I heard Hilary Benn on the radio the other morning, talking about Labour's plans to build more houses if they come into government. The UK needed a system, he said, whereby new homes could be built in accordance with local communities' wishes.
As it happens, I agree with Hilary that the UK needs more homes. We have more would-be households than properties for them to live in, and you do not need to be a retired fund manager to see that the laws of supply and demand will tend to push house prices up. They've had a dizzying run, they might pause for breath or even a correction (I still remember a cartoon from a previous financial slump of some huge grizzlies standing behind a door with the caption 'Bears? There are no bears here, just us corrections') but the trend is upwards. Bad for people who will never afford to buy a house, or are crippling themselves to barely afford a mortgage, or are still obliged to live in a house share at an age when they might have hoped to rent a flat of their own. Bad for the UK tax payer faced with an escalating bill for housing benefit. It isn't an issue for me personally, in that I already have a house, but that doesn't mean I can't see it from other people's point of view.
Would I want the new houses next to my house, though? That's an academic question. Nobody is proposing to build any houses near us. We merely have the lettuce farm, and endure salad production on an industrial scale. If, in years to come, our friendly neighbouring farmer ever wants to put polytunnels in the field immediately next to us, you can bet that we will fight him tooth and nail, just as we objected to the planning proposals for the quarry on the next farm down the lane. As things stand, we are not immediately threatened by polytunnels or houses. But if we were, I'm sure we'd think of reasons to object.
And there's the rub. I've just been browsing though the local papers while I wondered what to blog about (given that I spent the day at a friend's house, and I don't review my friends or their houses on line, other than to say that it was a very nice day (and thank you if you're reading but you're probably not)) and local communities don't generally seem to want housing. The residents of Alresford do not want 145 homes built off Cockaynes Lane. If Cockaynes Lane is where I think it is, it is a nice quiet rural lane leading to Cockaynes Wood, and if I lived down it or near it I would not want 145 houses built there either. On the other hand, as a friend pointed out yesterday, Alresford is objectively speaking a sensible place to put new housing, having a rail link to Colchester and thence Stratford and London.
In Rowhedge opposite Wivenhoe on the Colne, the former waterside industrial area had fallen derelict, and has been cleared with a view to redeveloping the land as housing. Some local residents have called for the area to be left as open green space, on the grounds that there are no jobs in Rowhedge and the occupants of the new houses would all have to commute to Colchester or further afield, creating additional traffic and congestion. Rowhedge, in their eyes, is not a suitable place for development. On a grander scale, Tendring District Council is eyeing up plans for up to 3,000 homes on the outskirts of Colchester. I can see practical problems with that idea, since the traffic on the eastern fringes of Colchester is already a nightmare during the rush hour, and it's hard to see how the inhabitants are supposed to get in or out of their new homes to get to work. Colchester MP Bob Russell is up in arms, viewing it as a dastardly plot by Tendring District to grab the council tax for its own coffers while leaving Colchester Borough with the cost of providing schools and other facilities and the resulting extra traffic.
And yet if you were to ask Bob Russell, or the inhabitants of Rowhedge or Alresford, or Hilary Benn's local communities, whether they thought there was a shortage of houses, and if they were worried about how their children or grandchildren were ever going to afford anywhere to live, they would probably agree with Hilary (and me) that we need more houses. We all agree that they would be a Good Thing, just not next to us. Not creating traffic on our road, causing longer queues at our surgery, making it harder to get our children places at our school, or cluttering our view. Somewhere else, not here.
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