It is a dismal prospect. The impulse for liberation which powered Margaret Thatcher's challenge to postwar Butskellite conservatism has degenerated into the petty authoritarian presumption epitomised by John Gummer's decision to restrict further the release of green land for housing development, while abusing his planning powers to make the British townscape look more like Paris or Barcelona.
His white paper calls for a further diminution of new development, as though it were self-evident that building on rural land is eo ipso wrong, and that to keep land unbuilt eo ipso desirable. Only man is vile. The high court recently ruled out an attempt by our eco-maniacs to halt the Newbury bypass with their claim that snails count for more than people. But the tiny campaign for the preservation of rural England, and men in the ministry who might be made redundant were land development relaxed, have succeeded in making subsidised cows and set-aside count more than people.
In most of the country, land is not in short supply; common sense is. In the interwar period, when investment in lower and lower middle income rented housing stopped as a result of Lloyd George's disastrous rent control of 1915, the building societies took up the slack. They based their lending policies on the assumption that a freehold home should cost the equivalent of the male breadwinner's annual gross salary. This in turn set tolerable repayment and interest levels. Today, homes cost many times the average of home owner's annual income, which puts housing beyond the reach of many.
The cause lies squarely in government malfeasance. First, restrictive town and country planning, introduced by the postwar Labour government, but adopted enthusiastically by the Butskellite Tories, sent land costs rocketing. From an average 10 per cent of house prices in the 1930s, land costs rose to nearly 50 per cent, and considerably more in London. Estate developers have no alternative but to spend large sums on the planning permission and appeals lottery. When they succeed, rewards are spectacular; these are in turn adduced by restrictionists as "speculative" gains and used to justify further restriction, whereas in fact they are the fruits of restriction. Gummer is giving a further twist to the vicious circle.
(At the turn of the century, before motor vehicles replaced horse-drawn vehicles, there were over 6m horses in the country, which consumed the produce of some 25m acres. We now enjoy a surplus of agricultural land, whose owners are paid to keep it out of production. Yet would-be home owners are denied this land.)
But town and country planning is only partly to blame for high house prices. Socialist local authorities have acquired and demolished millions of houses, mostly of the kind people prefer to live in. This has been a great but unrecorded economic loss. In their place, councils have built monstrous instant slums, at great cost. Tower blocks can cost up to ten times as much per metre of living space as low rise, particularly when design and building control are as inefficient as socialist activities universally are. So they are demolished after a few years, leaving a financial burden on rate and taxpayers for a further half century.
The sins of the city fathers are visited on to the children for three generations, in the form of inflated rates-council-tax and Exchequer grants, and a reduced stock of old houses available for purchase, hence pushing house prices sky-high. This market distortion in turn has been used by socialists of all parties to justify building "social" or "low cost" housing (euphemisms for yet more council housing).
Economic and social considerations alike dictate diametrically opposite policies. Release ample green land to make new housing cheaper. Force councils to disgorge houses they are holding to demolish and land they are holding to build on.
Not content with his retrograde land policies, Gummer wishes to change our townscape to something resembling Barcelona's, by encouraging more flats in city and shopping centres. Has he never considered that there are good reasons why London differs from Barcelona? In the first place, the Catalan land and townscapes are markedly different from those of adjacent Arag?n and La Mancha, in spite of similar climate and geology, reflecting national character and history. Nearer home, a few miles east of Calais, the land and townscapes change dramatically as you enter historic Flanders.
A fortiori in Britain, climate and national character-"keep yourself to yourself"-combine to make the house with net-curtains the desideratum. Town flats, particularly in shopping centres, have disadvantages. Rent controls and allied legislation make them unattractive to developers. Families prefer houses with gardens and garages. Semis in serried rows make it easier to identify strangers than central shopping areas, where every Tom, Dick and Harry is free to roam.
But what sticks in my gullet most is Gummer's presumption, the insolence of office. He is there to keep local authorities' overweening arrogance in check, not to add his own, by telling us how to live. Britain's land and townscapes are the product of centuries of spontaneous elemental growth. During my lifetime they have deteriorated aesthetically and functionally, largely as a result of intervention by ill-educated zealots in councils and ministries, confident that they can second guess historical evolution and spontaneous activity. Gummer is well qualified to be their patron-saint. But where can we look for salvation?
