Modern houses - Update #1

TBHNT is something of a hobby blog - one that only occasionally gets updated, and so, only occasionally gets read. So, I have been overwhelmed with the response to my piece on modern housing especially since Brian Micklethwait plugged it on Samizdata.

John Harrison who in addition to having the dubious distinction of being an ex-university chum of mine is also a Conservative councillor wrote me a long e-mail about how he sees things from his end. He wrote:

You raise an interesting question about modern housing and whether smaller rooms and bad workmanship are caused by controls such as the planning regime. I would suggest that numerous different factors have an influence but the main ones are planning, building regulations, consumer choice and latterly new planning guidance such as PPG3.

Since Metropolitan Green Belts were established, there has been increasing pressure on builders to locate new housing on a diminishing supply of land within existing settlements rather than by spreading the suburbs further over green fields. So we end up with smaller houses as a result of less land being available for building. Under new Planning Policy Guidance 3, Councils are encouraged to seek increasing densities of housing so the trend is set to intensify.

The other influence of the planning system is that Councils try to extract planning gain, so that as part of a development, developers have to stump up cash for new roads, schools, and increasingly provide a proportion of the land for 'affordable' housing. So to make a site profitable, developers have to make enough profit out of the remaining land to cover the development of the whole site. This adds to the pressure on house prices because the 'affordable' housing does not add to the supply in the market since it is only available to those who can not afford to buy. This creates a further incentive for developers to cram as many houses as possible on the part of the site that remains theirs to sell. Of course, many housebuyers have little option but to buy the smaller houses since the prices have been pushed up by the planning system and these are all they can now afford. The reason for smaller rooms, I suspect, is that builders are responding to legitimate consumer preferences. Given a certain size of footprint for the property, would you rather have three bedrooms or four? Properties with more bedrooms sell for a higher price, even if one of those rooms barely gives enough space to rotate a feline.

Land and buildings are expensive and builders need to build to a timescale and budget that allow them to sell at a price that finds a buyer in the market. With all the costs loaded on them by planning policies and planning gain and affordable housing quotas, is it any wonder that the quality of the build suffers?

There is also the effect of the building regulations which increasing lay down standards which must be followed, prescribing all sorts of things from the width of doors to the steepness of staircases. Once a house design has passed the hurdles of this the builder will re-use it over and over again - the bland designs of the 1970s come to mind. Councils have, to some extent, learnt that this leads to very boring street scenes and to their credit, insist on variations in design to give some interest to the view but within all the constraints of the planning system, these variations are only cosmetic - a few different coloured bricks here and there; use of a few different 'standard' house designs through a street.