Commentary
Take housing out of Whitehall’s hands into Mayors’
Having worked locally, regionally and nationally – and across housing, economic development, health, and public service reform – it’s frustrating to see how we fail as a country to deliver the places (and homes) people need, writes Mike Palin.
Part of the reason is because we have placed housing, alongside so many other policy themes, within a silo with the false belief that by ‘pulling a (narrow and often singular) policy lever’, our ‘housing challenge’ can be fixed. This has driven the tendency to not see housing as part of a wider system and has led to the layering of initiatives over time without ever stepping back to ask what, more fundamentally, needs to be done differently.
So, if we’re thinking of how we might re-wire the state – we might as well think about how we re-wire how we see housing too.
Firstly, we need to see housing as a societal asset that, if enabled, has wider public benefit. Huge improvement in public health came at the turn of the 20th Century from building homes with sanitation, the suburban extensions of our cities in the 1930s helped dig our economy out of the Great Depression, while we cannot continue carrying the modern-day taxpayer costs of homelessness and temporary accommodation without a new housing approach. Hence, the future must stop seeing housing as ‘units’ but instead see better homes as being about shaping places and the system-wide role it plays. By fixing housing, we can grow the economy and deliver a better quality of life.
Secondly, we need to recognise that although a societal asset, it is also an investment asset – we have to be much more honest about the fact that housing will only be delivered if we value its benefits over a long-term horizon and with co-investment by private capital. Too often policy conversations think housing is ‘bought’ as an output of public funds or that it is an industry onto which public cost can be shunted – it doesn’t recognise the fundamentals of ‘viability’ or of the co-dependency between capital and a long-term approach. The result is we’ve made it progressively harder and harder for private investment to flow and for public and private partnerships to work for the long-term. Hence, we now need to find new ways of incentivising more private investment, not undermine it, and steward that investment in the right way as part of a partnership from which everyone gets a return.
Third – we urgently need some policy consistency over a long-term time horizon. There has been a consistent failure to have a strategy (or even a minister!) that lasts more than a couple of years never mind a few decades and hence the constant churn of policy and new initiatives has undermined the certainty and clarity needed to get things done. Because housing is so important to the public consciousness policymakers are obsessive about ‘doing’ something new – what we actually need is consistency, fewer initiatives, and a strategy with an outlook of at least 20 years.
Fourth – we do not need Whitehall running the show – it has failed repeatedly to give the advice to, or implement the intent of, the political ambition of more homes. It has a self-interest in constantly churning and changing the delivery system and little regard for thinking about how housing plays a role ‘in place’ to make living standards better. Instead, we have had a long-standing orthodoxy of setting targets and seeing new housing through a narrow lens of being a taxpayer cost that HM Treasury wants to avoid instead of an investment from which society gets a return. Given we have entered the era of devolution, then maybe it is better to let Mayors and local areas decide what’s needed and how it should happen? At least this creates a democratic mandate and real-world incentive to deliver better, think as a system, and make it relevant to people and place.
Mike Palin is a former local authority chief executive and former executive director of Homes England.
This is the second in a commentary series produced in partnership by Place Media Group and CivicScape debating the housing model in this country.
