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Housing Need?

Over my lunchtime scan of the planning portal news (a tasty cheese ploughman’s sandwich if you are interested), I was taken by the reported scrap between the HBF and CPRE. It’s been hard not to miss it in the national press as well, with radio and TV coverage this week, and now the Daily Telegraph rallying the outraged of middle England to take up their pens and object to the NPPF. In amongst the detail of argument about whether the system needs more flexibility to allow house building to rise from its historically low levels, or whether this is all a problem of land banking with developers sitting on 280,000 units worth of unimplemented consents, I was surprised by the absence of coverage about the people for whom this is such an important debate, and why the provision of housing is so important.

I had a meeting with a Regional Director of one of the national house builders yesterday, and we both alighted on the fact that the voice that is lost in arguments about ‘green fields disappearing under concrete’, corporate greed and shareholder profit for the fat cats, or economic stimulation and the importance of construction to the economy – is the voice of the people who might occupy the housing that’s built. If anyone needs reminding about why we need housing, and who it is for, a quick click on Shelter's web site has a sobering effect. Figures (largely from 2008/2209), identify 1.6m children living in overcrowded, temporary or run done housing, 80,000 homeless households, 1.8million households on local authority waiting lists, 500,000 households living in overcrowded housing. Shelters number one priority to address this issue is ‘build more homes’. By all means make sure there are environmental safeguards, and that we build the right type of homes in the right places, but without new homes being built, our so called developed economy will continue to harbour huge swathes of disaffected households, living at best in third rate accommodation, temporary accommodation, or worse still being homeless.

Keith Fenwick - Director, Birmingham

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