Home ownership a ‘bulwark against populism’, says Localis

The think tank Localis has called for radical measures, including new towns in the south east of England, to help break the deadlock of people being unable to afford to buy a home.

In a report published today, called Disrupting the Housing Market, the think tank calls for the extension of the principle of auto-enrolment from pensions to saving deposits among 18-40 year-olds to radically speed up the time it takes young people to earn the deposit for their first house.

It also recommends employers and government chip into the auto-enrolment schemes to help homebuyers save enough.

The report suggests giving local authorities discretion to re-designate greenbelt land through the creation of ‘yellowfield registers’, which will allow the sustainable release of land for new homes.

It calls on government to give local authorities more flexibility to plan for new homes and recommends the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) be tasked with creating a programme of new towns where they are needed around the south east of England.

It also recommends extending protections and flexibilities for the increased numbers of individuals and families who use the private rented sector by allowing them to choose their initial tenancy length at six-month intervals up to 36 months, with a one-month break option after six months

‘Home-ownership is a bulwark against populism and radicalisation,’ said Localis chief executive, Liam Booth-Smith. ‘When you have a tangible stake in society you are far less likely to want to tear it down. It is also an important life ambition, one that recent generations have enjoyed and future generations should too.

‘The housing market is everyone’s problem,’ he added. ‘Those who already own their home are dependent on someone else buying it. If the first rung of the housing ladder is lifted too high, there will be fewer and fewer buyers to sell to in the future.’

Speaking today at the report’s launch event in Westminster, housing minister Alok Sharma said there was a ‘lot of interesting stuff in this report’.

‘It is not just going to be the government,’ he said. ‘It is going to be all of us together who will make sure we will get these homes built. When we get to the next election, what I want is people to say it was a Conservative government who put fairness back into the housing market.’

Mr Sharma said he also wants to see Section 106 and viability assessments, which can often affect the number of affordable homes built in a development, to be ‘simpler and much more transparent’.

‘What we are going to do is make sure the issue around viability is something considered in local plans,’ he told the event. ‘So, by the time you get to look at viability on individual sites, there will be much less room for movement.’

‘I hope that even privately some of the larger developers will acknowledge they are not building at the rate they should,’ he added. ‘There are measures we are setting out for more transparency, requiring people to tell us that if we give them planning permission tomorrow, when they will start building and when they will finish.’

‘In terms of the New Homes Bonus, we have already said that from 2018/19, we will consider whether we should be withholding the New Homes Bonus payments in places that are not planning effectively,’ added the minister.

Also speaking at the event, the managing director of the Lovell Group, Jonathan Goring, raised the issue of surplus land owned by government departments.

‘I spent five years working with the Ministry of Defence on their surplus land,’ said Mr Goring. ‘They have declared 30% of MOD land is surplus and we actually commissioned a report, which suggested there are 90,000 central government-owned [surplus] sites – that’s 460,000 hectares of land.

‘For those who try to keep the balance the green belt between what is available already, I would suggest can try a lot harder to flush out the land available,’ he added.

Liam Halligan, an economist and journalist for the Sunday Telegraph said housing is ‘the most pressing issue in British politics’, and added it is ‘even more important than Brexit’.

‘I think Help to Buy is just a quick fix and a sop to a very powerful house-building lobby,’ he said at the event. ‘The housing market used to be a source of social mobility, ambition and aspiration. The housing market now is a source of social immobility, bitterness and rancour.

‘I’m a free marketer, but when the market is broken, the state needs to intervene. The supply side of the housing market is not working. It has all the characteristics of an oligopoly.

‘The most important line in this report for me is that home-ownership is a bulwark against populism and radicalisation,’ added Mr Halligan.

‘Can it be right that young people living in Surrey are not able to buy their own homes, even if they hold down their own job and work hard. There is more acreage given over in Surrey to golf courses than to residential property – that’s outrageous!

‘Unless people feel they have a stake in society, then they will not believe in society. Unless people have some capital, they will not believe in capitalism. And for that reason, if for no other, we have to grab hold of this problem and solve it.’