To grasp the nettle: How to deal with housing, climate and levelling up (Cover story for The Planner January 2023)

December 2022. The levelling up and regeneration bill is merrily making its way through the report stage to a soundtrack of supermarket Christmas tunes. It’s a special time when MPs can gather round, suggesting amendments. Puncturing the festive legislative atmosphere, a group of Conservative MPs tabled a mutinous amendment seeking prohibition of mandatory housing targets and the abolition of five-year land supply.

Surely, you cried, so few people couldn’t have such an impact? But they could. When I reached the fifth door of my advent calendar, Michael Gove capitulated. Although targets were only ever a starting point, it represented a shift. There is broad consensus this will reduce housing delivery and undermine plan-making: Merry Christmas.

A crisis

If you possess a functioning memory you may recall a government promise to build 300,000 houses a year, reaffirmed by Gove as recently as October. Many argue we don’t need that many. I believe we do.

If anything, housing needs are underestimated, being based on past trends. Household formation projections don’t take account of people who were unable to access housing, making under supply a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 2018 Crisis identified a backlog of 4.75 million households and called for the target to be raised to 340,000 a year.

Overcrowding in the social and private-rented sectors has risen to the highest levels seen since data collection began, according to Overcrowded Housing (England), a 2021 report for the House of Commons Library. Housing is increasingly unaffordable: in 2021, the Office for National Statistics estimated that full-time employees would spend 9.1 times their annual earnings on buying a home: In 1997 the ratio was 3.5.

In 2020, England had the third lowest percentage of vacant dwellings of 23 countries selected by the OECD from its Affordable Housing Database, including close neighbours like France, and Denmark. This very low buffer exacerbates housing’s lack of elasticity (a long lag between demand and ability to meet it). When supply is inelastic, prices rise faster; while it’s not as simple as ‘more supply, lower prices’, the opposite point is easier to prove: having fewer homes than we need will increase costs.

More housing, more problems

If you accept that we need more housing, the next question is how to deliver it? Many people who accept the need still argue against new homes. Objections cluster at two scales: local and global.

At the local level are concerns about environmental impact, insufficient infrastructure, affordability and poor design. At the global level are broader climate objections: the carbon take of construction, carbon-intensive travel patterns and the impact on our biosphere.

These concerns are valid. Place Alliance’s 2021 National Housing Design Audit found that new housing design in the UK is overwhelmingly ‘mediocre’ or ‘poor’. A Home for All Within Planetary Boundaries, a November 2022 research paper led by ecological economist Sophus Zu Ermgassen, concluded that building out the government’s 300,000 homes figure would consume England’s whole cumulative carbon budget for 2050.

You might conclude that we simply shouldn’t build any more new housing. Zu Ermgassen’s research suggested reducing demand for homes as financial assets using macroprudential policy, expanding social housing, reducing underutilisation of floor space and accelerating low-carbon retrofits. I agree that we should do all of that, but it won’t happen fast and won’t be enough. Even building exclusively on brownfield land won’t do it. Most housing is already built on previously developed land, as DLUHC’s Land Use Change Statistics for 2022 demonstrate, but even with significant government support, it can only be part of the solution, as Lichfields’ Banking on Brownfield report suggests.

Is it better to have unmet need than to build on greenfield sites? I don’t believe so. A safe, affordable home is not optional; it is a need, not a want, and its absence has deep impacts on wellbeing. 

Planning barrister and author of A Home of One’s Own, Hashi Mohamed, captured this impact when writing in the Financial Times in September. “Cramped conditions limit our horizons not just physically but mentally. They affect the relationships you build, the friendships you sustain and whether you have the space and time to find your place in society.”

People whose only available water is unsafe don’t simply stop drinking. It does not follow that if new housing is badly designed and unsustainable, we should stop providing it. If we’re doing it wrong, we must learn to do it right.

Levelling up

Insufficient housing has implications for addressing spatial inequality: levelling up. Writing in Showhouse magazine, Paul Smith at Strategic Land Group recently highlighted the government’s intention to target new homes towards areas of unaffordability –  namely London and the South East. But a huge driver of that demand is the strength of the economy. So one option that would support levelling-up would be to make other destinations more attractive with investment and infrastructure, rebalancing demand for homes. The traditional approach of ‘create employment, attract population, build houses’ can also be inverted, especially with flexibility around working locations.

