The IfG’s report by Sophie Metcalfe provides some much-needed historical analysis, but her final recommendations miss out some of the issues that ministers will need to address if we are to avoid the problems Cambridge has seen at places like Northstowe and Clay Farm
To summarise Ms Metcalfe’s recommendations, they are:
- Ensure housebuilding remains a consistent political priority led from the
highest offices of government - Define what success looks like
- Reconcile housebuilding ambitions with other policy objectives
- Prioritise national housing targets over local objections
- Plan for new housing where it is most needed, and consider how it will align with the government’s other growth and infrastructure plans
- Align new developments with local growth and infrastructure plans
- Ensure local areas share in the benefits of new housing
- Equip the planning system to deliver effectively
- Support industry to develop the skills pipeline it needs to deliver
- Regularly review whether the market is delivering desired outcomes, and adjust if necessary
Browsing through that list reflect how complex housing policy is – because there are so many different variables and factors that affect the success or otherwise of the Government’s policy objectives. The headline of those is building 1.5million new homes in the next five years. As Ms Metcalfe says, ministers face the task of meeting that target – one which will require a rate of completing new homes not seen since the 1960s.
Above – Metcalfe/IfG (2024) p20
You can see from the graph above that the high levels of house building required a huge component of council house building. One of the policy options not included in Ms Metcalfe’s analysis is the direct grant funding of councils to build new homes (or providing councils with significantly wider local taxation powers to raise the revenues to pay for new homes) that might help create that extra industry capacity. At the same time, the structures of our economy, construction industry, and regional labour markets are very different today compared with the 1960s or in the decades before, when housing and transport schemes were used as a means of providing jobs for unemployed men – such as the construction of the Fen Causeway in Cambridge, which will be 100 years old in two years time.
Housing policy is fiendishly complex – not least because it influences and is influenced by so many other policy areas, such as health
Housing and health policy used go arm-in-arm. It seems obvious now, but one of the big differences local government made to the health of their residents was in the improvement of housing stock, something that Parliament legislated for piecemeal throughout the 1800s. Cambridge Borough Council’s public health reports (many of which have been digitised by the Wellcome Library for which I’ve linked to lots of them here)
Above – Cambridge City Council’s Public Health Report 1960 p65 – new houses built by the local authority and private enterprise. Via the Wellcome Library here
Note the impact of the Holford Wright Report / Cambridge Development Plan 1950 which aimed to restrict Cambridge’s population to a maximum of 100,000 until the Millennium, as well as restricting what types of industry could establish themselves there. Consider also the impact of slum clearances which nominally reduced the total number of homes in an area, even though councils had considered such properties to be unfit for human habitation.
Preventative healthcare and housing policy
Now consider the NHS Prevention Programme, which was incorporated into the seemingly forgotten Longterm NHS Plan (which understandably hasn’t had any updates since just before the first lockdown of 2020). Two years prior to that, the NHS published its own Healthy New Towns Programme which you can read about here. You can also read about their pilots here. Looking at the NHS Long Term Plan Implementation Framework of 2019, we can see good ambition frustrated by fragmented local public service structures on the ground.
“System plans should set out how they will support local identification of respiratory disease and increase associated referrals to pulmonary rehabilitation services for those who will benefit, particularly for the most socio-economically disadvantaged people who are disproportionately represented in this patient cohort.”
Above – NHS LTIP 2019, p20 – Respiratory Diseases
When you look at the mess that is Cambridge’s local governance structure (which the city council is consulting on), there is absolutely no chance those local links are being made. (Trust me, I’ve asked both my dentists and GPs and most of them don’t know the first thing about local government – why should they, no one taught us citizenship or civics at school!) That means a GP treating a patient with respiratory problems caused by living in a poorly-ventilated home (The community union for renters, ACORN Cambridge found such cases in very recently-built homes in South Cambridge of all places) currently has no means of escalating the housing issues with local housing enforcement officers – what few of them there are due to nearly 15 years of austerity.
