The impact of town planning in the U.K. and Western Australia
The heart of the matter of housing affordability
The origins of town planning in the UK go back to the formation of Council for the Protection of Rural England in 1926 by Patrick Abercrombie. The express purpose was to limit urban sprawl and ribbon development along roads. The CPRE claims to be one of the longest running environmental groups in the UK. The real but unstated aim was to enable landowners to continue to enjoy unfettered enjoyment of their estates and keep the working class at arm’s length.
In England around 1% of people own roughly half the country’s land. A different mode of speech, parodied in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ and the Lerner and Lowe musical ‘My Fair Lady’ is an indicator of geographical origin, social class and the sort of house that a person lives in. At one end of the spectrum is the landed estate with its carriage driveway approaching a multistory mansion surrounded by gardens and trees, and at the other, the terraced council flat with or without parking for a vehicle on the street, shared walls and space for a garden out the back. And, increasingly what we see below, the multistory flat.
An inviolable ‘Green Belt’ surrounding urban areas was the organizing element in the 1947 Planning Act. If settlement cannot be extended at the margin due to the ‘green belt’ stipulation, its necessary to replace old with new, providing for a smaller footprint or extending in the vertical with multistory blocks or the utilization of ‘brownfield’ sites, where the factories of the first Industrial Revolution were located, many sporting a degree of soil contamination. Due to the scale of the enterprise, action by an individual person is out of the question. This is a job for well heeled developers. Nobody does this better, faster or cheaper than the Chinese. Few do it as poorly as the English, as recorded here and as apparent below.
In England, ‘social housing’ is provided by local councils. Much of the high rise created to replace that destroyed in the second world war is now in a deplorable condition due to corrosion of embedded metals.
Support for this regime depends on the persistence of ‘respect for 'ones betters’. The environmental ideal is used to achieve this. It has been elaborated over time to include the climate change scare, the attendant demonization of fossil fuels and the notion that intermittent sources of energy have to be employed to save the planet. This narrative is supported by the landowning class, the monarchy, academia, the BBC and the tabloid media, from left to right across the political spectrum.
The British underclass and the serfs of 19th Century Russia are convinced that their interests are, and have always been, near and dear to the heart of Tsar Alexander and his near relation via Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth, and King Charles as described here, here and here. This could be likened to a marionette show.
On the other side of the coin is a steeply progressive tax system with more than 50% of the population gaining more than they give.
The consequent inflation of wage and energy costs has accelerated the export of manufacturing jobs to Asia, and a return flow of cheap manufactures facilitated by the past accumulation of wealth, income redistribution and the lingering vitality of the Pound Sterling, the Euro and the US dollar. Stability in the balance of payments depends on foreigners’ purchase of British debt, the desire to give their children a ‘Western Education’ and the direct transfer of technology to East Asia where a ‘can do’ attitude is backed up by a a ten hour day, seven days a week, an astonishing ability to save, the swift ramping up of the education system, personal discipline, and an apparent ability to build infrastructure at half the price in half the time, innovating along the way, including mastering the transplanting of trees from a rural to an urban setting.
Australia has adopted the same restrictive town planning policies. In an effort to limit the spread of cities, block sizes have been reduced. This increases the proportion of land devoted to roads, enhancing traffic congestion giving rise to a distinctly uncomfortable urban heat sink due to the complete removal of photosynthesizing vegetation and its replacement with materials that absorb energy to depth and yield it up but slowly. The increase in air temperature is localized and attributed to ‘carbon pollution’. Man is invited to see himself as his own worst enemy, not a particularly intelligent approach but ‘it is what it is’. People respect the word of authority. Support for this ideology is bipartisan.
The consequences are simply awful.
A study published in February 2023 reaches the conclusion that by comparison with other European countries, an additional four million homes is required if the British people are to enjoy the standard of housing that exists on the European continent. This study can be accessed here.
The British study suggests that:
Despite Britain’s apparent beneficence in providing public housing, other European countries, like the Netherlands and Austria, show that different approaches have provided better outcomes. These countries built more private housing than the UK and in notable instances, as in Vienna, sufficient affordable, durable and attractive multistory units to house half the population at very affordable rates. This provides long term tenure for a complete cross section of tenants from the rich to the poor, of every race, all in close proximity. Moreover, this arrangement has proved to be consistent with the development of a strong community of interest with mutual acceptance and support. See here.
The root cause of the housing crisis in the UK is considered to be the effect of urban containment in restricting the supply of land. Whatever choices the UK makes about housing tenure and whichever countries it learns lessons from, allowing more development on more land is considered to be the only way the housing shortage can be remedied.
