Poor Doors

Well, what did they think would happen when the planning system forced folk who can afford to buy an £800k apartment and folk who can only pay low rents to a Housing Association into the same block?

The owners are buying lifestyle. They want a 24/7 concierge service to take in mail and parcels and keep out crack dealers from the lobby. They want a clean, well maintained, regularly checked play area for their protected children free from dog turds, needles and spray tags. For this they are willing to pay an eye-watering service charge.

What of the social tenants in the same block? The service charge will be equal to the entire disposable income of many. Should they get these things for 'free' (not free of course - the owner occupiers will have to pay)? Should owning an apartment in a shared block, unlike a flat in a conversion or an Edwardian maisonette or a place in a mansion block, come with a legal obligation to pay directly for social tenants?

Developers have come up with 'poor doors' - separate entrances for the social tenants that do not enjoy the 24/7 concierge service or the standards of cleaning, decor and maintenance in the common parts. Play areas are segregated. Unaffordable service charges are thus avoided. Of course the distinction is humiliating and divisive and undesirable - so much so that councils are now motivated to act to end the practice.

But how? Fairly? Practically? Genuine ask.

Localism will help build more houses

There are some facts from which we cannot escape. One is that the UK is short of housing. Not of bedspaces, mind, but dwellings. That this shortage is exacerbated both by migration and by migrants' desires to live in London and the South-East is also not in doubt. Whatever the arguments over the causes, we can agree that our young people should have easier access to their own homes, and that options of both renting and buying should be available. As neither markets nor central government are fulfilling this, we must look to alternatives. 

As I've written many times before, Localism doesn't just mean making the final unpopular rationing decision in dividing a cake whose size has already been determined by central government. Localism means having tax as well as spend powers. Sure, having a tax levied in Manchester that is not charged in Middlesborough leads to what the Daily Mail derides as a 'postcode lottery' in its support for central Statism, but sometimes local solutions can meet local problems. 

You can't go far in Vienna without seeing the familiar red lettering on a building's upper stories that proclaims it as a Council House (gemeindebau). The huge wave of housebuilding in the 1920s has left a legacy of some 600k people, around a third of Vienna's population, still living today in rented city-council housing. And they're not all poor, by any means. Some of those Alfred Loos designed apartment blocks have the same cachet as Dolphin Square. 

Their construction was originally funded by a city-wide Housing Tax and Luxury Tax, and they were allocated on the basis of need, with rents restricted to a proportion of average income. 

With the construction cost of a new house (excluding land, VAT and stamp duty, fees, cost of money etc) at (very roughly) £150k, it will take a lot of cash to build 300,000 new dwellings nationally. But break that figure down between public and private, and then down to locality, and it becomes manageable. Tax and land concessions together with penalty charges for unoccupied homes and delayed development, some suspensions of RTB in some council areas (e.g in all London boroughs), low cost finance through the Public Works Loan Board and a mix of other stick-and-carrot measures that would usefully include limited local taxation can facilitate new housing without additional burdens on the Treasury. 

I've little hope that Hammond, a grey and modest man of no real quality or ability, can display the imagination required, but we'll have to wait until Wednesday to see.  

   

Council housing doesn't work any more

The Parker-Morris standards for Council houses are almost always described as minimum space standards. They are not. They are actually maximum space standards. When the committee was investigating during the 1950s, at the height of what was then called 'slum clearance' in which gorgeous Georgian terraces and the remains of 16th and 17th century urban villages were destroyed along with any houses that had inconveniently survived the Blitz, the government faced a demand problem. If they built houses that were wind and weathertight, with indoor privies, heating and all modern conveniences, good strong roofs and damp courses, better in fact than most privately rented housing stock, how would they curb demand? The answer was to make them small - with every square inch of space calculated; room for the bin, and the pram, for a small 2-person sofa, a table for the wireless, a dining table for two. Making them as small as possible - smaller than the private alternatives - was intended to restrict demand, and in the 1950s, to an extent, it worked. It also allowed economy in construction, housing 25% more people than new private construction for the same cost. 

