The public might not believe in trade-offs, but they exist regardless

Over the weekend, the FT published an interesting article by Luke Tryl on the question of housing policy – interesting because it illustrates quite well the danger of Pollster Brain. Of the Government’s housing programme, he writes:

“The problem, however, is the aggressive rhetoric. Its determination to push the mantra “build, baby, build” – which, in crude terms, positions environmental protections as red tape to be cut, and nature as a blocker to building – risks doing more to damage the mission to address the housing crisis than enable it.

“This framing rests on a binary assumption popular in Westminster and among very engaged activists online, but which misreads the British public: that we face a stark choice between housebuilding and nature protection.”

A very clear symptom of Pollster Brain is when somebody starts viewing material policy analysis as merely poor efforts to guess public opinion. The reason that both Westminster and very engaged activists (as well as a third group Tryl mentions not: policy experts) believe that there is a hard trade-off between our current environmental restrictions on housebuilding and actually building enough houses is because, as a matter of practical fact, there is.

Anybody in national politics who has come around to a bold pro-housing position has not got there under any illusions about the overall popularity of that position. It will surprise nobody to learn that on this issue, as so many others, the public likes nice things and does not on balance believe that trade-offs exist. But the unfortunate fact of living in a pre-Singularity economy is that scarcity is real.

Besides which, one of the major problems with trying to conduct major policy on the basis of polls is that most voters do not know very much about most policy issues. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a say – we live in a democracy – but it does impose on politicians some responsibility to curate the options put to them, even if doing so sometimes requires a little courage. For example, Tryl writes:

“Green spaces are crucial – the opportunity is to actively bring nature into new developments rather than pitting them against it. Amid the gloom of the cost-of-living crisis and with public services visibly struggling, local parks and nature sites still manage to lift the public mood. In fact, parks and green spaces are the single biggest source of local pride for Britons, ranked higher than local history or community spirit.”

The single biggest source of pressure on urban green spaces, including both parks and gardens, is our ‘pro-nature’ planning system. Restrictions on land use – especially the Green Belt – encourage densification and in-fill in areas that are already developed and the packing in of as much saleable square footage as possible on new developments, which means more concrete. The overall effect of this is to protect underdeveloped (and not always green) areas very few people use, at the expense of the sort of green space lots of people enjoy.

If this trade-off was put to More in Common’s panellists, there is no evidence of it in the article. Perhaps it would have seemed simply another misreading of the public, who like both parks and the Green Belt actually. Likewise, we are told that:

“Rather, the public think that any new housebuilding ought to go hand in hand with protecting nature: 72 per cent of people say they are more likely to think positively of a politician who argues that new housing should “integrate with the natural world”.”

Credit where credit is due here: the question is at least straight-up about what it’s actually testing (whether people like a politician) rather than whether this is actually a good or useful policy intervention.

But it’s worth briefly considering it anyway: what does it mean to say that new housing should “integrate with the natural world”? Were any specifics attached to it? Were developers surveyed about the likely impact of those specifics on building, and those consequences packaged up when the option was polled? There’s no sign of it; merely a nice-sounding thing with a 72 per cent approval rating.

Finally, there’s also the ingenuousness of some of it:

“This “Yimby (yes in my backyard) vs Nimby” battle that dominates social media is a caricature of public opinion. It suggests that Britons are divided between those who want new homes and those who would selfishly block building them to protect the view from their own house. The reality is far more nuanced. Most of the public are not instinctively anti-housing; they object to poor planning and poor supporting infrastructure and are fed up with developments that promise regeneration but deliver soulless units lacking green spaces and which damage the countryside.”

If there is one polling finding less surprising than people liking nice things and not believing in trade-offs, it must be their not believing themselves to be villains. There are indeed lots of people who say they support more housebuilding in general, in theory, whilst being inveterate opponents of any attempt to build housing that inconveniences them.

The concept of the Nimby is not – usually – a moustache-twirling cartoon villain who revels self-consciously in their selfishness, not least because few who have tangled with a Nimby are left in any doubt of their own estimation of their righteousness. They are almost always true believers, either in some crackpot theory that Britain doesn’t have a housing shortage at all or, more commonly, that there is some particular imperative to Keep Little Whingeing Special. More homes yes, but not here.

Pollings proper place is marketing, and there probably is some presentational wisdom here; perhaps the Housing Secretary should witter on about things ‘integrating with the natural world’ as they pour the concrete. But it must be a pandering in word, not deed: actually laying down even more regulations to make new developments “integrate with the natural world” would, outside the happy domain of the public imagination, tank construction yet further and exacerbate the housing crisis.

It is the prerogative of the public in a democracy to choose their governments. But it is not supposed to be their role to make lots of granular policy decisions; that duty is delegated to the parties, and the parties have a responsibility to keep their offerings reality-oriented. Because in general the public do not, and should not really be expected to have, coherent policy positions – and the result of too long indulging their issue-by-issue preferences is the very country we live in now, and about which they are most unhappy.