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Prisons, power stations and social housing – just not in my backyard | Michael White’s political briefing
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 10, 2010
So-called 'garden grabbing' replaces large and lovely old homes with heartless flats
Ministers announced what sounded like welcome news, the restoration of immediate powers for local authorities to prevent a destructive and undemocratic practice. So-called "garden grabbing" replaces large and lovely old homes with heartless flats and disfigures once-sylvan suburbs with densely-packed starter homes. It is all John Prescott's fault, they say.
But like its earlier ruling this week – rejecting bin taxes in favour of recycling rewards – there is more to the Department of Communities and Local Government's (DCLG) populist initiative than is immediately obvious to voters eager for power to be devolved from Whitehall centralists to locally-responsive councils.
Another word for it is nimbyism, the empowerment of sharp-elbowed locals to prevent developments they don't like – from prisons and power stations to social housing and speed bumps. Everyone knows how the system works, Prescott as well as anyone. He tried to rebalance competing forces.
At issue today was the ex-deputy prime minister's drive to increase the proportion of new homes built on brownfield sites, primarily old industrial land, but also gardens from past eras where land densities – well into the 20th century – were low and gardens large. It has been going on for centuries: every town in Britain must have Victorian homes built in the garden of a Georgian house, modern ones built in Victorian gardens.
Contrary to tabloid assertion, Prescott did not reclassify gardens as "brownfield" – that happened under Margaret Thatcher. But he did increase the pressure on councils to build more homes, more densely, partly to ease pressure on green belt and greenfield sites. Councils found it easier to blame Prescott in the local paper than use existing discretion to dictate precise terms to hungry developers and offend local voters in the process. They use the EU and the Human Rights Act as punchbags too.
Labour's last housing minister, John Healey, was prodded into commissioning research which found a modest problem in some areas.
Some 80% of new homes were built on brownfield sites in 2008, against 56% in 1997; those on gardens 23% compared with 11% – 30,000 of the 150,000 new homes built each year. Too many two-bedroom flats were being built instead of family homes, it was noted.
But the very un-Labour Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) hailed Prescott's strategy as "one of the biggest yet unsung environmental successes of recent years", now threatened by resumed suburban sprawl. So "decentralisation minister" Greg Clark's remedy overstates both the problem and the remedy.
The recession has halved market-led demand for new homes, but the social need remains. It is unlikely to be addressed by Clark's formula which may tilt power too far away from Whitehall towards the nimby. If so Clark will not be the only Whitehall-based minister who comes to regret early localist decisions rooted in years of soft options shaped in opposition.
The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has also been busy this week promoting the merits of local decision-taking by the health professionals. He took time off to announce an inquiry into a brutal failure of localism: in Mid-Staffordshire hospital where patients died in lethally-managed wards and no one blew the whistle on it.
‘Garden grabbing’ eases the pressure on greenfield sites
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 21, 2010
This attack on brownfield development means more green fields will be built on
Michael White draws attention to the government's attack on "garden grabbing" brownfield development (Prisons, power stations and social housing – just not in my backyard, 10 June).
He is right to point out the links to localism, populism and nimbyism: "the empowerment of sharp-elbowed locals to prevent developments they don't like". But why would a minor bit of middle-class rabble-rousing find a place in the incoming government's first legislative programme?
White appears to assume that the issue is about the physical capacity of "old industrial land [and] gardens from past eras" to accommodate enough new homes. In fact, the key question is the right balance between extending the city and renewing its existing fabric. During the Thatcher and Major years, I was responsible for planning and transport policy in Newcastle and Birmingham. I coined the term "brownfield" (in 1976) to express the tension between urban renewal and greenfield development in the dynamics of urban change. Brownfield development, in this view, is like cell replacement in the body, an essential part of the continuing health of a city.
White rightly draws attention to how Prescott's brownfield strategy "eased the pressure on green belt and greenfield sites". However, by focusing simply on numbers of new houses, he (like Prescott) underplays the importance of the strategy to housing choices more generally. In practice, only 10% of housing transactions each year are new homes – and most of these are built within existing neighbourhoods and on brownfield land. As Prescott recognised, there is not a finite stock of brownfield sites; with good local planning brownfield supply is constantly being replenished.
White implies that the current furore is just the perennial conflict of nimbyism with developers. But there is a bigger issue: rapidly rising house prices from the mid-90s were blamed by the 2004 Barker Report on an inadequate supply of new homes, and this in turn on lack of land. Developers took the opportunity to attack Prescott's emphasis on brownfield because greenfield land is easier and more profitable to develop.
We can now see that house prices were a bubble pumped up with hot money and unreal expectations of capital gains. But the last government did a policy U-turn, persuaded by developers that more greenfield land would mean more new houses and (eventually) lower prices – and that higher profitability would provide infrastructure, services and social housing. As a result, twice or three times as much greenfield land is now in the pipeline.
With nimby constituents, Conservatives and Lib Dems generally opposed these increases. How ironic, then, that the coalition's attack on brownfield development inevitably means more green fields will go under the bulldozer – even as developers are backing out of the planning gains that justified this.
However much (or little) new housing the market will now bear, almost all will henceforth be on greenfield land, with dire consequences for cities, neighbourhoods, social fabric, transport demands, and most people's housing needs.
• This article was amended on 21 June 2010. Owing to an editing change, a line in the original said: "As Prescott recognised, there is a finite stock of brownfield sites". This has been corrected
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