In 2017, private housebuilding builds to almost exactly the same space standards as the 1961 Parker Morris quota. But with no room for the landrover baby buggy, the fridge freezer, the dish washer or storage for clothes and shoes twenty times the size of the lean post-war wardrobe. The owner of a modern estate home may also rent a self-store space in lieu of a garage and loftspace, or clutter their parents' homes with their overspill of stuff. 

Off-site fabrication, increased quality control that means thinner, leaner structural sections, eliminating wet-trades, de-skilling construction and global procurement* have all combined to deliver new houses at minimum cost and minimum size with barely acceptable economic life; you can expect the roofs to fail economically in twenty years, services to fail economically in fifteen years. However, for those houses built with a slot-in pre-plumbed bathroom wall that just needs connecting to water and bolting in, owners may well need to remove sections of the external brick cladding to replace the plumbing. Yes, we're now building instant slums, with poor soundproofing, shoddy materials and, still, hammer-induced fitting of precise components. 

It's no longer possible to build council houses better than private homes for lesser cost; there is also no longer a 'cheaper' option as private builders have already attained the nadir. There's just new housing, all the same. The only variable is land with planning consent. Unless the government cracks this one, new council housing just won't work any more.

*A consignment of cement-woodwool boards from Thailand on one of my jobs was delayed when HMRC found a few kilos of heroin hidden in the load.

Sajid Javid just a Marxist central statist, says Guardian

Simon Jenkins has penned a corker of a column for today's Guardian - it should be compulsory reading for every town planner, every council officer and every elected politician in Britain. I, of course, commend it to you. Just to give you a flavour;

"Demand is not need. The famous quarter of a million is crude “family formation”. The implication is Leninist, that the state’s duty is a home for every citizen, irrespective of choice, price or district. I could answer that Britain has 700,000 empty houses, and London last year converted thousands of offices into flats. Is that the end of the shortage? Only a bureaucrat in a bubble could talk such nonsense, yet the BBC trots it out as a “crisis” day after day.

By imposing one size fits all building targets on all communities across Britain, Javid is seeking total mastery of the private housing sector. He is completing a last link in Labour’s 1940s nationalisation agenda, bringing to housing the same welfare centralisation, bureaucracy and insensitivity now afflicting the NHS."

He makes the moot point that a changing, dynamic economy such as Britain's needs a high degree of labour mobility - which means that a large rented sector is better for the nation than a workforce of inflexible, static owner-occupiers. By accident rather than design, this what we've got. 

He also identifies that housing isn't a British problem but a London problem, and the answer is to increase density in London. I've been saying this for years. The photo below is of a 1920s council house estate within Zone 3. I'll bet that most are now RTBs and rented out - and that such owners wouldn't turn down the offer of a free additional rental room for every one they own by co-operating in replacing these tiny, cold houses with four storey apartment blocks lining the road frontages.  

If councils can't stomach that, I've also long advocated building on sites such as Blackheath. There's nothing natural or heath-like about this vast space; it has no more ecological merit than a municipal gang-mowed playing field. The tiny corner of original gorse-clad, undulating heathland left intact on Blackheath is used by local dog-walkers, who come to watch the outdoors homosexuals playing in the bushes. 

Jenkins is also right that money needs to be switched to managed hostels for those simply incapable of sustaining themselves in their own rented flats. Anyone who has watched an episode or two of  those TV docs that follow high court bailiffs and sheriffs will know that evictions for non-payment are generally of two sorts; those just taking the piss, who move on from private landlord to private landlord as serial rippers-off, and those who genuinely just have such chaotic lives that they can't be trusted to live independently. The latter are deserving of care, and need to live in managed units being fed if necessary, and given some pocket money for clothes and cosmetics.

Yes, I know that 300k net migrants a year are a huge pressure on housing, but as Jenkins says, such pressure is demand and not need. They will have to live in garden sheds, garages and 6 to a room in their relatives' homes if they cannot afford commercial rents. Eventually things will find an equilibrium.