Land value capture looks like an idea whose time has come
Posted: September 13, 2018 Filed under: Compulsory purchase, Land | Tags: land value capture Leave a commentOriginally published on September 13 on my blog for Inside Housing.
How does land worth £21,000 or £482,000 per hectare suddenly become worth £1.95m? And who should get the windfall?
The answer to the first question is, of course, when agricultural or industrial land is granted planning permission for residential use (all three figures are estimates in government statistics).
The answer to the second is much more complicated – getting it right could boost construction of new homes and provide a new source of funds for infrastructure and affordable housing; getting it wrong could destroy incentives for landowners to bring land forward and mean housebuilding dries up.
Now the all-party Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee has published a report on an issue that has a long history dating back to Winston Churchill’s criticism of the ‘unearned increment’ made by landowners following public investment in infrastructure – and even right back to Henry VIII.
Support for reform has grown across the political spectrum and even the last Conservative manifesto promised to ‘work with private and public sector housebuilders’ on the issue.
Supporters note, correctly, that the success of the post-war new towns was based on their ability to buy land at existing use value and use the uplift to fund infrastructure but that all this was stymied by legislation such as the 1961 Land Compensation Act that entitled landowners to the ‘hope value’ after their land is developed.
At the same time history is littered with examples of governments introducing uplift levies and tariffs and supplements that failed to deliver and sceptical landowners and housebuilders argue that reform will be prove much more complicated than supporters make out.
A look ahead to the Budget part one: the land question
Posted: November 13, 2017 Filed under: Budget, Compulsory purchase, Land, Section 106 | Tags: Churchill, Civitas, Joseph Chamberlain Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on November 13.
More than ever before, this year’s Budget looks like a watershed moment for housing.
Philip Hammond is under mounting pressure from all sides to do something big and bold and break with the failed policies of the past.
The calls for something radical are coming from more than just the usual suspects and are for more than just a cheque with lots of zeros.
Conservative MPs know that they cling to power (just) thanks to the votes of elderly home owners. Brexit may dominate everything but many of them realise that beneath the surface housing is one of the key issues poisoning their relationship with the under-45s.
They understand that cynical policies like Help to Buy are no longer enough, that the party is running out of time and that it has to look at policies that were previously unthinkable.
Yet conventional wisdom says that we’ve heard all this before, that Hammond’s caution and the Treasury’s orthodoxy will turn thinking that was big and bold into outcomes that are tame and timid on November 22.
After the announcements in the last few weeks of an extra £10bn for Help to Buy, another £2bn for social housing and the u-turn on the LHA cap for social and supported housing, how much is left for the chancellor to say (or spend)?
However, another view says that the housing question has such serious social, economic and political implications that the answers cannot be put off any longer. See this blog by Toby Lloyd for a good round-up of some possibilities.
In a series of columns ahead of the Budget, I’ll be looking at some of the crucial questions concerning investment, tax and welfare and, to kick things off, land. Will the Budget be big and bold – or tame and timid?
Housing in the Conservative manifesto
Posted: May 18, 2017 Filed under: Compulsory purchase, Council housing, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing First | Tags: Conservatives 1 CommentOriginally posted on May 18 on my blog for Inside Housing.
This is a Conservative manifesto with only two firm targets on housing but lots of interesting hints about future direction and some intriguing omissions.
The first target is to halve rough sleeping by 2022 and eliminate it completely by 2027 by implementing the Homelessness Reduction Act and piloting a Housing First approach.
The 2022 target may seem bold but it would mean that rough sleeping would still be significantly higher than it was in 2010 when the coalition came to power.
The one for 2027 is incredibly ambitious and would mean matching Finland’s incredible record on homelessness within ten years.
Sajid Javid obviously returned fired up from his visit to Helsinki but you wonder if he took on board just how comprehensive and well-funded the Finnish version of Housing First needed to be to work.
The second target is ‘meet our 2015 commitment to deliver a million homes by the end of 2020 and we will deliver half a million more by the end of 2022’.
The first bit is unambitious and should be achievable, especially as the end point has been shifted from May 2020 (the original end of the parliament) to December 2020.
As the National Audit Office pointed out in January, that would actually mean that fewer new homes will be built over the next three years than were achieved last year. This is on the basis of the net additional supply of homes rather than just housebuilding completions.
The second bit is a different matter. A quick look at the net supply figures shows that there have only been three years in the last 25 when we have exceeded 200,000.
Jules Birch 