Simon Cooke: Conservatives must accept the need for housing in their own patches

Simon Cooke was a councillor for 24 years and served as a leader of the Conservative Group and Deputy Leader of Bradford Council. He is an activist with the Shipley Conservatives, and author of The View from Cullingsworth.

There is a welcome emphasis in the Conservative Party on trying to meet the challenge of Britain’s housing problems. It is also true that “the politics of Chipping Barnet” still dominate the view of Conservative politicians as they oppose even the most modest of housing developments.

It is notable that Blake Stephenson, MP for Mid Bedfordshire, pops up twice in articles, one here at ConservativeHome and one in the Daily Telegraph, presenting the classic position: ‘I’m in favour of new housing but here are lots of reasons why the new housing needs to be somewhere else’. James Yucel, from Onward and Conservative YIMBY, gives us some mild criticism of this position and argues for a new rural planning approach that “supports gentle density, enables business-led development, and recognises that real countryside isn’t a disused car park in Zone 6”.

But these ideas, while welcome, are still dependent on housing developed by rural businesses, not merely on demand for homes; Onward’s proposals also reflect the classic NIMBY position by arguing that housing pressures in Mid Bedfordshire, the Weald of Kent, or Suffolk go away if you allow the densification of London.

If we don’t plan on a real change to the planning system (and this is implicit in the outline of plans Yucel sets out), then the ten-point plan for London should apply everywhere.

Nobody serious about housing denies that Britain needs at least four million new homes and probably as many as six million. Nor should we doubt that most of this housing needs to be built in places with the highest demand for housing (and we know where they are because they are the places with more unaffordable housing), most of which are in London and South East England.

If we aren’t moving to a zoning system but relying on housing targets then the targets in high demand areas need to be at least doubled. These areas, I’ve no doubt, include Mid Bedfordshire and Suffolk. If we are going to criticize, rightly, the politics of Chipping Barnet, we need also to criticise the politics of Flitwick, Tenterden, and Lavenham, because they are no different.

More than anything else, the Conservative Party has always been the party of suburbia. Conservatives have always seen that having a real bricks-and-mortar stake in the nation and its communities makes for better citizens, stronger businesses and a safer, more prosperous society – yet we have become devotedly attached to a socialist planning system where your right to choose how to use your land and property is controlled by the local council.

I appreciate how hard it is to call for real change; I was a councillor for 24 years representing villages surrounded by green belt – and I live in that green belt.

But the green belt has to change, and Conservatives have to set out how they are going to meet the aspirations of millions by allowing the development of a new suburbia – just as in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1950s Conservative governments supported the new suburbs that became the communities where most of us grew up.

Cramming more and more development into cities, even if you call it ‘gentle density’, doesn’t meet this aspiration and will create a more dependent, less rooted population living in either rented flats or social housing.

Flitwick, the town that Stephenson doesn’t want to grow, is on the main line into St Pancras, a few minutes from Bedford and Luton, adjacent to the M1 motorway, near to one international airport, and an hour’s drive from another. If villages like Steppingley and Westoning become part of a new suburbia that isn’t a bad thing, any more than it was bad when Elmers End, West Wickham, and Shortlands became part of London’s suburbia.

Indeed, new housing development helps save the pub, keep the local shops and makes it less likely that the GP, dentist and school are a 12 mile drive away.

By implying that Britain’s housing problems can be fixed by building the houses somewhere else too many Conservatives are simply rebadging the failed socialist planning approach. Worse, the proposed strategy described by Yucel depends on billions in transport investment when merely making Flitwick 40 per cent bigger would use existing infrastructure better (by recognising how the private car is the dominant form of transport in Britain, something unlikely to change any time soon).

Don’t get me wrong, I think getting more homes built in London is a great idea but, when it comes to getting planners out of the way of people who want to build homes, this should apply everywhere in England, not just in Chipping Barnet or Orpington.

Cullingworth, the village where I live, has two pubs, an award-winning butcher, a post office, a co-op convenience store, a fantastic village hall, and a GP surgery. That we have this great social infrastructure is, in no small part, down to us accepting nearly 500 new homes over the last decade. We have enough kids for a pre-school and a primary school, and there’s a cricket club, football club, and bowls club.

Yet across England, and especially in the South’s green belt, people are trying to tell us that their dying village without most of these amenities is threatened by a few new houses. Conservatives should be saying no to these objectors and saying that, if they want great communities with fantastic social infrastructure, then those new houses – that new suburbia – is the way to make it happen.

If we’re not prepared to accept wholesale planning reform we should at least:

1. Allow people to build a house for themselves on land they own
2. Give automatic permission to development on brownfield land in villages and market towns
3. Accept that meeting housing need, set out in clear targets, is an appropriate reason for green belt deletions in local plans
4. Let conversions of redundant rural buildings be 20 per cent bigger than the current footprint
5. Support small scale urban extensions to villages and market towns
6. Presume development rights next to rail stations and motorway junctions even in green belt
7. Lift the absolute ban on merging villages to allow more sustainable communities
8. Permit small scale speculative infill development in green belt
9. Limit planning objections to those directly affected so as to restrict the politicising of planning
10. As Onward suggest, use a ‘Builders’ Remedy’ approach to prevent local planning authorities from delaying allocation of land to meet new housing targets

Labour has dodged real planning reform and will fail to fix our housing problems. With Reform, the Liberal Democrats, and Greens firmly in the ‘no more housing’ camp, we Conservatives have the chance to set out policies that really will make a difference.

Let’s not miss this chance because some MPs want a cheap headline opposing housing developments in their patch.