Yes, there is a solution to the housing shortage

Published in the Evening Standard

Such is the power of a prime minister-in-waiting. Gordon Brown only had to mention the housing crisis in the south east this week for the issue suddenly to gain the prominence and airtime campaigners have craved for so long. They have been sounding the alarm for years, but a word from the man destined for Number Ten ensured that everyone started listening. Brown better get used to it: this is how things are going to be for the next couple of years.

The PM-to-be accepted that the south east housing shortage was becoming desperate; that too many young people are being priced out of the property market before they can even enter it. His proposed solution sounded great: a set of five new eco-towns, providing 100,000 carbon neutral homes. That way, we’d alleviate much of the housing problem and do our bit for climate change. And if it meant nicely trumping David Cameron’s green credentials, well, that’d be a happy bonus.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t taken long for the shine to dull on Brown’s big idea. Green groups say any benefit in reduced carbon from these eco-homes could be cancelled out if their occupants have to commute by car to their jobs, doubtless in London. And the Nimby crowd have wondered where exactly these new settlements are to be built. They might like the idea of green homes in theory, but they don’t want a big new town in their backyard thank you very much.

That’s just how it is with the great housing conundrum: name a possible solution and you immediately come up with two more problems. Little wonder it has our leaders paralysed.

Think of the pressure on the south east. First, London is growing, with more and more people keen to squeeze in. Latest figures project a leap in London’s population to 9m by 2031. That’s 1.5m more than live here now.

Much of that growth will come from immigration, so that pretty soon more than half of London’s people will have been born outside Britain. But it’s compounded by the sheer dominance the capital has over the rest of the country, as businesses of every kind are drawn to locate themselves here rather than anywhere else.

The effect of this vastly expanded population is clear. Suddenly there are not enough homes to go around. And the infrastructure begins to creak under the strain. Hospitals have more patients to treat; schools have more children to teach.

Think of a remedy and you soon hit a brick wall. Could we somehow reduce the flow of people? It’s hard to see how. The Poles, Lithuanians and Hungarians who are here are now citizens of the European Union, granted the right of free movement. Besides, not many politicians are in a hurry to position themselves as anti-immigration: it sounds too much like hostility to the ethnic mix that already exists here.

Above all, London has clearly shown that it needs immigrants. As Ken Livingstone pointed out this week - noting that in the last seven years of buying a coffee on his way to work he has only been served by a native-born Londoner once - it seems there are some jobs which only migrants are willing to do. With an ageing population, the pensioners of the future need these young workers to provide for them in their old age.

So much for immigration. What of shifting the national set-up, so that things are not so tilted towards London? It would certainly take the pressure off if more businesses upped sticks for Birmingham or Glasgow. But past attempts to encourage relocation have always failed. And if it was tough to make people move north in the 1960s and 1970s, how much harder now, when London is a global city. The focus of most firms is not Britain but the world; they want to look outward and London lets them do that.

OK, you might say with a sigh. It’s clear we’re going to have to accommodate all these people in the south east somehow. But where? Point to vacant terrain – like the 9% of farmland in the south east said to be subsidised for doing nothing - and you instantly collide with the Nimby problem. The defenders of the green belt are a mighty lobby, hard to beat. Would-be house builders can’t even rely on Londoners to be on their side: most of us tell pollsters we don’t want the countryside to be concreted over. We may not live surrounded by green and pleasant land – but we want to know it’s there for a visit.

In other words, people keep coming – but we don’t want to build on the land that might house them. Surely, something’s got to give. The answer might not be some new radical masterplan but a typically British one: to muddle on as we are.

For London has already absorbed 800,000 more people since 1986 – equivalent to a city larger than Leeds. We’ve done it simply by squeezing more of us into the space we already occupy.

The key is housing density. We may go on about how crammed we all are here, but if London was as densely populated as Paris there would be 35m of us living here. Only one pocket of London currently matches Parisian levels of density - and it’s not some slummy hellhole, but Bayswater packed with well-heeled apartment blocks.

It’s density the mayor is aiming for when he gives permission for new developments, combining a ground-floor store with multiple flats on top. And it’s density we’ll get as onetime family houses get filled up with half a dozen rent-paying singles, whether from Australia or Nigeria.

But the government cannot just stand aside and watch this happen. This crowding is a consequence of policies it has pursued, from EU expansion to the pursuit of surging growth. If it wants a denser London, it will have to provide the infrastructure that will make that possible. That means transport, like Crossrail, so that all these people can get around, as well as ensuring local councils can carry the extra strain on their services. The easiest way to do that is to allow local authorities to keep more of the revenue these new residents will bring. If they are going to pay the cost of a rising population, they should at least get the benefit of it.

These are the problems of success in London, but they are problems all the same. And they now find themselves on the desk of one Gordon Brown.

Posted on May 17, 2007 10:52 AM

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