The preservation of open land has long been a key component of British planning. But the effects on middle-income households, and on suburban residents, are rarely discussed—namely, that restrictions on building are forcing up prices. One good example can be found in Oxford, to the west of London, best known as an ancient university town. The local authorities have tried to keep its traditional character and protect the centrality of its colleges, some of which date back to medieval times. The colleges own much of the land around Oxford, but it cannot be built on because of the greenbelt established around it under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947.
This restraint on development has had a predictable effect: Oxford is Britain’s “least affordable” city, and the average property now sells for more than eleven times local salaries, $507,035 (£340,864), or twice the national average.1 The results have been devastating on many middle- and working-class families. Early in 2015, the city authorities used a light airplane fitted with infrared cameras, and found 2,300 suspicious heat patterns and have so far discovered three hundred people living illegally in garden sheds. People live in sheds because they cannot afford a home.
To the east of London is England’s other major ancient university town, Cambridge. Though historically it had less industry and a smaller population than Oxford, the city fathers decided in the 1980s to attract new technologies in order to grow. Like Oxford, Cambridge has a greenbelt around it, but the local plan, drawn up with advice from the architect Marcial Echenique, cleared the way for expansion at its suburban fringes and in the smaller surrounding towns. Unlike Oxford, it is building new homes in Trumpington and in the North West between Madingley Road and Huntingdon Road on former greenbelt land. To be sure, even Cambridge suffers from the English disease of unaffordability, with houses costing seven times average salaries, but nothing on the scale of Oxford.
These differing attitudes toward suburban growth constitute a major issue in the future of Britain. According to government’s breakdown of where people live, 9 percent are in urban cores, 23 percent are in areas that are suburban/urban, 43 percent in suburbs proper, and 20 percent in what they call suburban/rural, with 5 percent in wholly rural areas.2 Overwhelmingly, then, Britain is a suburban country.
What is more, despite assertions to the contrary by urban pundits, people like living in suburbs. Sociological surveys from the 1940s right up to the present day consistently find that people prefer the idea of living in suburbs, with detached or semi-detached homes. In addition, people who live in the suburbs are generally happier than those who live in inner cities. Research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that “residents in suburbs, both deprived and affluent, were far less dissatisfied than similar groups in urban areas.” Another Joseph Rowntree survey found that “dramatically increased density is not favored as the answer to the perceived housing shortage,” adding, “the clear message is that the majority of people aspire to live in detached or semi-detached homes with gardens.”3
All the more remarkable, then, that the British government’s housing plans since 1947, and even more so over the last twenty years, have been designed to restrict suburban sprawl and to concentrate populations more densely in urban areas. Though Britain is an overwhelmingly suburban country, most of its suburbs, like Willesden or Basildon, were first developed between the wars, before the creation of the greenbelt under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. Indeed, current plans aim to fill in suburban areas, presently at a density of between six and sixteen dwellings per acre (15 to 40 per hectare), up to twenty-six dwellings per acre (65 per hectare) around London, and twelve dwellings per acre (30 per hectare) elsewhere.4 Right now, numerous suburban areas are earmarked for densification.