Ending the housing crisis in the next twenty-five years would require England to add 442,000 homes every year, double the current housebuilding rate of 220,000 a year.
So far, all efforts to improve conditions have been undermined by the planning system’s increasingly tight rationing of land. The intensity of this pressure cooker situation can be gauged by the difference in the trends in the two figures immediately below, the first showing population growth, the second, the rate of home building.
An increase in home building would increase economic growth, just as it did in 1932 to 1934 when it accounted for a third of the increase in GDP. This occurred during the economically depressed interwar period when Britain reached its highest ever rate of housebuilding.
The UK is unique by European standards in never having had a proper boom in private housebuilding after the Second World War. New social and council housing can be part of the solution, but achieving a large increase in the number of new homes built by the private sector is the missing ingredient, and perhaps, given the checquered record of the public sector, the better alternative. Most governments don’t do public housing well. The Chinese leave the task to the market, why don’t we? Is it because we over-regulate the market and it can’t supply what is needed?
The scale of the housing challenge means that tinkering with little reforms will make little difference to housing conditions and the British economy. A big problem requires a big reform. Fixing the design of the planning system, fundamentally untouched since 1947, is that big reform.
It is observed that zoning systems in other parts of the world, such as Ireland and New York City, result in similar outcomes to the English planning system. These too, are inflexible zoning systems with either “single-use” , and/or discretionary review of applications for planning approval that reduces the applicant success rate. A more accommodative permitting system is required.
Its considered that skyscrapers would be suitable in a city centre zone and polluting industrial activity in industrial zones, but neither would be allowed alongside homes and light commercial uses in the suburban living zone. In other words, the middle ground between the city centre and polluting industrial activity needs to accommodate the full gamut of mixed uses, a very much simpler zoning system. But this by itself will be insufficient.
It is suggested that proposals that comply with the more accommodative zoning structure should be granted planning permission as a matter of course. Making them subject to advertisement and notification inviting comment from bureaucrats, consultants and people with vested interests is seen as a recipe for obfuscation, confusion and self serving obstruction.
Frontloaded public consultation in the creation of the local plan might be seen as desirable but this introduces an element of self-serving advocacy whereby the NIMBY lobby denies the possibility of small format homes that new entrants might be able to afford. Realistically, any form of community consultation is likely lead to the denial of the needs and aspirations of those least equipped to defend themselves.
The notion is that development should be permitted unless it is specifically prohibited in the published plan. The review process would then be very simple. It would leave less room for a gatekeeper to support NIMBY exclusiveness.
It is suggested that planning systems in other parts of the world, such as those of Finland, Japan, and Houston Texas, and recent reforms like those in New Zealand, where prices had been escalating at an extraordinary rate, can provide inspiration for Britain.
How does this relate to Western Australia and the City of Busselton in particular?
As in Britain, the USA and New Zealand, “Single-use” housing zones that are added on the margin and the practice of ‘discretionary review’, is the essence of the problem. What is ‘planning’ if it is not making up ones mind in advance. Discretionary review is a process of ‘planning on the run’ reflecting an inability to set guidelines up front, and stick with them. The priorities must be clear. Development is for human purposes. The conservation of native vegetation per se, or of other ‘endangered species’ and the avoidance of destruction by fire are secondary objectives that can be met by adaptive design. The primary KPI should be that humans should be housed.
Applications for development are a request for a permit to create value, to increase the infrastructure available to the human community. The need for this has never been greater, and accordingly we must see humanity as the threatened species. Why?
The birth rate has fallen below the level where the population can be sustained. Think about the importance of recognizing this imperative and what we might do to reverse the trend. In particular consider how designing for self supporting communities might be possible if the automobile were to be excluded from the immediate vicinity of every residence and how the space that is liberated might be used to the advantage of mothers, the aged and children in order to build a community that is resilient self supporting, that flourishes like a well watered plant in good soil.
In Western Australia, country councils adopted ‘town plans’ from the 1960s. When a small community adopts a town plan it is like donning a straitjacket. The inconvenience attached to the separation of home from work is a misfortune for children who could otherwise gain access to their fathers in working hours to learn things incidentally and by example.
The independent, socially aware councilor, will see the adoption of a plan as a mistake. Once the plan is in place it puts a bureaucracy between the impulse to create and the process of making it happen.
Applicants are put off by the time and expense attached to negotiating the planning system. Templates should be available for things like bush fire management according to circumstance. Demanding the creation of a unique report on an up front basis can tip the balance so that the prospective stream of revenue falls short of the cost of obtaining planning approval.
