“Mutant algorithms” - 5 things MPs & the media keep getting wrong on housing numbers
So, what are you up to on Thursday?
For #planoraks at a loose end, I mean, where to start? There’s a bumper crop of things to keep you occupied. And you don’t even need to leave your front room.
You could tune into the blockbuster planning inquiry happening this month and next into Sir David Adjaye and Asa Bruno’s UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre next to the Palace of Westminster which is being streamed live and in colour by the Planning Inspectorate here. I am appearing in support of what is a truly remarkable scheme, instructed by “Learning from the Righteous”, a Holocaust education charity. If you’re interested, my short opening statement can be watched here and read here.
And once you’re done with that, next stop is BBC Parliament. Because that’s where you’ll find a debate arranged by the Backbench Business Committee "on a motion on Planning Reform and House Building Targets” which will be opened by Bob Seely, the Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight.
Wondering what Mr Seely thinks about the Government’s proposed reforms? No need to wait until Thursday. He’s already told us here:
Take my constituency, the Isle of Wight; the proposals will see our target increased by over 50 per cent. Half the Island is designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, yet we will be ordered to build more houses per year than either Portsmouth or Southampton, both cities with major infrastructure and services, and populations almost 70 per cent larger. This is just nonsense.
The Government ordering Bob Seely and his constituents to build more houses than Portsmouth. Dear me. That doesn’t sound fair, does it? Is he right?
You may just have noticed a leeeetle bit of media coverage on the ever-vexed topic of housing targets. To get up to speed, have a gander at my crib-sheets on the proposed national housing plan, and the 3 big political challenges facing the White Paper.
But the housing numbers drama is a daily deluge. It’s becoming very hard to keep up with. And when you try, time after time after time, you’ll see the same basic errors creeping into the way both MPs and journalists (some of whom, you’d have thought, would know better). And some of those errors are important. Because, as you’ll see if you tune into BBC Parliament on Thursday, the errors make a grown-up, cogent debate about housing numbers almost impossible.
What are these errors? I’ll give you my top 5 bugbears:
Claim: The proposed formula for local housing need “will allow developers to build hundreds of thousands of poorly located new homes…….”.
No. It. Won’t.
It won’t “allow” developers to lay a single brick. That’s not how any of this works. And I fear that the good folks at CPRE who are responsible for that quote, and for some of the other ideas permeating the press coverage, are sophisticated enough to understand that.
As all good #planoraks know, the local housing need figures set what we now call an authority’s “policy-off” figure for need. But the authority doesn’t actually have to deliver those numbers. Au contraire, national policy allows them to undercut it. For all sorts of reasons. If lots of your area is Green Belt, or a National Park, or AONB say (here’s looking at you, Mr Seely), you can pick your ultimate housing requirement figure - the policy-on number - which “shows the extent to which their identified housing need (and any needs that cannot be met within neighbouring areas) can be met”: §65 NPPF.
Which is part of the reason why the Isle of Wight delivered 354 homes last year and Southampton delivered almost 1,800. So - happy days - there’s no need to worry about the islanders being “ordered” to exceed housebuilding levels Southampton next year. Or Plymouth. Because that is not what the Government is proposing. Not even close.
Claim: The new formula will = “a huge rise in” / a “doubling" / a “tripling” in development.
Nope. Same deal. Under our current system, layers of constraint can be added to the local housing need figure at the plan-making stage. Which means that lots of authorities, and particularly Green Belt authorities, never even plan to meet their objectively assessed needs. Which is why a huge rise in local housing need does not = a huge rise in local housing requirement, or huge rise in the delivery of development.
Claim: The algorithm “ignores” constraints, or “doesn’t recognise” the need to preserve valued spaces.
The formula is a standardised statistical exercise. It’s supposed to tell us where the houses are needed. Based broadly on where people have been living and how expensive it’s been. But in our present system, that’s only part of the job. Once the formula’s performed that function, the baton is handed to local authorities to decide what their housing requirement should be. The system layers constraints - including those valued spaces - onto the local housing need figure.
So the idea that constraints or designated landscapes are ignored is… well, it’s totally wrong. Flat wrong. If anything, there’s an argument for constraints being given too much power in the process.
Plus - not a critical point, this one, but… it’s not an algorithm. It really isn’t. I know algorithms are all the rage this year, but the proposed formula for determining local housing need is… a formula. It’s an equation. It’s not a sequence of computational procedures which turns inputs into outputs. Worth trying to avoid politically charged lingo where we can. This is a topic with enough politics already!
Claim: “Decisions on where new homes go ‘will not be made by central government’, Pincher pledges”
Maybe this was inevitable. Release 2 big consultations at the same time. You’ll end up with lots and lots of confusion between them.
And some of that confusion’s fair enough, becuse the consultations are linked. The new standard method formula in the "changes to the current system” consultation will provide the starting point for the White Paper’s national housing plan. But only the starting point.
Under the scheme of the White Paper, as I explained here, the baton is no longer passed down to local planning authorities to layer constraints onto that centrally derived figure. Quite the opposite. It would be Central Government which layers on constraints and decides - authority-by-authority - how much housing goes where.
So… Chris Pincher MP’s defence that the standard method for housing does not dictate where homes should go is right, but it’s only right if we’re talking about the current system.
It is totally wrong when it comes to the new regime being consulted on in the White Paper. Under the White Paper, decisions on where new homes are to go certainly will be made by Central Government.
Claim: “We want to ensure that the Green Belt is protected so there are beautiful green spaces…” Robert Jenrick, 5th October 2020.
Don’t get me started on this one. Such is the power of Green Belt policy in the national imagination - and in particular, the imaginations of our politicians - that our “once-in-a-lifetime” radical planning reforms weren’t radical enough to go there.
Which is saying something, because Jack Airey’s paper which got all of this going in the first place argued that “Green Belt protections should be reviewed to clarify what purpose they are supposed to be serving and whether it is still justified”. Fwiw, I agree. Boris calls the planning system sclerotic, but the irony is that the most rigid and unresponsive plank of national policy - the bit almost completely unchanged since 1955 - the bit holding back all kinds of sensible development ideas around our most sustainable settlements - is the one bit he won’t touch at all.
But it’s the repeated, consistent and - has to be, doesn’t it? - knowing conflation of Green Belt with other things by some of our politicians which rankles. Because I don’t need to tell you: the Green Belt isn’t all green, and it’s definitely not a belt. It has nothing to do with scenic beauty, “beautiful green spaces” or landscape quality, or wildlife protection (at least so far as England is concerned). It was post-war mechanism to contain what the Government of the day rather pejoratively described as “urban sprawl” (aka new homes for people who needed them). No more. No less. Perhaps if they’d called the policy “urban containment zones”, we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a state of confusion.
Is the Green Belt under threat? Does a loss of 0.2% last year sound like a threat to you? My goodness, at that rate there’ll barely be any Green Belt land left by… [checks calculator]… 2520.
This one’s a topic for another blog post! But worth noting on this hit-list of errors. Because I suspect a fair few #planoraks would agree that a program to confront our national housing crisis which doesn’t take on the sacred cow of national Green Belt policy is a program that’s doomed to fail.
So that’s your Thursday media intake sorted, #planoraks. Enjoy the debate. If you’re looking for a drinking game, it’s a sip of the liquid of your choice every time an MP falls into one of the 5 errors above. Which could make for a long afternoon!
In the meantime, stay well #planoraks.