In 2002 the government’s Urban Task Force under Lord Richard Rogers set out the goal of dissuading greenfield development in the suburbs, in favor of increasing the building of new homes on existing brownfield sites in major cities by 60 percent over the next ten years.5 His task force’s goal was to achieve much higher densities—to “build up, not out”—through smart growth, using the ingenuity of architects to fit more people into less space. The policy has, at least in that sense, been a great success; the housing charity Shelter reports that overcrowding doubled between the censuses of 2001 and 2011.6
Across the country, a shortage of affordable homes has led people to desperate solutions. Many younger people and immigrants, unable to buy or rent a room, have taken places in garden sheds and other converted buildings. In East London, Newham Council had to create a special unit to evict the mostly immigrant tenants illegally renting converted garden sheds. The sheds have been broken up to prevent reoccupation, and immigration officers are on hand to harass the evicted tenants. The number of people aged between twenty and thirty-four living in their parents’ homes has increased from 2.4 million in 2002 to 3.3 million in 2013.7
The unplanned outcome of the preference for building on brownfield sites was that overall construction slumped to a level insufficient to meet housing need or replace the existing housing stock. The falling off of home building can be seen in the number of dwellings since the high point of the late 1960s. (fig. 1.8.1) Between the 2001 and the 2011 censuses, the population of the United Kingdom living in households grew from 57.7 million to 62 million, or 7.5 percent, while the number of households grew from 24.5 million to 26.4 million, or 8 percent. The number of households grows for different reasons. Some of it is due to immigration, though less than most people think. Some of it is natural population growth. Up until 2001, when the trend stopped, some of the growth in the number of households is because of the proclivity for smaller households, with more households containing the same total number.8
We can see that the trend is that new home construction is falling off while the number of households is increasing. Is a growth in the housing stock of two hundred thousand a year enough to meet the additional households? To accept that premise would be to imagine that houses once built stand forever and do not need to be replaced. In the 1960s, when slum clearance was a policy, and more new homes were being built, demolition rates stood at about eighty thousand a year. Today’s demolition rates are much lower, but with the sorry outcome that Britain’s housing stock is now the oldest in Europe: 55 percent of UK homes were built before 1960. Not surprisingly about a tenth of those are decrepit houses and flats, with leaking roofs or rotten windows. The Home Builder’s Federation estimates that, at the current rate of building, each house in Britain would have to stand 1,200 years before it was replaced, or about as long as the Tower of London.9
Britain’s laws on land and land use are distinctive, though in recent years many countries have borrowed smart growth ideas from them. For many long years—since the Norman Conquest of 1066—Britain has managed its population by creating monopolies in land ownership. Today, those in the Campaign to Preserve Rural England (CPRE) demand that green and pleasant land be kept pristine. “Surely you would not let people build houses on the New Forest,” one CPRE spokesman, Shaun Spiers, challenged me.
The New Forest that Spiers referenced was once thickly populated with Anglo-Saxon homes before it was cleared to make way for the Norman lord William Rufus’s deer park. In the fifteenth century, peasants were cleared from the land and made into dependent wage laborers. Right up to the late nineteenth century, the law enforced an aristocratic monopoly over the land, which could be sold only once in each generation. That system broke down because the aristocracy had impoverished themselves and lobbied for the right to sell their land. After the Settled Land Act of 1882 liberalized the sale of estates, land quickly passed into the hands of farmers. After World War I, when food prices were low and the demand for “homes for heroes” was high, people took advantage of the free market to buy up thousands of plots to build their own homes.10
These spontaneous settlements between the wars, called “plot lands,” “ribbon development,” or “sprawl,” provoked howls of protest from the old gentry. Demands were made to re-create the restrictions on landownership, and to re-create feudalism without lords, with the presumable result of keeping the poor in the cities. Indebted country houses could be passed on to the National Trust, but large landed estates could not easily become national property.
The answer was a unique reform that separated rights to own land from the right to develop the land. Under the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, a new restriction was created: development from that point on could only be done with planning permission from the authorities. Ownership no longer entailed a right to develop land for habitation. Under local and regional authority plans, building was restricted to areas between greenbelts that were set at the outskirts of towns and cities to prevent the imagined scourge of ribbon development.
A whole new planning system was created, with a new caste of planning officials to operate it. The pent-up demand for new homes after World War II was reconciled with the hostility of the home counties by creating what were called “new towns” outside major cities to siphon off the pressure. Planning was in keeping with the postwar idea of a welfare society with a planned economy. In the 1960s the planning law was even used by Housing Minister Richard Crossmann to accelerate building plans and meet the additional housing need.
Later, in the 1970s, antidevelopment forces had a much greater impact on the planning system than those who were in favor of growth. The movement started with protests against the Covent Garden development in London and against the widening of the A1, the major thoroughfare the goes from London into Scotland. These well-meaning conservationists had an inordinate impact, and the authorities introduced clauses into the planning regulations that gave local communities rights to object to new developments. “Not in my back yard” attitudes were empowered, but the future generations had no say. The planning system was like a car with brakes, but no accelerator. Always dreaming about its bucolic past, Britain by the 1980s was fiercely conservative. Not only did it have a Conservative government that was beholden to the county shires that dreaded urban sprawl, it also had a growing green movement committed to protecting the countryside. All of the firepower was on the side against development, with the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the National Trust, Heritage England, the Tory shires, the anti-road protestors and the Green Party. To top it off, the new Labour government in 1998 appointed the Urban Task Force under the architect Sir Richard Rogers. Rogers, along with his adviser Anne Powers, was committed to the inner-city renaissance, meaning higher urban densities. In particular, he warned against the “extreme forms of social isolation of many American suburbs,” and the danger of “segregation.”11 In London, Sir Richard had the ear of the radical mayor Ken Livingstone, who was opposed to any sprawl that would dilute the city’s tax base.
One of the strongest arguments against new building has been the fear that Britain’s countryside would be put under too much pressure, the Urban Task Force arguing that “large tracts of our countryside have been eroded.”12 But this is largely built on a misunderstanding. When surveyed as to their opinion of what percentage of the country is built up, Britons settled on an average of 40 percent developed, 60 percent countryside. The true figure is less than 10 percent developed and fully 90 percent countryside.13 The reasons for the misunderstanding are twofold. First, people do not spend much time in the countryside, so experientially the cities loom much larger. Second, the countryside has a symbolic meaning for people as a respite from the kind of pressures that they feel in the city, which they project by imagining the countryside being eaten away. Environmental and conservation movements of course have drawn on that romantic attachment to rural England. In itself that is no bad thing, but it does lead to a thoroughly exaggerated belief in the danger to the countryside from new developments. Put simply, if one were to increase developed Britain by fully one-tenth, it would reduce undeveloped Britain by one-ninetieth.
The conservationist lobby has responded to every proposal for development with a warning that the greenbelts in Britain were being encroached on. But the greenbelts that the planning authorities sketched around their urban centers just kept growing, more than doubling in size since 1993, until today they cover 13 percent of England, or 6,327 square miles (16,386 square kilometers). But the green-belt is just one of the legislative limitations on development. The thirteen national parks of England and Wales together cover one-tenth of the land. All other significant categories of managed land (e.g., Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Ramsar Wetland Sites, Heritage Coast, or Sites of Special Scientific Interest) restrict development in nine-tenths of England.14 (figs. 1.8.2–3)
The effect of all these regulations is to strangle development in Britain. The greenbelt has turned out to be a noose around our necks. The impact of the planning system is easy to sum up: In the United Kingdom as a whole, the value of a plot of land with planning permission is about a hundred times greater than one without it. All of that additional value is an artificial creation of the planning regime, forcing up the cost of houses, and restricting new developments.
An average house in the United Kingdom was changing hands at $288,130 (£189,002) at the end of 2014, and in London for $620,053 (£406,730). Property prices in London rose by 17 percent over 2014.15 House prices have been rising precipitately since the turn of this century. They fell back in 2008 with the credit crunch, only to climb right up again.16
In Britain in 1983 the average price of a house was three and a half times the average earnings; in 2007 it peaked at a ratio of 5.82 to earnings, before falling back sharply in the mortgage crisis; it then climbed again to just over five times average earnings today.17 In some places, such as Oxford and much of London, the figures are still higher. Not surprisingly, the call today is for “affordable housing.”
Some commentators thought that the overheated housing market showed that Britons are hung up on homeownership. “There’s a lot to be said for renting,” said the British writer and commentator Owen Hatherley. But the rents are up, too, averaging $1148 (£753) a month UK-wide, and $1880 (£1233) in London. Broadly speaking, rents rise in line with prices, so renting offered no escape from the housing problem.18 In fact, rising house prices have reversed Britain’s long-term preference for homeownership. Home-ownership had been rising since 1918, while renting as a share of tenures had been falling, right up until 2001 when ownership reached 69 percent. Today ownership is down to 64 percent, with young people finding it impossible to get their first foothold on the ladder. They have been called “generation rent.”19
Britons have $8.69 trillion (£5.7 trillion) tied up in their houses, a substantial proportion of the country’s estimated $11.13 trillion (£7.3 trillion) of all wealth; 11.1 million have borrowed $1.97 trillion (£1.292 trillion) to buy their homes, and each year feed their debts with $62.5 (£41 billion) in interest payments.20
With the remarkable rise in house prices, any normal market would respond to those price signals by increasing output, but with homebuilding, the opposite has happened. As prices have increased, sales have stagnated and even fallen. Increased demand has not increased supply. The cost of building a house in Britain is $137, 200 (£90,000).21 But homes sell for twice as much—more than four times as much on average in London. The markup is so great because the restrictions on new building under the Town and Country Planning Act limit supply, forcing prices up.
