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Magazine Issue 10 - Spring 2000
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| Heaven, hell and housebuilding Developers have been whinging about the planning system for years. This seems ironic since it is ordinary people who are really excluded from the supposedly democratic process. The trend is for developers, not the community, have the final word – especially when it comes to house-building. Xanthe Bevis reports. Since the 1930s mass housebuilders in Britain have made money by speculating – putting up off-the-shelf boxes to be marketed to a public becoming increasingly obsessed with property ownership. In the process the construction industry has become a powerful player in Britain's economy. But it is now in a state of over-capacity, with increasingly tight profit margins - companies often have to rely on land deals and payment abuse to contractors to ensure a healthy cash flow. In order to cushion themselves from the cyclical nature of the housebuilding market, companies amass large land banks - the most valuable of which already have planning permission for new building schemes. For the large housebuilder, planning permission is the key, as it can transform a tired field abused by the Common Agricultural Policy into a pot of gold overnight. Anything that stops this process is clearly seen as "unreasonable obstructions at a local level" – words from the 1998 Bryant Group Annual Report. In their 1998 Annual Report, former House Builders’ Federation President and Bryant Group Chief Executive Andrew Mackenzie said: "With the better market conditions we have seen increasing competition for land, the supply of which has been severely constrained by the inadequacies of the planning system" [1]. The fact that we live on a planet of finite size with 6 billion other people also needing land for food and shelter seems to have escaped him. The House Builders’ Federation While they can individually bend the ears of politicians on the subject of how local peoples’ concerns are stopping their profitability (pretending that building luxury commuter houses is the only way to house the homeless), private sector housebuilders in England and Wales also have lobby groups to do this for them. More than eighty trade and professional organisations are linked with housebuilding, and the construction industry sector as a whole has more trade and professional organisations to lobby on its behalf than any other British industry. The main lobby group for private sector housebuilders is the House Builders Federation (HBF), part of a wider lobbying group called the Construction Confederation. With eight regional offices across England and Wales as well as a London headquarters (Construction House, 56-64 Leonard Street), HBF uses its teams of professionals, publications and public relations skills "to ensure as favourable an economic, political and planning climate in the UK in which private housebuilders can operate". HBF has the resources to ensure that it can appear at numerous local authority plan inquiries arguing in favour of various measures to make business easier for developers. In ‘Simply the Best - that's why you should join the HBF’, the HBF boasts that: "Our planning team is simply the most formidable force in planning today in the housebuilding field and it is fully accepted by the Department of the Environment, local authorities and other bodies such as the Confederation of British Industry". As if cementing the relationship between private housebuilders and land development, in 1999, HBF appointed a new Chief Executive, Dr Stuart Hill, previously the Chief Executive of HM Land Registry. As far back as 1980, the HBF was pledging to "secure amendments to the planning system that will redress the balance of power between local authorities and applicants and which will reduce delays and detailed interference in planning matters." A classic HBF quote appeared in ‘Building’ magazine, January 1999: "We would be delighted if the planning process were speeded up but we would need to see concrete details." The lie of the land A particularly worrying aspect of HBF's work with local authorities is the undertaking of ‘Joint Housing Land Availability Studies’ before local development plans are drawn up. In 1981, the HBF Annual Report outlined how, together with the Royal Town Planning Institute, it had decided to establish a Joint Land Requirements Committee in conjunction with the Housing Research Foundation to "provide a framework against which county and local plans could be drawn". Around twenty Joint Land Availability Studies were undertaken in the following years. In 1995, HBF North West Region worked with Lancashire County Planning Officer Graeme Bell and District Councils in the area to draw up a study of land that could be used for housing. The reaction of Pendle Borough Council to the study is interesting: "This Council ... concludes that the County Council can no longer be expected to provide an independent service in respect of land for housing". In producing the study, major housebuilders such as Bryant Homes, Maunders Homes and Hassall Homes ‘helped assess’ sites of over 0.4 hectares that could be used for housing. Obviously such studies are likely to influence land allocations