Peace, permanence and affordable prices: six ways to solve Britain’s housing crisis | Housing

Imagine a country where everyone could live securely in a decent home, one with room enough for your ordinary needs, that would also be a haven for your dreams and an expression of who you are. Which offers peace and privacy yet is part of a neighbourhood, with access to transport, schools, health, contact with nature, places of work, shops, sport and entertainment. Where you can move easily to another home as your life changes – if you start a family, you become single, you grow old, you move jobs.

A country that meets such simple needs should, as I argue in my book Property, surely, be the ultimate goal of policies about homes. Britain is not currently this place. And, despite the Labour government’s welcome attention to addressing these issues, its plans are unlikely to make a significant impact any time soon.

The government has said, very clearly, that it’s going to build 1.5m new homes. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has released a video to that effect, in which the communities secretary Angela Rayner and other ministers recite this number over and over.

Rather than building these homes themselves, the government’s idea is to encourage the private sector to build most of them, by relaxing and speeding up the planning system. They want to allow more building on green belt land, to limit the power of local objectors to slow down or stop development, to limit environmental protections, to oblige local authorities to permit more homes.

Yet the “most acute housing crisis in living memory,” as Rayner calls it, is one of affordability rather than numbers. It consists, as she has pointed out, of 150,000 children in temporary accommodation, nearly 1.3m households on social housing waiting lists, total homelessness at record levels, shrinking prospects for younger people to own their own home and rent increases of 8.6% in a year.

And, while basic economics tells us that there’s a connection between supply and price, there’s little reason to believe that loosening the bolts on the planning system will bring prices down by sufficient amounts, quickly enough, genuinely to help people now in dire need.

A 1% increase in stock, according to government research, lowers prices by 2%, absent other factors. As Britain has about 30m homes, Labour’s extra 1.5m would add 5%, which in theory could lead over five years to a fall in price of 10%, a welcome although not transformative change for those trying to buy their first home.

Any price adjustment from rising numbers would be agonisingly slow – it’s not much comfort to families now struggling in small and insecure flats to hear that they might be able to buy a slightly cheaper home, somewhere in the green belt, some time in the future. And this is to assume that those 1.5m homes would be built, which would require the private sector to complete homes at a rate it has not achieved since before the second world war.

In practice it’s unlikely that homes will be built in the promised numbers, or in a way that would bring down prices. Those other factors excluded by the government’s calculations – rising population, changing financial markets, the effects of speculation – would intervene.

Large housebuilding companies slow their rates of construction if the value of their product is in danger of falling. It’s not obvious where the labour and materials to sustain a building boom, both of which are already in short supply, would come from, and their lack would drive up construction costs.

There is also the inconvenient truth that construction is a major contributor to climate change – according to one study, a rate of building 300,000 homes a year until 2050 would use up 104% of England’s total 1.5C carbon budget. Addressing one crisis, of housing, risks deepening another, of the environment.

So cranking out numbers is not by itself a solution. It leaves questions unanswered: what should these new homes be like, of what tenure, for whom and where, at what price? Who will build them? What difference would they make? What better ways are there of addressing need, other than the carbon-profligate practice of mass construction?

1 Reform taxes

If you really want to bring down the price of homes, reform of the planning system is a slow and laborious way to do it – it would be far quicker to remove the financial and fiscal pressures that keep prices high.

The main factor pushing them up, according to the economist Josh Ryan-Collins, is demand driven by the fact that, under the current tax regime, homes make attractive investments. An annual property tax, replacing stamp duty and council tax, would, he argues, take the speculative heat out of the property market. He also proposes measures by which local authorities and housing associations can purchase existing homes for use as social housing, another way of achieving affordability without construction.

2 Transform empty buildings

Even as demand for homes is high, there are the office buildings vacated during and after Covid and disused shopping centres and retail space. Although these types don’t always convert easily into homes, they could with generosity, imagination and some basic standards, be made – as an earlier generation did with warehouses – into fine places to live. In the Ilot Saint-Germain in Paris the architects Francois Brugel and Associates have made an old office building into airy, well-proportioned social housing formed around a communal garden.

It would be an environmental and urban scandal to leave these empty structures rotting while building new elsewhere. Here, another tax reform is crucial. At present VAT is charged at 20% on renovations of existing buildings, while none is levied on newbuilds, a perverse incentive for waste that should be removed by equalising the rates of tax.

3 Build public housing

The homes that are built should be the ones that most directly and quickly address need – those built for rent rather than for sale, especially affordable public housing. Put simply, there has to be a programme to match the one that Nye Bevan launched under the 1945 Labour government.

This doesn’t all have to be housing of last resort, but can achieve what Bevan called “the living tapestry of a mixed community”. As happens in places as different as Singapore and Vienna, the public sector can be a landlord to people at many levels of income, charged according to ability to pay.

The government spends many billions on housing benefit, most of which goes to private landlords and is gone for ever. It would be a more productive use of public money to invest in capital assets that remain public property and give a return.

4 Use land well

Land is a precious resource, so whatever is built on it should use it well. This means making the most of underused locations – the architects RCKa have for example produced eyecatching proposals for building homes on the margins of golf courses, and researched how new homes could be created around suburban and rural train stations, where they would benefit from ready-made public transport.

Good use of land also means building at what’s called “gentle density”, which is pushing up the number of homes per acre without resorting to tall buildings or overcrowding.

The proposed Phoenix development in Lewes, East Sussex, that will go up to five storeys high while creating shared courtyard gardens in its centre, shows how it can be done. This is the opposite of the land-hungry, car-dependent estates that are currently developers’ standard products, in which detached houses are dotted about treeless tarmac deserts.

5 Build sustainably

It should be beyond question that anything built now will achieve high standards of sustainability, both in the ways it is constructed and in its performance once it is in use. In Spain and Paris, affordable housing is now built with environmentally friendly materials such as timber, stone and rammed earth. In the Balearic Islands, homes are built that require neither central heating nor air conditioning. In Norwich, the Stirling prize-winning Goldsmith Street development provides council housing based on ultra-low energy principles known as Passivhaus.

6 Build beautifully

Whatever homes are built will last for generations, and will shape the lives of the people who dwell and grow up in them. Their future inhabitants deserve such things as congenial places between houses and flats to linger and meet neighbours, and homes that are well lit and well planned, with materials and details that give delight and character and such simple sources of pleasure as trees.

In Britain, the architect Peter Barber has shown how to achieve such things in compact urban sites. In the privately developed new town of Houlton, outside Rugby, a network of broad, leafy routes enrich journeys to school and to shops. These are for now exceptions; they should become the rule.

None of the above is of course easy. It will require a level of will and ambition that the current administration has not yet shown. But, on current form, Labour’s announcements will only lead to a future of ever-increasing numbers of environmentally damaging new houses, without much change in affordability or quality of life.

At the end of their term of government they will face enraged voters in the places most affected by new development, and others disappointed by their failure to make decent homes easier to rent or buy.

The prize is to make, through the places where people live, a better version of the society we have now. It includes a minimum standard of shelter for everyone, security from eviction, and neighbourhoods that are sociable and supportive. It means taking the gambling and anxiety out of housing markets, and the obsession with rising and falling prices, so everyone can get on with the rest of their lives.

Such an altered society would return the idea of a home to what it should be, not a unit of speculative profit but the setting of your life.

Rowan Moore’s book Property: The Myth that Built the World, is out now in paperback (Faber, £10.99), updated with a new chapter, How to solve a housing crisis