Talking of the under-provision of GP and dental surgeries, these are the things that residents in Cambridge have been complaining about for many years.
“We’ve been highlighting NHS dentistry issues in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough for more than three years, following our Finding an NHS Dentist report in January 2019.”
Above – Healthwatch Cambridgeshire, August 2023
This matters, because Cambridge’s population has risen from 123,000 to over 145,000 between 2011-21. Without the additional provision of GP and dental places, all that local people see is landowners, speculators, and developers walking away with huge profits while the additional population pressures make it even harder to find suitable healthcare. I was one of many local residents forced to go private for dental care after my dentist stopped taking new NHS patients due to what they said was the mess of government policy a few years ago.
The fragmentation of local public services
When I showed this old directory of Cambridge from 1936 to a ‘future of Cambridge’ meeting, I said to the packed small hall of the Guildhall that ***They may have been scoundrels but at least you had heard of them and at least you knew who was in charge of what!*** (Or words to that effect).
Above – Cambridge Directory 1936 via Lost Cambridge 20 Aug 2024
The above-link itemises which functions fell within the remit of what is now Cambridge City Council, and invites the reader to consider which ones were later regionalised/centralised, privatised, and/or scrapped completely. Note also the change in the law that removed the ban on women serving as magistrates in 1920. Four of the women who made modern Cambridge are all listed.
Resolving the triangle of doom
This came up on BBC Look East on 29 August 2024 when they interviewed one of a new breed of building professional: the independent snagging inspector whose job it is to inspect newbuild homes on behalf of buyers to identify what remedial works need doing before the paperwork is signed off.
“”The supply chain has dwindled but the demand for new homes has increased so it’s a fighting battle to get skilled tradespeople to finish the job…. Many have told me they won’t work on new-build sites because of the rates of pay and the pressure to do more than is humanly possible.”
Above – Samantha Curling, chairwoman of the National Association of Professional Snagging Inspectors, external to BBC Cambridgeshire in their report on Bellway Homes’ development at Bassingbourn Fields, South Cambridgeshire. 28 Aug 2024. (Note the over 2,300 comments on that piece!)
So, ministers want to build ***lots*** of homes that are of a very high quality and that are also affordable for the many. This is impossible – especially in the current circumstances. The three variables are:
- Time
- Cost
- Quality
If ministers want homes built at a faster rate than at present, they have to compromise either on cost (due to the labour shortage and materials shortages), and/or build quality (time pressures leading to poor workmanship and cut corners).
If ministers want homes built cheaply, they have to compromise on time, or quality – for example cheaper materials.
If ministers want homes of high quality, they have to compromise on cost and time – not least the time and expenditure it will take to get more people training up in an industry with chronic labour shortages whose skills are easily transferable to other sectors. For example electricians.
This is a similar conundrum the Royal Navy faced in the run up to WWI when Admiral Jackie Fisher launched the first modern battleship HMS Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun battleship that made every other war ship in the world of its type obsolete. Such ships had to make the same trade-offs between speed, armour, and guns (size and number). With HMS Dreadnought battleships, speed was compromised in favour of armour and guns. Fisher came up with the concept of the ‘Battlecruiser’ – compromising armour for speed in order to produce a ship that could outrun anything it couldn’t outgun. The result was HMS Invincible. The risk was a careless commander would treat the big fast ships as cavalry and lead them on a charge into doom. Which was what happened at the Battle of Jutland where the Invincible was sunk along with two other battlecruisers as the German fleet took advantage of these and several other design faults of the UK warships.
Joined-up policy-making – easier said than done
Ms Metcalfe rightly highlights this and the failures of Tony Blair’s Government to overcome departmental turf wars. I spent over two years in the old regional government office for the East of England in Cambridge during that government watching civil servants fail to function greater than the sum of their parts at a regional level. Departmental turf wars are hard to break out of. Ironically, one of the tests for the civil service fast stream in those days was role-playing such a turf war, noting that if the group could not come to an agreed solution, everyone failed the task. (Fortunately my group succeeded in what was the toughest assessment I have ever been subjected to, the result of which was joining the in-service fast-stream and moving to London).
