Despite recent trembles in the private housebuilding market as Brexit negotiations have taken hold, the government has continued its policy of selling off public land, much of it owned by departments like the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health, at an almost unprecedented pace, to plug depleted budgets and attempt to stimulate the development of new private homes.
On Wednesday, Theresa May announced that her government will “get back into the business of building houses” – and said that local authorities have a key role to play in this. But building houses requires land – and public land is in ever-diminishing supply as the central government continues to offload surplus public assets as quickly as possible.
This has created an obvious tension between central government policy and what central government says it wants local government to do.
The withdrawal of the public sector from housebuilding has resulted in a chronic undersupply of affordable homes. Historically, local authorities have been major players in house-building, but the winding down of this activity from the 1980s onwards has had serious consequences on the housing market. Millions of people have been left at the mercy of a dysfunctional market, with little or no influence over where they get to live.
However, in some places this is starting to change. According to a recent survey, 35% of councils are now either directly developing their own social and affordable housing on council land or have set up joint ventures to do so.
Central government could act to increase this figure, and rebuild a crucial role for local government in the fight to solve the housing crisis. If surplus public land were used not for one-off money grabs, but instead to enable local authority-led housing development, we could dramatically increase England’s stock of decent, affordable homes.
Communities must be at the heart of this decision-making process, having a say over what gets built, and where.
May’s government maintains that the large-scale disposal of public land to the private sector is designed to boost the supply of homes. But our research shows this policy is not delivering the quick fix to the housing crisis that was promised.
Only one in five new homes forecast to be built is classified as “affordable”, with as little as 6% of new homes to be social rented housing. In some cases, developments comprise nothing but luxury properties. And as more land is sold, there is less opportunity to reverse the mistakes that have been made, and for the government to genuinely get back into the business of building houses.
The Department for Communities and Local Government reported in February that government departments have now identified 91% of the land needed to meet the government’s target of 160,000 new homes by 2020 – 9% of which has already been sold. But as successive Commons public accounts committee reports have highlighted, home-building activity on the land sold has been slow.
Local authorities, largely quite independently of central government’s involvement, have shown that they are ready to become housebuilders again. But councils’ own land strategies are often dictated by their immediate, acute financial needs.
More than 250 councils are opting for cash receipts in exchange for their land assets through signing up to the One Public Estate programme intended to sell land and property to the tune of £414m by 2019.
We urgently need a more joined-up approach to tackling the affordable housing crisis. If May is really serious about making a dent in the housing undersupply, she must stop the sell-off of public land.
The first step is to increase public awareness about the land sale at a national and local level. At the New Economics Foundation we have developed a map that plots public land sites up for sale and those that have already been sold. It also identifies where development of new homes is already underway.
We hope our map will equip more local communities to monitor and scrutinise land sales in their area that aren’t providing the homes they need, or even better, encourage local residents to propose alternatives themselves.
We’ve been working with StART Haringey – a community land trust aiming to build 800 homes on a hospital site up for sale in north London. Of the new homes built, 75% will be genuinely affordable to local residents. Projects like these show that when residents take a lead, public land can be used for the public good.
- Sign up for your free Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with comment and sector views sent direct to you every month. Follow us: @Guardianpublic.
Looking for a job in central or local government, or need to recruit public service staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs.