A Google search for "Section 106" yields, as top advert: "Avoid Affordable Housing". Lawyers touting services to enable property developers to circumvent the needs of local communities. This is the tip of the iceberg which exists to support Big Construction; and it includes the Coalition. What hope can there be that any return to mass house building will include ANY lower-cost homes for those who need them, when the massed ranks of investors and their cronies in Parliament are arrayed against them, hidden behind a single clause in the Town and Country Planning Act?
Section 106 of this Act, backed up by more recent "clarifications", gives developers the escape chute from inclusion of social or affordable homes in new estates. It is clear that the very purpose of the Act was to ensure that developers had to provide Local Authorities with funds - "the essential provision"- towards infrastructure and social housing needed for the local community, through the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). Yet the get-out provided by Section 106, whereby reduction of overall scheme profitability below 17.5% enables the developer to escape the "essential provision" belies this intention; and invoking it has now become standard practice.
With house-building already below half of the rate required to meet demand in this Parliament, the shortfall has increased under the Coalition by an extra half-a-million houses. The Government is certainly failing the working and non-working people of the South of England who need to live near work but cannot find homes. Then in April Clegg announced that new Garden Cities and now all new developments can be built without social housing. With neither sufficient build nor provision of an affordable element, could the Coalition really be expecting NOT to get back into power? Could they be inflating a house price bubble whose burst the next Government will have to suffer? They are certainly doing big favours to land-owners, landlords and developers. Luckily, there are fewer of these than there are would-be householders. Labour has to get the message out that only we will free up land, control rents, build council houses and demand a proper affordable housing sector.
An excellent blog which really gets to the nub of the housing shortage problems and as a housing professional of more than 40 years I welcome anything that opens up this important debate.
ReplyDeleteThis country is heading for a property shortage of more than a million homes by 2022 unless something is done to dramatically increase the current rate of house building. According to reports from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) this will hit London and the South the hardest.
The down turn in the market plus the changes which were highlighted in the blog mean that we can no longer rely on developer contributions to supply our country’s new housing. None of the current housing market supply chain works and certainly none of this government’s range of announced policy interventions have done anything to stimulate growth.
New ways or at least old ways recycled must be found to provide affordable sites. Stock owning councils who, thanks to changes in the Housing Revenue Account can now develop homes must be encouraged not penalised as they are presently. Councils are key to the provision of new affordable homes because they have access to and the means by which land and redundant buildings can be released.
We need a Labour Party with a radical housing agenda to deliver homes on the scale needed to meet current demand – let alone the backlog built up by decades of under supply.
Keith Searle
Crowborough