“[Town] Planning is relevant to many departments beyond the housing department – such as the transport, environment and education departments – but departments are not unified by a common strategy reconciling their, sometimes conflicting, objectives. One former official said that under the Blair government there was “enormous kickback” from departments against the idea that they should be brought into a cross-government plan to build more housing, and that the meetings soon descended into “endless trench warfare”. Without a central strategy setting out how the government wants to reconcile its competing commitments and objectives, cross-government co-ordination to achieve its goals will be fraught.”
Above – Metcalfe (2024) p47
Note one of the other self-imposed burdens of the era was the over-centralisation as Whitehall tried to micro-manage from the centre, often via their regional offices, bypassing local government which was inevitably in an awful state after nearly two decades of cuts. The present trend for devolution in England that we hear much talk of today stems from the Thatcher-Major-Blair-Brown eras, although others argue that the decline of local government started far earlier than that.
For housing policy to succeed, the decline of local and regional government needs to be arrested and reversed.
At the moment, I don’t see that vision emerging – in part because of the UK’s tradition of Parliamentary Sovereignty. As I mentioned in a workshop I gave to some Cambridge University students earlier this year, unlike democracies such as Germany or the USA that have codified, written constitutions that set out the powers and limitations of each tier of government, the United Kingdom does not have this. We have Parliamentary Sovereignty. Within the realm, Parliament can do whatever it likes. It only needs to pass the legislation. Therefore there is nothing in principle that can stop ministers from tabling new legislation on local government so long as they are in control of the Commons. Even more so if it is a manifesto commitment they are legislating on. As a result, councils are utterly dependent on ministers as we saw with the Levelling Up grants – ministers acting like the Lady Bountiful character that incurred the wrath of Eglantyne Jebb (Cambridge social reformer, founder of Save the Children).
Where is the money coming from?
This is really the subject of a separate paper, but Ms Metcalfe addresses the recommendation by Kate Barker of a land value uplift tax – something that the former Combined Authority Mayor James Palmer repeatedly (but unsuccessfully) called for to fund his now defunct CAM Metro despite spending over £10m in feasibility studies. Apart from other things, this is really about how local and regional government can raise revenues from wider tax bases. For somewhere like Cambridge, ministers could enable the city/county/economic sub-region to tax the wealth and the bubble being generated here to spend on the things that not only we desperately need, but also the nice things to have. Such as not-hideous architecture and splendid urban design. That would enable ministers to redirect funds to places unable to raise it from their own economies. (Anyone who wants a crash course on local government finance from the Rates to Council Tax, read this from 1993 by the LGIU)
What I would like to have seen Ms Metcalfe address in her paper
Despite my headline, the paper is a good one and is worth reading. One issue I have is that several of the recommendations are things that the public should expect as basic competencies from *any* party in government. It’s because of the last decade or so that we have to remind ourselves of what basic competency is and that we should be more demanding of it.
With some of her recommendations, there are some really difficult issues that need unpicking. Cambridge’s experience over the past decade (and in particular the blogposts of former councillor Sam Davies MBE (Ind – Queen Edith’s) makes for a really good case study for places with housing shortages.
With that in mind, I would like to have seen Ms Metcalfe stating clearly which issues and tensions need further, detailed work – whether from think tanks like her own, from university public policy schools, or from within the civil service itself. These include but are not limited to:
- “Plan for new housing where it is most needed“ – Where are all of the builders and construction professionals going to live while building the homes that are needed in areas of chronic housing shortage?
- “Support industry to develop the skills pipeline it needs to deliver” – The Education Select Committee in 2020 published a report on adult education, calling for a Lifelong Learning Centre in every town in England.
