existing homeowners: please, please, please, let the Government reform the planning system. It’s not just the right thing to do: it’s also the only way to avoid a social explosion that will engulf us all.