Lies and the brutes who want Britain covered in concrete

by Max Hastings, Daily Mail, June 2, 2004

It is characteristic of this Government that when it hears something important that doesn't suit its purposes, it tries to stop the public finding out. One of the craziest proposals to pass through the Treasury's greasy hands recently is the one from economist, Kate Barker.

Asked by Gordon Brown to investigate the rise in house prices and Britain's alleged shortage of housing, she came back with an exciting solution: lets build more than a million new homes in England. If we flood the market, we shall dampen demand and force down prices. Barker shrugged in her report that, of course, it was none of her business to consider the environmental impact of carrying out her grand experiment.

Gordon Brown, whose idea of beauty is a number carried to a hundred places after the decimal point, was of the same opinion. He lives in Scotland, anyway. He stuck a throw-away line in his March Budget to say that he endorses the Barker report. Now a group of researchers from the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has examined Barker's consequences for our countryside, and their findings are damning: 192,000 acres of greenfield land would be needed over and above brownfield sites, equivalent to ten times the area of Leicester, or half the county of Buckinghamshire. This is even before the huge pollution costs are measured.

Yet while the Barker report was issued with much fanfare, this latest document has been silent slipped on to the internet by Defra, obviously in the hope that no one would notice. Indeed, it has taken a month for anyone to do so. Everybody in Whitehall is terrified of upsetting Gordon Brown or John Prescott, who dreams of covering all Britain - save a few national parks - with concrete, and has granted himself statutory powers to do so.

Alun Michael, the Rural Affairs minister, said in an interview recently: "We don't want rural Britain to become amuseum of the landscape. Planning rules must make rural communities fit for the 21st century." In other words, they must be fattened up for developers. Mr Prescott will decide what landscape needs to be left, museum samples of our rural heritage. It is like authorising an elephant to tidy one's sitting room. This is a huge scandal, and thank goodness somebody has begun to notice.

Almost all the assumptions upon which the Government is acting are either doubtful or false. It is still not too late to stop this madness, if we care half as much about the countryside as we claim.

I am president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. After the Barker Report was published, we commissioned a research organisation, Europe Economics, to study its findings. Its conclusions were startling. Almost all Ms Barker's date is plain wrong. Let us take the simplest issue first: is Britain short of housing? No, it is not. The last national census shows there are more dwellings in Britain than there are house-holds to occupy them.

Yes, there is a huge demand for second homes. There is also a great need for 'affordable housing' at the bottom end of the social scale. But neither of these considerations suggests a national need for housing so great that it justifies putting thousands of square miles of grass under concrete. Andres Lilico, of Europe Economics, points out that between 1991 and 2001, the number of households in Britain grew by 1.2 million, yet we built 1.5 million new dwellings. so where is the great nationwide shortage of roofs?

Housebuilders want to build big houses, which are far more profitable than small ones. Yet these do nothing to solve the problem of finding homes for poorer families. The high price of housing in the South-East can perform a very useful social mechanism, by discouraging people from packing into one over-crowded corner of Britain, and instead living and working where house prices are lower.

The Chancellor bravely suggested last year that the best way to help public service workers afford housing is by abolishing the national wage rates so dear to trade unionists' hearts and paying key workers in health, police, transport and so on, much more in expensive areas. This is common sense.

The threat to our countryside stem from the fact that the Government has allowed itself to be stampeded by the house building lobby into believing there is a crisis which can be addressed only by draconian measures, and to hell with hedgerows, fields and wildlife. Mr Prescott has effectively abolished our counties' traditional powers over planning, in favour of a centralised struggle based upon the regions. Ultimately, all development decisions are now at the Deputy Prime Ministers' discretion.

The counties, focus for centuries of English rural loyalties, have done a marvellous job protecting our landscape. Prescott has emasculated them. He has replaced a presumption against building on greenfield sites with a presumption in favour. Yet the Government rused into all this without doing its homework. It claimed tat shortange of land for building was driving up house prices. It did not bother to discover that even in countries like Australia, and the United States, where there is almost unlimited land, house prices have risen pretty much in line with ours, for the same reason - low interest rates and speculation.

It would be naive and wrong to go from one extreme - the follies of Barker and Prescott - to the other, and suggest that we do not need more houses at all. Of course we do, and some will have to go on green fields. Those of us who oppose uncontrolled development have also go to behave responsibly, by thinking about what kinds of development do least damage to rural communites. The problem is that the pendulum has swung too far in the developers' favour.

Today, many people who profess to love the countryside still seem oblivious to the threat hanging over it from a brutish policy contrived by ministers who neither care about the landscape, nor are capable of doing their sums properly. It is welcome that the Defra researchers have blown a hole in the Barker report before its follies can be implemented. Let us pray somehody in the Treasury takes some notice.

The report is an example of economic engineering gone mad - an attempt to change the face of the British housing market by pouring millions of tons of concrete over it. Neither Gordon Brown nor John Prescott will be around to see the consequences of such a grand experiment. But our children and grand-children will be. We may be sure that, as they sit upon the vast housing estate New Labour seems eager to make out of England, they will think that we were mad.

 Beware the houses that Jags build

"Is Britain short of housing? No, it is not. The last national census shows there are more dwellings in Britain than there are house-holds to occupy them," writes Max Hastings.

"Yes, there is a huge demand for second homes. There is also a great need for 'affordable housing' at the bottom end of the social scale. But neither of these considerations suggests a national need for housing so great that it justifies putting thousands of square miles of grass under concrete. Andres Lilico, of Europe Economics, points out that between 1991 and 2001, the number of households in Britain grew by 1.2 million, yet we built 1.5 million new dwellings. so where is the great nationwide shortage of roofs?" Read his full report.

Making existing houses financially available to first-time buyers is a far better option than to cover the countryside with concrete. The Tories' propose a lifeline for first-time buyers.

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