I once used Lowell near Boston as a case study: the post-industrial town focused not on replacing jobs but on creating attractive, affordable, neighbourhoods, drawing a highly employable population who then brought business to the area.

Growing the amount of housing in an area helps to create a critical mass to support shops, services and public transport, all of which diminish without sufficient people using them. A vicious circle begins where demand reduces, services shrink and fewer people want to live there. We should aim to start the virtuous circle of increased population, greater demand, improved amenities and justifiable infrastructure spending. 

The doughnut

There are compelling social arguments for housing at both the personal and macro-spatial scales, but there are legitimate quality and climate concerns. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics provides an excellent conceptual framework for such tension. The concept is deliciously simple: humanity’s aim should be to “meet the needs of all within the means of the planet”. No one falls short on life’s essentials: food, housing, healthcare, political voice, etc (‘the inner edge’). We also try not to overshoot our pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, such as a stable climate, fertile soils and a protective ozone layer (‘the outer edge’). We aim to stay within the sweet spot; inside the doughnut.

‘Doughnut’ economics is an excellent framing tool for housing. We can place Hashi Mohamed’s rallying cry for safe, stable, affordable homes on the inner edge and the research paper showing targets eating up our entire carbon budget on the outer edge. In April 2020, the City of Amsterdam publicly embraced the doughnut as a tool to guide its social and economic recovery from the pandemic. Could we take a similar approach in the UK?

A way forward

We already have policy tools that could be strengthened using the doughnut model: strategic spatial planning and design coding. Taken together they could help us balance the needs of people and planet. Join me, for a moment, in my personal planning utopia.

For starters, there is a national spatial plan for the UK, developed around the levelling-up agenda. This plan creates a high-level aspiration for a functional and sustainable arrangement of housing, employment and transport.

Strategic spatial planning would then be undertaken at the multi-authority level or at the single-authority level with cooperation. We have seen delay and disruption with joint local plans and multi-authority documents like the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework. But my utopian vision takes place in a different political and ideological landscape, and my hope is that would make things easier.

The spatial planning process would foster a much closer relationship between the policy vision for a place and its spatial expression. So often, I read documents that say all the right things from a social and environmental perspective, only to look at the key diagram and fail to see a relationship between the words and the map.

A spatial strategy based on the principles of doughnut economics (or even the core principles of most existing plans) might take the following approach to identifying appropriate locations for development. 

1. Eliminate land with significant physical constraints (eg, important landscape features, flood risk, etc);
2. Eliminate areas that fall beyond an accessible distance from current or planned public transport infrastructure and substantial local centres; and
3. Identify areas (using the Index of Multiple Deprivation) where development might be most needed, and explore ‘bundling’ challenging brownfield sites in areas of low viability with higher value greenfield. 

This gives an idealised spatial picture. From there, it is necessary to negotiate and make compromises. This would be done in a conscious, transparent way, acknowledging trade-offs rather than obfuscating with cheery comms. Outputs would be visual, legible and accessible. The process would include the challenging of engaging local people in high-level, long-term conversations.

Once locations have been identified, design coding comes in. The 2021 National Model Design Code already requires local planning authorities to draft local codes. They would have a clear remit to code for development that balances the needs of people and planet, setting higher standards of quality and sustainability for new development.

Although we might never eliminate opposition to new housing, I believe that demonstrably putting development in the right place and setting much higher-quality standards would bring us to a much more even handed discourse.

A wish list for change

Leadership: Grasp the nettle of hard social and environmental issues like housing. Transparently address hard truths. Reinstate national housing targets, develop a national spatial plan. Step up.

Resources: Invest in the people, skills and systems of planning departments. Give time and money for continuous internal improvement, rather than chasing the radical reforms of politicians and think tanks.

Power: Give local authorities the ability to assemble land, borrow money and deliver development directly. Give them a clear remit to draft strategic spatial policy and design codes that balance the needs of people and the planet and hold them to account.

Support: Help the development industry and local authorities adjust to this new reality. Acknowledge commercial challenges, develop transition measures, let go of lazy demonisation.

Globally the depressing economic picture is used to justify slashed budgets and cancelled plans. But our salvation may lie in the opposite: taking action. Imagine the potential of a spatially balanced country, a planning system equipped to take on social and environmental challenges, and a population in high quality neighbourhoods. We must look at the real problems facing us and acknowledge that the cost of doing nothing is greater than the cost of doing something.