The housing question isn't just how many, but where
I usually like Policy Exchange’s work but its new paper on solving the housing crisis is a little disappointing. Its main argument is that “Over one million new homes could be built over the next decade if each of the 353 councils in England built just one garden village of 3,000 new houses”. The arithmetic checks out, but that still wouldn’t do much to solve the housing crisis. The problem with England’s housing market is not simply that not enough houses are being built. It’s that they’re being built in the wrong places. According to Paul Cheshire, twice as many homes were built in Doncaster and Barnsley (where there isn’t much demand for housing) as in Oxford and Cambridge (where there is) in the five years to 2013. In 2002/03, it was three times as many!
This is why national house construction numbers can often be misleading. The crisis of unaffordable houses is mostly centred on places like London, Oxford, Cambridge and the rest of the South East. People want to live where the jobs are. (As it happens, an older Policy Exchange paper recognised this, suggesting policies designed to make it easier for people to move from North to South.)
Spreading housing development around the country will hence end up doing much less than we might hope. If your problem is a housing shortage in London, building more in Hull won't help much.
A second problem is that building entirely new villages is expensive, because of the new infrastructure that needs to be built. The report suggests paying for this with levies on the new builds, which just reduces the downward pressure on prices these houses would have. Building all that extra infrastructure is needless when there is already so much empty land around existing train stations to be built on in the South East (enough for one million homes!), where there really is demand for new housing.
I also wonder how much people want to live in villages which really would be very small. At the UK average household size of 2.4, we’re talking about villages of 7,200 people, far enough from existing towns that those residents won’t object to them. As someone who grew up outside an Irish town with a population of 6,666 (seriously), take it from me – these places can be a little dull.
There are 138 authorities in London and the home counties. Building new homes there – even if they had to be in new villages – would be better than nothing, although I don’t know how you’d go about building new villages in central London. Building new homes in places like Scunthorpe and rural Cornwall would be a lot less good, and policies that do not recognise that will distract us from what we really need to do.
Maybe there’s no such thing as a bad policy that results in more housing, but is it too much to ask that they also be houses that people want to live in, in places they want to live?