Smash hit

The trouble with country people and local authorities is that they do not like green fields giving way to tarmac and they tend to be hostile to intrusive new development. Prescott’s office, obsessed with targets, does not take kindly to opposition. If the rules do not produce the right result, then the rules must be changed until they do.

“Planning”, it said on Monday, “was seen as a key constraint on the delivery of land for housing.” Ironically, of course, that is exactly what the system was supposed to do: to take account of environmental impacts and protect communities and their landscapes from intrusive development.

If Barker’s recommendations become policy, satisfying local need will no longer be a defence against invasion. A new system of economic “triggers” will subvert the planners, ignore the environment and make it easier for developers to challenge councils that resist them. The starting gun for new development will be fired if property prices rise above a given threshold, for example, or if house sales are accelerating rapidly, or if building land is getting more expensive, or if local people are finding it difficult to climb onto the housing ladder.

Economic theory says that if more houses are built, prices will be pushed downwards, “ensuring more first-time buyers get the chance to afford homes of their own”.

As we saw in the north of England, what looks good on paper to Prescott does not always look quite so good when it hits the ground. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) watches in dismay. Barker, it argues, will concentrate demand in high-price hot spots that are already overstretched. “Releasing” new land for building will jeopardise the government’s own ambition to build 60% of new homes on brownfield sites. Surrendering to the market will do little to improve the supply of low-cost affordable homes that communities need.

Barker’s own model shows that even a doubling of the housebuilding rate will not bring prices down but only slow the rate of increase, which will be of little benefit to those in greatest need.

Not even her basic premise, that there is a nationwide housing shortage, is a proven fact. Basing its calculation on the 2001 census, CPRE concludes that there is a housing surplus in every English region. The rate of building has risen for three consecutive years to reach its highest peak since 1995 (154,599 new homes in 2004-05 alone), and developers’ land banks have increased by 30% since 1998.

In September 2003, CPRE calculated that the 15 leading housebuilders between them already held land with planning permission for 278,866 houses, enough to build a continuous terrace from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.

OTHER obstacles may prove less susceptible to ministerial fiat. The water industry gazed in horror at the map of the southeast, one of the driest regions in Europe, as Prescott’s planners sketched in developments with the abandon of settlers in a virgin continent.

By 2018 London will have grown by 200,000 households and 700,000 people, equivalent to the population of Leeds. All will need water. All will expect, when they flush the lavatory, not to see effluent flood back into the garden. Yet, extraordinarily, the water companies were not involved by the government until after its plans for expansion had been announced. “It would have been easier for us,” said Thames Water, “if we had been consulted earlier.”

The water will be delivered and the sewage piped away. But at what cost to the environment? And that is before we start to think about transport.

Elsewhere it is an excess of water that is the problem. Prescott plans 85,000 new homes along 40 miles of flood plain in the Thames estuary, most of which, most of the time, is kept dry by flood defences. “Most”, however, leaves a nagging region of doubt.

In February the Association of British Insurers argued that existing defences were unlikely to be adequate in a globally warmed future and the threat in some places was such that houses would have to be built with all their living space upstairs. Unless it could be assured that the tide would be tamed, the homes would be uninsurable, unmortgageable and impossible to sell.

One building that is likely to keep its head above water is the Vauxhall Tower. The impact of this monstrous block of flats on the London skyline — 49 storeys and 180 metres high — persuaded Lambeth, the local planning authority, to turn it down and Prescott’s own planning inspector to uphold its refusal. He did not risk overstatement when he said that the building, which was also opposed by English Heritage, would have “a detrimental effect on London’s riverscape”.

The opinion that counts, however, is not the council’s; not the planning inspector’s; not English Heritage’s, nor the opinions of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. It is Prescott’s opinion that counts.

He gave the developer a target for the number of “affordable” flats in the scheme. The developer met the target and that is all there was to it — another Prescottian gift to the nation.

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