'Unsustainable' housing plans?
Updated on 23 July 2007
Green paper plans to combat the housing crisis by building tens of thousands of new homes every year are unsustainable, say critics.
In a housing green paper, the government has unveiled its battle plan to combat the crisis - from developing brownfield sites to the return of the council house. But plans to build tens of thousands of new homes every year have sparked immediate accusations of unsustainability.
For a long time the housing market was simple: our house prices were going up through their roofs. Everybody felt rather flush. The government benefited from the feelgood factor.
But how the mood music has changed. The housing boom has spawned a crisis that the new Brown administration and its cabinet-attending housing minister see as their top new priority.
In just eight years, the temperature gauge of housing affordability has turned the map of England into swathes of red, meaning that the smallest properties now cost at least eight times the salary of low earners.
The green paper today says the crisis is so acute that local government will be cajoled into freeing up land and granting planning permission for this national priority.
But in return, housebuilders may have to agree to a nationwide system of sharing the development spoils with the exchequer to fund local infrastructure, and be discouraged from so-called "landbanking".
Today's green paper says the housing crisis is so acute that local government will be cajoled into freeing up land and granting planning permission for this national priority.
£8bn is what the green paper promises in support for 70,000 new affordable homes in England per year by 2010. But who is going to build them?
There has been a keen debate within government about whether, as in the past, only the return of council housing can deliver mass housebuilding or whether that role can now safely be handed to housing associations.
This green paper does test the water, offering councils a slight loosening of the Thatcher-era housing handcuffs that have seen millions of houses sold off under right to buy and not replaced.
Ultimately, if the government wants more houses of the right size, in the right place and at the right price, yet with less carbon emissions, it may have decided that it can't leave it all to the private sector.
