Brickonomics

Here’s a wonderfully hysterical story from Monday’s Telegraph about how

The Government intends to reward councils with cash if they give planning permission for hundreds of thousands of new homes to be built in attractive parts of England where property prices are high.

(Funny how the Telegraph only cares about areas with high house prices, isn’t it?)

Let’s see how many things they managed to mislead their readers about in a single story, shall we?

No environmental conditions are placed on the scheme

There doesn’t need to be. The housing targets are set as a result of a regional planning process which takes great account of environmental impacts.

There is no apparent ceiling on the money that councils could make if they exceed the targets for new homes set by Ruth Kelly, the Communities and Local Government Secretary.

Well, the total pot of money available for the Planning Delivery Grant in 2007/08 will be only £120m, equivalent to a whopping 0.6% of the total Council Tax take. Currently ‘Housing Delivery Grant’ accounts for only 20% of that (see page 4 here), with the remainder rewarding perceived good performance in adminstering planning decisions and policy-making. In a separate consultation paper, the government seems keen to tilt the balance more in favour of incentivising housing delivery, but there is no indication that the total pot available is going to increase.

Councils not reaching a threshold would be starved of cash.

If you call not receiving a very small bonus on top of a huge income from council tax, business rates, etc being ’starved’, yes. If not, then that’s just nonsense.

Government figures show that five million new homes are needed in England over 20 years, 1.5 million of them because of record levels of immigration.

No they don’t.

Now, as it happens, I think the proposed Housing and Planning Delivery Grant is a pretty crude and bureacratic way to incentivise housing supply at the local level. But I also think it’s too insignificant to make much of a difference. Of course it was not in the interests of Charles Clover or the Telegraph’s editors to inform their readers of the amount of money involved, since that would have got in the way of their primary objective of stirring up paranoid visions of class warfare.