Michael Gove’s housing reforms are the only ray of light in this doomed government
A s the present Tory administration staggers on, one minister at least is showing some terminal creativity. The levelling up, housing and communities secretary, Michael Gove, is galvanising housing policy, sort of. This year, he has at last abandoned the absurdity that there is a national housing need of a fixed number of houses a year.
Councils in England have been told they no longer need to deliver a precise target of new buildings laid down in Whitehall irrespective of sound planning or local opinion. He has also vetoed an ugly suburban development in Kent, has introduced plans that would allow local councils to limit Airbnb and holiday homes, and is trying to makemanufacturing companies pay for recladding tower blocks post-Grenfell.
Gove has begun to call the bluff on the daftness of the housing debate, typified by the BBC never seeming to use the word housing without adding “crisis”. There is apparently a crisis if house prices are rising as well as if they are falling. The thesis that Britain “needs” 300,000 new houses a year is a hangover of 20th-century demography, frantically kept alive by construction industry lobbyists. Need is merely a synonym for demand. The south-east “needs” an infinite number of houses because demand will always exceed supply as long as governments tilt wealth towards the capital, as Germany and France have wisely not done.
The exorbitant cost of much housing in the UK has nothing to do with housebuilding. New houses make up a tiny share of any country’s housing market. Prices rise when cities prosper and when, as in recent years, interest rates are low and so money is cheap. British politicians bribing voters with mortgage subsidies merely inflates prices and thus benefits sellers.
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