- Where are the facilities to re-train adults into the sectors with chronic skills shortages? (Dept for Education)
- What policies do ministers have to increase substantially the number of dentists, GPs, nurses, and teachers to staff the new facilities? (Including enabling towns and cities to have the ability/capacity to fund their own local training schemes to meet local demand – you’ll be shocked how few dental schools there are at UK universities)
- Given the huge debts so many of us have (mortgages, tuition fees, consumer credit etc), what policies are needed to ensure a critical mass of adults can retrain while still able to meet the demands of the debt repayments that keep them in their existing jobs? (Treasury)
- “Public opposition disincentivises local authorities from permitting development” – how many people know the basics of how central and local government function, let alone the basics of the town planning system, in order to provide informed feedback into the system? As Ms Metcalfe’s paper rightly points out, those with the time and the wealth can afford to engage with the system. Those with multiple competing demands cannot. Part of that solution has to involve citizenship education at school, in universities, and for lifelong learning. Furthermore, the high population turnover that some cities have mean that those residents don’t get the chance to put down roots and engage in local democracy. Therefore those likely to have the greatest need for new homes don’t get the chance to engage in the public policy processes, let alone voting in elections.
- Funding for the facilities and amenities – arts, sports and leisure appeared to be missing in its entirety. Councils have no money, Lottery funding requires match-funding, and competitive bids to central government are incredibly risky and fraught with waste. The risk is that England ends up building settlements of houses rather than communities, villages, and towns. Furthermore, ministers end up risking the situation we have in Cambridge – a rapidly-expanding city whose arts, sports, and leisure facilities are now too small to serve both the existing residential population, the up-to-10m annual visitors per year, and the significant regional market that the postcode data from leisure providers shows the distances people will travel to get to Cambridge for gigs, concerts, and shows.
And finally – the big stick. Directly intervening in the construction industry to enable councils to build a new generation of council housing in-house
Ms Metcalfe hints that there needs to be a ‘Plan B’ if “Plan A’ failes.
“The new government has made clear that it wants the bulk of new housebuilding to come from the private market, and it plans to introduce compulsory purchase measures that will make it easier for the private sector to viably deliver more affordable homes. This is a reasonable ‘Plan A’”
Above – Metcalfe (2024) p47
For how long are ministers prepared to wait for the private sector to deliver the homes that they have demonstrated they are unwilling to build, whether in booms or busts? While the Overton Window of what is politically acceptable, I would like to have seen something more about the massive decline in council house-building in the late-1970s-1980s, and why such centrally-funded house-building programmes should not be brought back.
One reason for assessing a potential council housebuilding programme at scale is because The Green Party recorded their greatest ever general election result at the 2024 general election. While Labour’s majority is substantial, the election of both the Greens and also some of the Independent MPs in previously safe Labour seats, the comments that Labour’s victory was wide rather than ‘deep’ shows that it could face political pressure from its left flank. Therefore I think it’s reasonable to call on the public policy sector to assess *how* such a policy might be brought in.
The policy debates aside, the most useful part of Ms Metcalfe’s paper for the general reader is the policy history
I’d like to see more public policy papers providing engaging and illustrated summaries of the history of the policies they are writing about going back to the 1960s. If only because back then they were debating huge issues of principle that we take for granted today. In this era of extreme inequality and the climate emergency amongst other things, some of the debates from previous generations are worth reassessing. One more recent look back I did on local history was the decision to let Cambridge grow – and the options we were given in the late 1990s.
Lessons to be learnt?
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Below – the old Cambridgeshire College for Arts and Technology – because I want our lifelong learning institution back in a 21st century inspirational form
Below – Citizenship: There are a number of cheap second hand copies of Citizenship Today by Jenny Wales (The pre-2016 versions tell us of what rights we used to have pre-Brexit!) if you want to learn some of the essentials from a user-friendly textbook not written by the Home Office!
The Cambridge Town Owl 