Demanding reports from consultants is the antithesis of taking professional responsibility. Gone is the time when surveyors employed by councils would give free advice to assist builders.
A truly professional approach requires the development of a predetermined set of rules, being transparent and helpful. A planning system that is non transparent is discouraging, demeaning, exhausting and unprofessional. Approval should be automatic if a proposal complies with the published framework. At the outset, the framework has to be inclusive. This is the crux of the matter.
A plethora of permission givers
Left to fester, the system tends to accumulate ‘hangers on’, those who are ever willing to provide the assurance to planners that they are doing their duty, including, flora and fauna experts, health and safety experts, building inspectors, structural engineers, energy efficiency assessors, ventilation experts, traffic surveyors, bush fire risk assessors and the carbon footprint obsessed.
Administrators at state level lay down overarching plans that apply to the largest cities and the smallest towns alike, and local authorities add a raft of local planning policies that can get bogged down in minutiae, including wooly motherhood statements in relation to secondary objectives such as ‘conservation’ and ‘amenities’ of one sort of another that may be near and dear to the hearts of parts of the local population. Too often these become primary objectives. The number of convenient excuses for rejection increase as the plan is complexed and loses sight of the primary objective that is affordable housing for all. Local plans may have no statutory authority. But they have to be challenged in a court of law if they are to be overthrown. This is a tragedy in the making.
Both local planning policies and the overarching plan must be seen as, at best, an attempt to capture a moving target. The target and the plan should be reassessed at no longer than five year intervals, rather than amended on an ad hoc basis as if the underlying structure remained sound. At the outset and on an everyday basis the aim is to provide a dwelling at an affordable price. If this is not achieved, and permission to start building is not available within a month, its the plan and the planner that is at fault. Heads should roll when the primary KPI is not met. This is what could be called ‘straight thinking’.
Unfortunately, its not something that is likely to happen anytime soon.
Keeping on the right side of governments.
The following comment from journalist and commentator Graham Young is apt.
As the size of government has increased, the need to keep on the right side of laws, rules, and regulations also increases. The range of businesses that can be adversely affected by regulation is huge. While they legitimately lobby to protect their interests, there is a political need to appear a good corporate citizen as well. What a good citizen is will be defined by a combination of the government in power and external and internal public opinion. This leads to an unhealthy vicious cycle where elected governments are not shy in pushing back on corporate non-government constituencies for support. Just asking implies a threat of retribution, whether real or not. Most businesses will hedge their bets at the least and comply. Government and business then move in lockstep and genuine diversity, essential to the workings of a healthy democracy, is marginalised.
This is unhealthy. Its not the sort of democracy we can be proud of. Lets face it, our system is corrupt. The demand to meet a plethora of Environmental Social and Governance targets that is now put in front of financiers and the boards of public companies is dismaying. Specious KPIs, that impair performance will cost society dearly. Already we are witnessing a collapse in labour force productivity and falling real wages. The determination to tackle the real wage issue by increasing award rates on equity grounds, will induce a wage price spiral that causes runaway inflation. Interest rates will rise, increasing costs of production and diverting funds to the ever expanding and very well paid services sector, of which the public service is part, that part that tends to grow at a disproportionally fast rate because governments can borrow to meet the needs of the dispossessed. This will not end well.
Where will reform come from?
Reform should be on the table for any State Government serious about addressing the problem. It will be essential to bypass recalcitrant local councils as in Auckland, New Zealand where the cost of renting a house got to be severely out of whack with the cost of ownership, due to an investment boom, escalating home prices, and inappropriately large houses, as is apparent in the table below.
The state of play
The extent of a planner’s success or failure in securing the welfare of people in his jurisdiction can be adjudged via two indices. The first is the percent of occupiers who own their own house. The second is the proportion of income required to pay the rent.
Percent of occupiers who own their own house by country: Russia 91.7, China 90, Singapore 89.3, Poland 87.2, Norway 80.8, Spain 76, Italy 74.3, Greece 72.8, Netherlands 70.6, Australia 66, United States 66, Canada 66.5, New Zealand 64.6, Sweden 64.2, United Kingdom 62.5, Austria 51.4, Germany 46.7, Switzerland 42.2
Austria and Germany have a low ownership rate but the cost of rental lies between ‘acceptable’ and ‘moderately unaffordable’ whereas rents in New Zealand, the east coast cities in Australia and the City of Busselton are ‘unaffordable’ to ‘severely unaffordable’.