Britain’s onerous planning regime is a system out of control. Nobody who set out to create a plan in 1947 would have planned a system that would push house prices up to five times national income today.
The impact of the house price ramp on social inequality is profound. More and more city centers are becoming gentrified. “Inner city” used to be a euphemism for social problems, when, in the early 1980s, city centers had largely been abandoned by the upwardly mobile. The rise in house prices came at the same time that many better-off people had second thoughts about living in the countryside, and helped to launch what Lord Rogers called an “Urban Renaissance.” Over the last twenty years, areas whose names evoked poverty, like Hoxton, Notting Hill, Brixton, Hackney, and Camden, have become gentrified, or at least their prices have climbed, so that today they stand for wealth. Those with modest or just average incomes are finding it impossible to buy in city centers and move instead to the suburbs and outer suburbs. Others who need to be in town to be close to work suffer overcrowding and rent poverty.
Long-term, the unrealistic price levels have an impact, too. With house prices so high, inherited wealth plays a much greater role in social positioning. Social mobility in Britain had already slowed in the 1980s. The education system today is much more geared to passing on credentials to those who can afford to go to college, than it is to training or to disinterested reflection. Now that home ownership is coming to be beyond the reach of working-class people, while the better off can help their children onto the property ladder, life chances are being set at birth for many.
There have been many “quick fix” solutions to the housing problem, but it will take some time to build the homes that people need. There is one solution, proposed by the architect and commentator Ian Abley of the 250 New Towns Club, which would help not just immediately but in the medium and the long term as well.
Abley proposes that we abolish the division between the rights of land ownership and rights of development by repealing the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Without the artificial legislative constraint, the price of a home could come down to an affordable $137,200 (£90,000). Land in Britain is not overly expensive, and the possibility of self-build solutions on the part of individuals and housing cooperatives would open up. The impact of repealing the Town and Country Planning Act would be to favor greenfield development. In particular, the opening of land that was formerly without planning permission, outside developed areas, to development would reduce land costs—by a hundred times in principle (though market rates would of course alter with demand).
This is far from unrealistic. Between 1919 and 1939, much of Britain was developed without any need of an overarching planning law. The specter of sprawl was just a bogey that disguised a snobbish loathing for the working class.
The sociologist Paul Barker notes that the Housing Corporation Commission demands more planning to deal with the problem of a housing shortage, but says, “the long-lived, plan-less model of suburbia was a much better bet…Could a preference for non-plan be any worse that the failures of almighty plan? It hardly seems so.”22
Britain’s madly overgrown officialdom has led not to a greater rationalization of housing but to an irrational chaos that leaves people at the mercy of slum landlords in overcrowded buildings, or rent poor. Was the 1947 Act intended to impoverish our children and exacerbate social inequality? If so, it is working. The best plan is to leave people to make their own decisions about how they will address the need for new homes in the twenty-first century. That would open the way for a much more expansive and attractive suburban growth.
2 Jane Todorovic, Living in Urban England: Attitudes and Aspirations (London: Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2000).
3 A survey in 1943 by the Society of Women Housing Managers, and another by Mass Observation, found that people overwhelmingly wanted to live in suburbs, reported in Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 69–72. In 1960 and 1961 there were two social surveys on suburbanization that also found marked satisfaction with suburban life, written up as J. Barry Cullingworth, “Social Implications of Overspill: The Worsley Social Survey,” Sociological Review 8, no. 1 (July 1960): 77–89; J. Barry Cullingworth, “Swindon Social Survey: A Second Report on the Social Implications of Overspill,” Sociological Review 9, no. 2 (July 1961): 151–66. A 1998 Joseph Rowntree Foundation survey was published as Roger Burrows and David Rhodes, Patterns of Neighbourhood Dissatisfaction in England (London: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1998), which again found greater satisfaction among suburban dwellers than urban. In 2005 the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment published its survey What Home Buyers Want: Attitudes and Decision Making among Consumers (London: CABE, 2005), which again found that people preferred the idea of suburban to urban homes. Mark Clapson gathered surveys of people’s living aspirations, in Suburban Century (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 55–57, and see footnotes; Ben Kochan, in research for the Town and Country Planning Association and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, collected more resent research on people’s living aspirations and satisfaction, published in Achieving a Suburban Renaissance: The Policy Challenge (London: TCPA, July 2007).
