Nick Boles' fait accompli: for housing you like, build on the countryside

Thu Nov 29 23:35:29 GMT 2012

Nick Boles's fait accompli: for housing you like, build on the countryside

To conserve or to scrap planning? Neither of 
these seemingly contradictory Tory impulses will solve the housing crisis

Owen Hatherley - guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 November 2012 19.00 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/28/nick-boles-housing-build-on-countryside

Planning minister Nick Boles has suggested that 
1,500 square miles of English countryside should 
have housing built on it. Photograph: Geoffrey Robinson/Rex Features

"Concreting over the countryside" is an evocative 
phrase. It suggests roaring waves of bulldozers 
and cement mixers erecting serried ranks of tower 
blocks across our sites of outstanding natural 
beauty. However, as anyone who has seen an 
out-of-town development for the past 30 years 
knows, it means something quite different in 
practice. Winding cul-de-sacs of "vernacular" 
houses with gardens, with each street named after 
something that used to be there  thousands of Orchard Closes and Cedar Drives.

It's not as odd as it might initially sound to 
find a Conservative politician, planning minister 
Nick Boles, confidently advocating massive 
development. Apparently, "all we need to do is 
build on 3% of land and we've solved a housing 
problem". That means something around the size of 
Greater London. Rural campaigners have reacted 
with horror. So how did planning and conservation 
become the enemy of the party of order and conservatism?

For the past few decades, the Tory party has 
veered between two only seemingly contradictory 
impulses. One wing aims to stop urban and 
suburban development and to stringently protect 
the landscapes of southern England; the other 
aims for development at all costs, especially in lucrative southern England.

The concrete-over-the-countryside wing was 
dominant in the 80s, when Nicholas Ridley 
decimated town planning in favour of ex-urban 
"non-planning", with developers given carte 
blanche; the conservationist wing seemed to win 
out under John Major, when his government brought 
in restrictions on out-of-town developments. To 
use the language of the French philosophers 
Deleuze and Guattari, the Tories 
"de-territorialise", with the ruthless 
homogenising destruction that accompanies 
neoliberal economics; then they immediately 
"re-territorialise", dragging in flags, green 
fields and anthems to cover up the cracks.

What Nick Boles's comments on planning have done 
is offer a fait accompli to Tories. If you want 
everyone to have a house and garden, if you want 
the housing market to pick up, and if you want a 
house to be affordable for your children, then 
you must logically support building in the 
south-eastern countryside, not far from your back 
yard. There is, as always, no alternative. On his 
own terms, he's right, although his claim that 
the results would be "beautiful" is more improbable.

The problem is that the terms of the debate are 
so skewed as to make it completely pointless. 
Housing isn't kept expensive because of 
undersupply as such, but for an entire complex of 
reasons  the overdevelopment of the south-east 
over the rest of the country, the refusal to 
allow the building of council housing (and now 
even "affordable" housing), the concentration of 
land in the hands of a few powerful landowners, 
the refusal to regulate landlords or introduce 
rent control, a national economy that relies upon 
floating and refloating housing bubbles 
 but 
none of these can be confronted without 
challenging the power of builders, developers, 
landlords and landowners, who are even more 
crucial to the Tory party than outer-suburban nimbys.

Boles is tapping into something maybe equally 
fundamental in the rightwing psyche  the 
hostility to planning as such. In the Ridley era, 
planning was emasculated to such a degree that it 
still hasn't recovered  witness the miserable, 
gimcrack cityscapes built under New Labour. The 
last time Boles got himself in trouble for 
inflammatory comments was in 2010, when he 
advocated "chaos" in local government, as opposed 
to "believing that clever people sitting in a 
room can plan how communities should develop". 
Aside from a conception of what town planning is 
that would embarrass a GCSE geography student, 
you can see here some proper red-blooded libertarian thinking.

Ridley's destruction of town and country planning 
was partly influenced by a source from leftfield 
 "Non-Plan", a late-60s proposal by radical 
architects and thinkers to curb planners' power 
and let people do their own thing. As should be 
expected in something so capital-intensive as 
housing and development, that meant letting 
developers do their own thing. But the rhetoric 
survives  in his "chaos" comments Boles talked 
of the exciting flux of restaurants opening and 
closing, people unpredictably deciding to move 
elsewhere, and "lots of organisations doing 
different things in different areas". It sounds 
so much more attractive than what in practice 
means handing local government and planning over to Serco and Barratt.

Tellingly, Boles's proposals also give planners 
greater power  not the power of local government 
planners to plan but giving a "planning 
inspectorate" the power to overrule local 
authorities, who will not be able to appeal. 
That's a reminder that the conflicting rhetoric, 
whether cosily conservationist or stridently 
libertarian, obscures the common interest of the 
middle classes in housebuilding and home 
ownership. The means are different  stopping 
development keeps house prices up, encouraging it 
stops the developers from going bust. All agree 
not to think about the alternatives  building 
public housing on public land, for the five 
million people on the council waiting list, or 
taking over some of the 930,000 empty homes in 
Britain, 100,000 of which lie guarded and unused 
in London. And why should they, as how much profit would that make?
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