James Yucel: More thinking won’t fix the housing crisis

James Yucel is Head of Campaigns at Onward & Director of Conservative YIMBY

Academics will not build a single home. Developers will. That ought to be the starting point for any grown-up housing strategy. Yet every few months someone very grand with even grander titles explains that what Britain really lacks is not cranes, capital or consents, but a higher quality of thinking.

William Hague’s latest version in The Times is just the establishment’s latest remix of a familiar argument: build less, think more. As if the problem with the UK’s housing industry in 2025 were an intellectual shortage in SW1 rather than a delivery shortage everywhere else.

Since I came into Westminster last year from real estate private equity, I have been genuinely startled by how slow this world is. In my old job, if you wanted something, you picked up the phone. In politics, you arrange a lunch in three weeks. Then someone moves it because of a statement in the Commons. By the time you meet, the news cycle has shifted, the project is off, and you spend lunch gossiping about reshuffles that will never happen.

At the same time, there is this odd ecosystem of people who only talk to other people in the ecosystem, a permanent roundtable of clever folk explaining to one another why the people who actually build things must try harder to satisfy new conditions. Call it the wonk industrial complex. It is very good at circular debate. It is demonstrably very bad at getting homes out of the ground. There are rare exceptions, of course, usually found quietly listening to builders while everyone else quotes each other.

Here is the simple point Hague misses: ideas are wonderful, but they do not move soil. Britain’s housing crisis is now a problem of working capital, viability, risk pricing and blockage inside planning and post-planning. Which is why the best recent work has come from people who manage real assets.

Michael Keaveny at Grainger has just set out, in Homes for People We Need, a sober framework for making social rent deliverable. He starts with the cost of capital. He accepts that low rents cannot fund long-term investment without subsidy. He shows how to recycle the £2.8 billion we are wasting on temporary accommodation into structured funding that could support hundreds of thousands of social-rent homes. That is a real-world answer because it notices debt markets.

The same is true of the material Onward is putting out. We make a point of speaking to the people who actually build things before we publish; a rare thing in Westminster, where the word ‘delivery’ usually refers to lunch. Our Industry Fellow programme exists for that reason: Simon Dudley, Chris Worrall, practitioners who know what a development appraisal looks like. Our newly established Onward Corner lets industry voices like Lauren Atkins write it up in their own language. Her Hard Truth Facing Developers piece is crystal clear: costs have stacked up, demand support was pulled away, and post-consent stages have turned into a bog. In some councils, you can pay £78,000 in CIL on a three-bed and still find millions of pounds of developer contributions sitting unspent in the same authority. That is not a theory problem; it is an operators-are-being-immobilised problem.

Westminster needs to stop pretending that a new commission chaired by four professors will fix this. Any serious government would treat departmental advisers like a senior hire in a business. If you are working on housing, you ought to have actually delivered housing, recently, not once twenty years ago for a housing association. You should know what Natural England hold-ups look like in real time. You should know how investor confidence reacts when ministers float abolishing upward-only rent reviews. You should know what it costs to carry a stalled scheme for nine months while Gateway 2 drifts. Otherwise, you end up producing elegant essays that cannot survive contact with a QS.

This is why Hague’s innovation-versus-infrastructure line does not land. Innovation in housing is not a substitute for delivery; it is mostly a function of it. If you want better decarbonisation, more modern methods of construction, stronger building safety, you need volume to absorb the cost. Chris Worrall’s One Per Cent Housing Trap exposed the real-world symptom. Vacancy is too low for landlords to decant and repair. That is why tenants live with mould. You do not fix that with more regulation seminars. You fix it with more bloody homes.

There is also something faintly comic about discussing the future of British housebuilding in rooms where no developer is present. I have sat through these self-aggrandising sessions, everyone desperate to sound like the smartest person in the room. These people have never taken scheme risk. The only thing most of them have ever built is a sandcastle. Yet they will happily prescribe new obligations, new social-value assessments, new reporting standards. Imagine holding a meeting on reforming the Premier League and not inviting a single club. In Whitehall, it is a typical Tuesday morning with a nice selection of bagels.

The prize for listening to actual builders is obvious: you get practical solutions. Keaveny says lock in values at planning and use structured capital to make social rent stack. Atkins says unlock the £8 billion of unspent CIL and Section 106 and aim it at live sites. Worrall says build two to three million homes to restore slack so homes can actually be repaired. None of that requires another dusty review. It requires a state that can pick up the phone to industry on Monday and change guidance on Friday.

So here is the counter argument to Hague. Yes to ideas. Of course we need science, innovation, talent visas. But housing is not stuck because we’ve run out of theory. It is stuck because we let people with no sectoral experience design rules for those who do. It is stuck because the slowest people in Britain are in charge of the fastest market in Britain. It is stuck because we keep confusing consultative activity with economic activity.

We can fix that. Thin out the academics who think policy improves in proportion to its syllable count. Hire the builders, the planners, the funders, the people who have actually delivered something heavier than a policy paper. Make consultation with the private sector a mandatory stage gate in policy. Publish viability tests that look like real models. And for the love of God, invite builders to the damn roundtables.

Or ignore little old me. Keep listening to the academics. I am sure they will crack the housing crisis this time on their eighth attempt.