in local authority plans as well as giving housebuilders advance notice of possible sites for development. Predict and provide While identifying sites for future development, HBF also needed to ensure a demand for the houses. In 1992 they set up the New Homes Marketing Board - but their activity to create a market for their members' products may have started long before. In 1995 a government report [2] showed that between 1991 and 2016 there would be a 23% increase in households, meaning that 4.4 million new households would form. Housing projections - part of a now unpopular ‘predict and provide’ approach to allocating land for housing - are a theoretical assessment of demand and have been virtually discredited. However, the projected number of houses needed still forms a critical part of the framework for planning decisions. The extent to which house-building interests may have had an impact on the original figures is not certain but some interesting connections have come to light. Until recently, the HBF had fourteen representatives on the National House-Building Council (NHBC); in 1996, HBF Director Donald Moody was an NHBC Pension Ltd Trustee and HBF publications have boasted that "HBF is a major voice on NHBC." NHBC, as an inspection body for building standards, has since tried to distance itself from the housebuilders’ lobby group. A creation of the NHBC, the Housing Research Foundation, appears to represent all officially recognised bodies concerned with new housing: The Building Societies Association, Consumers Association RICS, RIBA, local authority associations – and, indeed, the House Builders Federation. Propping up the ivory tower At some point it seems the Housing Research Foundation formed a subgroup called the Population and Housing Research Group (PHRG), based in Chelmsford at Anglia Polytechnic University. In the mid-eighties the PHRG sent questionnaires to all county planning departments in England ostensibly as part of a project into forecasting housing requirements. When some county councils, such as Berkshire and West Sussex, did not respond, it was suggested that this was because of a suspicion of PHRG due to its links with industry bodies. One member of the Chelmsford-based group, Prof. David G. King, has been involved with a number of publications on household projections, most of which appeared in the 1980s. Perhaps his most significant work was the development of the Chelmer Population and Housing Model. This demographic regional housing model was developed in the mid-eighties as part of a research project supported by the Housing Research Foundation. "Conceived as the establishment of an academically independent local demography/housing forecasting unit", this statistical method was welcomed by planning consultancies and the HBF. In February 1986, Prof. King proposed major extensions of the population and housing model to include market demand forecasting. He published a call for private sector funding to enable his model to be extended and approached the government to develop a project to devise a similar approach for "rural profiles". Obviously, other academic groups have worked on projection models too, but it has been hard to ascertain on which research the later government figures calling for an increase in the amount of land allocated for housing development were based. For such projections to be truly credible, academics who have devised models to produce such figures should be genuinely independent and not be connected with the very industries that will stand to benefit from high projections of need for new build. In the meantime, the true housing crisis is ignored - the fact that most of these houses will be out of the reach of ordinary people in housing need and are more likely to line the pockets of speculators. With the decline of the private rented sector, which used to cater for workforce mobility, new houses meet the needs of large companies wanting to relocate and move their workforces around with them. Publicly provided social housing faces the double squeeze of under-funding and the threat of being sold off to the private sector. But that's another story - and not one that the developers want to go into. They’re too busy tying us up with their own agenda of massive new developments and saying that the planning process inhibits their business. However, while developers can intimidate local authorities with threats to appeal against decisions not in their favour, the public has no third party ‘right of appeal’ to intervene. And they’ve usually done plenty of spadework to create the right climate for things to go their way. It seems that to object to the destructive proposals of large commercial organisations, communities need either to organise access to expertise and cash or need the determination to take matters into their own hands and physically stop the development. References: [1] Bryant Group Annual Report 1998 [2] Projections of households in England to 2016. London: HMSO Other sources include: "Building"; "Contract Journal" ; Hansard ; HBF website; NHBC website; works by Dave King, 1950 - ; "Housebuilder, HBF newsletter and other publications. This info is taken from a report available from: URGENT Box HN, 16b Cherwell Street, Oxford OX4 1BG 01865 794800 info@urgent.org.uk |