Straw Houses - will Angela succeed where so many have failed before her?

by Stoker

Modern housing has finally caught up with the Three Little Pigs; by the wonders of modern technology you can have your new mass-produced house built out of brick,  or wood (a softwood timber frame with plasterboard inner walls and a thin brick skin), or even of straw (agricultural straw bales, plastered internally and with a timber or rendered blockwork exterior.)  To be fair, straw houses are not yet really mass-built by the mass house builders, but are more the realm of self-builders, especially those who wish to feature on Kevin McLeod’s excellent and long-running T.V. house-building programme Grand Designs*.

Now, as readers may have noticed, we have a new Labour government in the UK. One of its leading pre-election promises was that it would solve the UK’s long running so-called “housing crisis”.  So-called because the problem is really that there are too few houses in the areas where people wish to live – Chelsea, Bath, the Surrey Hills - but more than sufficient where many persons do not wish to live – Livingstone. Gateshead, Salford; to give but a few examples of each.   

But no matter; the people want cheap housing, brick, wood, or straw, and politicians who want re-election must do their best to meet the demand.  So Sir Keir Starmer’s feisty deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, has been given the task and has, possibly rashly, promised to build 1.5 million houses in the next five years – i.e. before the likely date of the next election.

One rather imagines Ms Rayner announcing this in the House of Commons, feeling a warm glow and burst of pride as her fellow Labour member’s cheers rang out, and then sitting down with a bump and thinking “oh s**t!”.  For this rate of building is consistently promised by each incoming administration of both parties and it is just as consistently missed.  The last Conservative government had at least the sense to quietly shuffle away and replace each council’s remit on housing from “requirements” to “targets”.  Targets of course they almost invariably missed, sometimes in spectacular fashion.  Ms Rayner though is  showing signs of reimposing requirements of her own devising, particularly in Conservative-held local authorities; a case, it is to be feared, of Angela finding some scapegoats for failure good and early.  Some councils (nearly all Labour) have had their figures reduced.  The most surprising, given it is where housing demand is strongest and by far the largest urban conglomeration in the UK, is London.  There, the annual figure drops from 99,000 homes to 80,000, though as only around 21,000 were built in 2022, it is far from certain that the mayor of London will get anywhere near the new Rayner requirement.

The difficulty with all this is that the building of new homes is almost entirely outside the minister’s control.  There is no ministry which builds houses.  Local authorities themselves might build a few, a very few.  Housing Associations, in past times major builders of lower market housing, or social housing as we must now call it (or “affordable housing” though that bizarrely implies all other housing is unaffordable) are mostly struggling to build many new units, not least because of a heavy burden of maintenance and repair underfunded by rents.  Which leaves the private sector.  Private house builders would love to provide any number of residential units, but find that, whilst Ms Rayner is pressing the accelerator hard to the floor, there is a whole range of politicians, quangos, civil servants, and special interest groups who are pressing the brakes equally hard. 

This has been the theme of the last thirty years; it has become more and more difficult to actually persuade all the various nay-sayers to allow houses to be built.  The forum for all this is that process known as ‘planning consent’ and those of our readers who have ever tried to get consent to build even a modest extension or garden office will know that this is one of the slowest, most expensive, appallingly maddening processes a houseowner can go through.  (Mrs Stoker, whose builder has taken a year so far to refurbish her bathroom, begs to differ, but that is exceptionalism.)

Ms Rayner has taken on board some of the limitations caused by the planning process and has ordained that the ‘green belt’, the protective zone of non-developable land around most cities and larger towns, is to be reviewed and those parts of it of no particular merit (which seems to mean not pretty and/or without trees) will be reclassified as ‘grey belt’ and then be opened up to planning applications for residential development.  This is of course going down very badly – even though only announced two weeks ago – with those who value the green belt, either as protection of views, protection against noise and pollution and overcrowding, as areas of local beauty, or just for dog-walking.  One senses a gathering storm which will end inevitably in the courts; the whole point of the green belt was to prevent the very process which Angela is now trying to kick start.

But that is just one facet of the juggernaut blocking the development road.  Most communities think there should be more houses so that the young can buy their own homes; most communities equally think that anywhere near them is not the appropriate place for such building, and this increasingly leisured nation has lots of time for fighting the developers off.  The minister may ordain, the local council may have requirements to meet, but angry and well-informed locals can put up a huge fight, armed often with weapons made available by government.  Many and various surveys must be carried out before the local council will even accept a planning proposal.  How will the sewage from new homes be dealt with? Where will children of such households be educated? Is the road system adequate for the traffic? Will local flora and fauna be irremediably damaged, especially, of course, the local bats?  (Now add hedgehogs to the list).  Will water run-off be affected, or the mineral mix of local water courses, or sites of historical interest?  And the increasing authority given to the judiciary means that neither the local council nor the men, sorry, persons, at the ministry can just apply the “APPROVED” stamp to the application.  Recalcitrant objectors can now go off to courts and higher courts and Supreme Courts to argue that proper process has not been followed.  Dear Angela can stamp and shout but there is a good chance it will take at least five years to get even half her houses through the planning process, let alone built.

Your correspondent lives, as regular readers may know, in East Anglia.  In the beautiful regional capital, Norwich, Anglia Square, a huge brutalist architectural development of the 1960’s proved to be unwanted and so badly built that by the early C20th it was abandoned by most of its tenants. In 2008 a scheme was put before the public to demolish it and build a new mixed-use development.  The new scheme was vigorously opposed and in 2014 it was withdrawn and the property  sold to developers for demolition for a major housing scheme.  After extensive consultations and opposition a scheme was put to Norwich City Council, who approved it in the face of local fury. It was promptly “called in” (remitted to the relevant minister for a decision overriding the council).  The minister told the council and the developers to try again; they did. The council approved, with many strict conditions, a revised proposal. The developers gave up and are trying to sell the site. 

The point of this story is that this in many ways is the perfect redevelopment opportunity - a large city-centre scheme, abandoned and derelict, with a reviled building on the site, to yield a substantial addition of housing to a city which needs it.  But in sixteen years it has made no progress whatsoever.  How many homes is Ms Rayner going to procure in the next five years if this is one of the best cases for redevelopment in the country? 

*available on Channel 4 in the UK.