Building boomers

Most of the houses of the Midland town were of a pleasant architecture. They lacked style, but also lacked pretentiousness

Apparently we are in for the ‘biggest building boom in a generation’. Really? Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner talks a good talk on this, but the Planning & Regeneration Bill that Parliament saw yesterday still has some gaps it needs to fill.

It’s all very well rewriting the planning laws to enable builders to build more easily, but there still has to be the manpower there to do the actual, you know building. Anyway, more of that later.

The Bill has some interesting elements in it – some of them interesting in the ‘wonder how they’re going to make that one work’ way, others that are, well, actually interesting.

For starters, there will be an extension of the compulsory purchase idea to mean that councils will be given powers to buy land even if owners do not want to sell. It’ll be a shame if it means an end to that rather British quirk of having an old oast house slap bang in the middle of an estate of modern boxes, because Old Gerald had lived there all his life and refused to move. See also: that weird house in the middle of the M62.

Instead of having to ensure that any environmental damage that their new buildings will cause is sorted out prior to planning permission being granted, developers will have to pay into a National Nature Restoration Fund to offset potential damage and reduce delays. That sounds ‘interesting’ on paper, but will it simply mean that permission is granted for a housing estate on acres of green fields, destroying wildlife habitats, while the National Nature Fund forks out for a few dozen trees and a children’s nature trail in a park two towns over?

I think there will be some very ‘interesting’ conversations – of the protesting variety -over whether the council really can buy land it has earmarked as having ‘potential for development’, regardless of local opposition. Greenfield sites tend to be the low hanging fruit, the areas that don’t require decontaminating, or redeveloping from industrial use, and therefore are attractive as the easy option.

What all sites need though, Greenfield, brownfield, grey-belt, is infrastructure. An estate of 300 family homes – whether they are lowcost/affordable, executive or, more usually, a mixture, all need water, sewage, electricity, schools, corner shops, transport links. There doesn’t seem to be much in the Bill about water management. As an aside, it took months for the Royal Mail to recognise my friend’s address on a newbuild estate which they insisted couldn’t have a postcode as it didn’t exist.

All these ideas in the Bill are part of the concerted effort to hit the government target of building 1.5 million homes by the end of the decade. One of the things that holds it all up is the planning delays. So, anything that goes a way towards reducing those has to be welcome.

However, speed things up too quickly and you run the risk of waving tings through, of reducing the amount of scrutiny, and not paying enough attention to the needs of the local communities and the surrounding environments.
The Bill won’t get rid of delays caused by local action or dissent either. Not every protest against a development is down to NIMBYism. Sometimes the protestors are right. Sometimes the developments as they are first proposed are too big, to dense, in the wrong place and, often, on the promise of local improvements that, experience has taught, are never quite what was promised in the first place.

Then, of course, we have the issue of who is going to build all these properties. Labour shortages, skilled labour shortages are worse than ever, we all know that. An ageing workforce, natural wastage, and the effect of , yes, the Government’s own National Insurance and Minimum Wage policies on employers’ willingness to recruit: these are all reasons why we are continuing to have a shortage of actual builders to build this ‘greatest building boom in a generation’.

The intention is there, it just needs to be managed properly and in the interests of all the stakeholders – government, councils, developers, the economy, the population and the environment. As usual with these things, the devil will be in the details.