Our transformative housing reforms show why we should focus more on long-term planning
3 min read
The impact of the government's housebuilding plans on the OBR forecast serves as an example of how we should approach all policymaking.
The Chancellor's Spring Statement in March outlined a range of spending decisions over the next few months to ensure that the UK continues to meet its fiscal rules.
Working on the delivery of new homes before I entered Parliament, I have been committed to the positive economic and social benefits of new homes for a long time. But it was only with this new forecast that, for the first time, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) placed a score on the government’s changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). This crucial document sets national planning policies and was updated by the government last year to restore the housing targets abandoned by the Conservatives and to allocate low-quality ‘grey belt’ land for affordable housing.
As a result of these changes, the OBR has said, the UK will build an extra 170,000 homes over five years and add £6.8bn to the economy. This is the largest impact that the OBR has ever measured of a policy.
This comes as no surprise to those of us who with experience in the housing sector. I have worked all of my life to deliver social homes at a national, regional and local level, and know all too well how doing so is crucial for our prosperity as a nation.
Our homes are not just brick and mortar. Having a stable roof over our heads is one of the most essential things to be able to live a happy, healthy and productive life. Going to work or to learn, raising a family, or recovering from illness, are all made substantially harder when you cannot guarantee where you will be living for the next night, the next week or the next month.
This situation is all too common. One in 200 households are currently living in temporary accommodation, every single one of them let down by the lack of housing, particularly of secure social homes.
Building these homes provides families with a route out of unacceptable conditions and also has clear economic benefits.
Imagine what local authorities in London could afford if they were not spending £4m every day on temporary accommodation. Imagine how the life chances of the capital’s children would change if one student in every London classroom were not experiencing homelessness. Imagine the savings on our energy bills and our emissions if we replaced the oldest and leakiest housing in Europe with new, energy-efficient homes built to the Future Homes Standard.
Solving the housing crisis will have a clear impact on growth, and it was because of this that I quizzed the OBR about this at the Treasury Select Committee in November of last year, and the same last week in their appearance in front of the Committee. While it is encouraging to see the impact of the NPPF recognised in the new forecast, now is a crucial opportunity to change how we think of the fiscal impacts of the government’s policies more broadly.
This government has the boldest agenda for housing of any in my lifetime, setting out plans to build 1.5m homes, undoing decades of decline in our social housing stock, and reforming problematic and exploitative tenures in the private rented sector and leasehold.
The impact of this programme needs to be fully recognised in our budget-making process so that policymakers are incentivised to make decisions with the long-term impacts recognised just as much as the short-term ones.
Rachel Blake is the Labour MP for Cities of London and Westminster.
