14 billion reasons to hope Mr Gove hits the target for new homes...

ONE of the first acts of Rishi Sunak on becoming Prime Minister was to reinstall Michael Gove as Secretary of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, while one of Gove’s first actions was to reinstate the Government’s target of delivering 300,000 new homes a year, a target axed by Liz Truss’ comically short-lived but disastrous administration.

The target had been kicking around for a few years following the publication of the Housing White Paper back in 2017.

However, we’ve never been close to achieving it, and so you might wonder why Gove is doggedly sticking with it.

There are many reasons for increased need and demand for housing.

People are living longer and so there is less natural churn in the housing market. Affordability has become a big problem, particularly for younger people. Smaller household sizes are increasing demand, as is immigration.

And at the same time the supply of genuinely affordable housing has been dramatically eroded through things like right-to-buy, while incoherent policy responses have simply exacerbated the problems, such as focusing on demand-side initiatives such as helpto-buy.

Research by organisations such as Shelter demonstrates that such is the scale of housing need across the country, it will take post-war type development programmes to meet it. We haven’t built enough homes to meet housing need since the first year of the first Thatcher government, and the last time we built homes in volume consistently was the late 1960s.

Since 1979, we’ve seen right-tobuy, the curtailing of major state-led housebuilding programmes, laissez-faire planning to ‘free’ the market with affordable housing delivered through section 106 agreements, and an attitude that ‘housing benefit can take the strain.’

But despite an open acknowledgement of continued housebuilding failure in the aforementioned 2017 White Paper, very little has changed since.

And that is mainly due to an obvious ideological block in the modern iteration of the Conservative Party, and their ongoing austerity project, which manifests itself in an aversion to state-led interventions and planning, an unhealthy obsession with home ownership at the exclusion of other forms of housing, and blatant politicking – witness former Chancellor George Osborne’s comments that council housing ‘breeds Labour voters’.

Yet in years gone by, Conservative governments built millions of homes. Today though, the public sector currently lacks the capacity to deliver, while the general public are less accepting of major developments.

In recent years, there has been a mini revival, with some local authorities getting stuck into the business of building once more, none more so than here in the Potteries where Stoke-on-trent City Council has done some great work.

In the capital, Peter Barber – winner of the 2022 Soane Medal for architecture – has carried out some incredible and ground-breaking work for a number of London boroughs on difficult sites which has seen him reinvent a number of housing typologies – including the old backto-back – thus proving that housing numbers can be delivered without having to resort to high-rise solutions.

And the real positive is that highquality results are being achieved. A story in The Times at the weekend noted that new homes in the public housing sector are being built to better standards than those delivered by the private sector, which gives an indication of what the possibilities could be if local authorities were properly resourced to deliver.

Back in the late 1990s, the White Paper on household growth indicated that by 2020, we would need to build four million homes. The then Labour government responded by creating the Urban Task Force who saw the need to deliver new homes as an opportunity to regenerate our towns and cities, and produced Towards an Urban Renaissance, which became the regenerator’s bible.

However, results were mixed, with the approach to delivery too marketoriented; indeed, the state played mainly an enabling role, and the missing piece of the jigsaw was direct intervention. The 2008 financial crisis put paid to a lot of what was planned, and that four million target was ultimately missed.

That opportunity still remains, and it will be interesting to see what – if any – pledges are made towards the 300,000 a year target in the Autumn Statement to be given by Jeremy Hunt, left, tomorrow. Anything substantial may appear expensive in the short-term; but in the long-term the homes built would pay for themselves, while a major housebuilding programme would also provide a significant economic boost: research has demonstrated that hitting 300,000 a year would generate more than £14 billion of economic activity and generate 260,000 jobs.

So while Mr Gove might be bullish about the 300,000 homes a year target, without the resources and tools, he’ll just end up sheepish. Over to you Mr Hunt.