Deluded of Tunbridge Wells May 29, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Environment, Factoids, Homelessness, Media, NIMBYs, Party politics, Planning.2 comments
Greg Clark, Conservative MP for Tunbridge Wells, has a shocking tale to relate (via obliging Times journalist Rosemary Bennett):
Up to 20,000 new homes each year that ministers claim are going up on brownfield sites are actually being built in back gardens, figures show.
That “up to”, friend to alarmists everywhere, sets alarm bells ringing, as does the implication that unsuspecting homeowners are waking up to find that sneaky developers have dumped a block of flats on their geraniums. So let’s do what Rosemary Bennett didn’t and give this factoid more than a moment’s reflection.
Her article goes on:
“Garden grabbing” now accounts for 15 per cent of all new housing as family homes in towns and suburbs are pulled down by developers and replaced with flats.
The Conservatives, who obtained the figures from the Department for Communities and Local Government, said that the public was being “deceived”.
Greg Clark, Tory MP for Tunbridge Wells, said: “Most people assume that when the Government talks about building on brownfield sites it means ex-industrial land, like disused factories and railway sidings. They have no idea that much of it is actually beautiful, green, environmentally important gardens.”
That first line really is a peach. What Clark and Bennett call “Garden grabbing” actually covers any and all construction of new dwellings on previously residential land – including the land occupied not by gardens but by the buildings themselves. So if, for example, someone pulled down a block of flats without gardens and replaced them with semi-detached homes with gardens, Clark would call that “garden grabbing”. The logical extension of the argument is for all current residential land to be frozen in its current state of development for perpetuity or for it to be declared undevelopable greenfield as soon as the current dwellings are demolished. That would naturally create far more pressure for greenbelt land to be developed, but I’m sure Clark doesn’t actually want that.
The article implies that “garden grabbing” is a new or growing phenomenon, since it “now accounts for 15 per cent of all new housing” and Bennett cherry-picks 1997 as a base year since the figure then was only 11 per cent. What she mysteriously omits to say is that back in 1986 (under the Conservative government), fully 26 per cent of all new housing was built on previously residential land, and that this “garden grabbing” accounted for half of all brownfield development. This was revealed by Yvette Cooper in her answer to Clark’s parliamentary question on the matter, but he naturally chose to ignore the far more serious offences of his party colleagues, and Bennett naturally chose not to bother herself fact-checking the figures he spoonfed her.
If this is NIMBYism I’d like to see IMBYism February 10, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in Factoids, London, Planning.add a comment
London Mayor Ken Livingstone is quoted in today’s Local Government Chronicle (not online) as claiming that councils’ reluctance to endorse housebuilding schemes is pushing up London house prices. “Someone”, he says, “has to take an overall, London-wide overview”. I wonder if he has anyone in mind?
Ken’s obviously got a vested interest in taking power from the councils, but figures from his own statisticians undermine his claim that they’re holding back housing development in London. Chart 5.6 in this part of the evidence base for the 2005 London Housing Strategy says that while housebuilding is relatively low in historical terms in London at the moment, this is entirely down to the collapse in construction by local authorities, which is due to the central government cutting back on funding and restricting their borrowing power. In fact, the most recent year (2003/04) saw the most units of private housing completed since records began in 1970.
And that’s not all – figures from the Mayor’s 2005 Housing Provision Survey show (in Table 1, if you can read it) that in the last two years London councils granted planning permission for a net additional 90,000 units of housing, which compared to current supply (arguably already quite high, as mentioned above) doesn’t look much like NIMBYism to me.
The Mayor’s remarks raise another question, though. He wants the power to approve bigger ’strategic’ housing schemes (over 200 units) even (maybe especially) over the opposition of local councils, and therefore local residents. There is a clear argument in favour of this – why should residents in one part of London be able to veto a development that could benefit the whole city for years to come? But at the same time, why should the Mayor, who after all won’t have to deal with any negative consequences from his river-side HQ, be able to force through a development which a local council may have rejected for sound planning purposes? How should we resolve these kinds of disputes? Economists of a Coasian persuasion might favour government butting out and interested parties negotiating a solution involving compensatory payments, but are invited to outline how that theory applies to, say, an application to build 500 homes on greenfield in leafy Bromley.