4 Kochan, Achieving a Suburban Renaissance, 4, 23.
5 Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance (London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 173.
6 Randeep Ramesh, “Quarter of Households in Parts of UK Overcrowded, says Shelter,” Guardian, December 23, 2012, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/dec/23/households-uk-overcrowded-shelter.
7 Emily Knipe, “Young Adults Living with Parents,” Office for National Statistics, 2013, accessed May 6, 2015, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/family-demography/young-adults-living-with-parents/2013/sty-young-adults.html.
8 “Households and Household Composition in England and Wales, 2001–11,” Office for National Statistics, May 29, 2014, accessed May 6, 2015, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_361923.pdf. Household size decreased from 3.1 per household to 2.4 per household between 1961 and 2001, or around two people fewer for every three households, making a total of around 17 million additional persons needing housing; net migration to the UK between 1961 and 2011 was 2,149,000. Ian Macrory, “Measuring National Well-Being—Households and Families,” Office for National Statistics, April 26, 2012, 4; Jen Beaumont, Population (London: Office for National Statistics, 2011), 6.
9 John Stewart, “Building a Crisis; Housing Under-Supply in England,” Home Builders Federation, June 2002, accessed May 6, 2015, http://www.hbf.co.uk/policy-activities/news/view/building-a-crisis-housing-under-supply-in-england-by-john-stewart-june-2002/; Oliver Rapf, Europe’s Buildings under the Microscope (Brussels: Buildings Performance Institute Europe, 2011), 35; James Heartfield, Let’s Build! (London: Audacity, 2006), 17.
10 Settled Land Act in Dominic Hobson, The National Wealth (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 78–79; land buying in W. Robertson Scott, England’s Green and Pleasant Land (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947), 38; plotlands in Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (London: Mansell, 1984).
11 Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance, 50; Peter Hetherington, “Rogers Laments Failing Vision,” Guardian, January 6, 2002, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/jan/26/regeneration.urbanregeneration.
12 Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance, 26.
13 Kate Barker, Barker Review of Land Use Planning (London: HMSO, 2006), 44; and see Mark Urban, “The Great Myth of Urban Britain,” BBC, June 28, 2012, accessed May 6, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096, for a breakdown of the land use statistics.
14 “Where to Build?,” Audacity, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.audacity.org/downloads/audacity-Where-to-build-01.pdf.
15 Patrick Collinson, “UK House Price Growth Slows in Last Three Months as Property Market Cools,” Guardian, December 30, 2014, accessed November 13, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/dec/30/uk-house-price-growth-slows-last-three-months-property-market-cools.
16 Halifax House Price Index, “Historical House Price Data,” July 2015, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/economic-insight/halifax-house-price-index/.
17 Ibid.
18 Owen Hatherley, “Is Home Ownership Really So Desirable?,” Guardian, May 31, 2011, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/31/home-ownership-debt-renting; Amy Loddington, “Rent Rises Creep above Inflation for First Time in over a Year,” financial-report, August 15, 2014, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.financialreporter.co.uk/specialist-lending/rents-rises-creep-above-inflation-for-first-time-in-over-a-year.html; London Councils, “London Key Facts,” accessed May 6, 2015, http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/londonfacts/default.tm?category=10.
19 Lisa Batchelor, “UK House Prices Rose Almost Eight Per Cent, in 2014,” Guardian, January 8, 2014, accessed November 13, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jan/08/uk-house-prices-rose-almost-8-percent-2014.
20 “UK Homes Now Worth a Total of over £5.7 Trillion, Up 10 percent Year on Year,” Savills, January 12, 2015, accessed May 6, 2015, http://www.savills.co.uk/_news/article/72418/185344-0/01/2015/uk-homes-now-worth-a-total-of-over-%C2%A35.7-trillion—up-10—year-on-year; The Money Charity, “Money Statistics,” January 2015, accessed May 6, 2015, http://themoneycharity.org.uk/money-statistics/january-2015/.
21 James Heartfield, “Give Us the Freedom to Build Our Own Homes,” Spiked, March 30, 2015, accessed November 14, 2015, http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/give-us-the-freedom-to-build-our-own-homes/16828#.Vdezx_lViko.
22 Paul Barker, Freedoms of the Suburbs (London: Francis Lincoln, 2009), 210.
