There’s no place like home: some thoughts on an idyllic childhood on a council estate in South Wales

This is based on a piece I wrote for English Heritage before I left the UK at the end of 2010. It still has resonance , in the UK and Australia I think where housing design and location challenges are also considerable. I draw attention to the bits in brackets pointing out the failings of CLG then and now – and how the same people responsible for messing up then have messed up over planning today . Does no-one senior get whacked for failure in that place?



I was born in a council house in South Wales. Today ‘council housing’ conjures up inner-city flats with tumbleweed blowing around inhospitable spaces between bleak Bauhausian towers. In fact, I grew up in an idyllic place, styled on the Garden Village model with spacious houses and massive gardens – all within walking distance of shops, schools, jobs, pubs and the countryside.Urbs in rure .( I add that the great planner and force of nature Sir Peter Hall once told me that I couldn’t have been brought up in a garden village because he’d never heard of Beddau Garden Village , and was the world’s leading authority on Garden Villages, so it couldn’t exist. I regard Peter as right on most things except this.)

So attached am I to this house and this place that I bought it for my parents. When they died I kept it to pass to my daughter one day. Its value? A lot more than its asking price, which is about half a pantry in Chelsea. This house is never leaving my family. It means too much. Because it’s not a house, let alone a ‘unit’. It’s a home.

While all of us are sentimental about home, research shows that families languishing eight storeys up a tower block on a ‘brown-field site’ don’t have this attachment to where they live. They hanker to leg it to somewhere like where I’m from. A good family home with garden in a great place. A place where we’d all like to live. A toxic mixture of public policy and the market conspires against that objective.

There’s no place like home – which makes it surprising that this country currently builds rubbish places and homes. Because of the credit crunch I bring you good news and bad. The bad is that we build the smallest, worst-designed, most expensive housing in Christendom – and in places people don’t want to live. The good news? We’ve stopped! Housing delivery in 2008–9 dropped to the lowest levels seen in recent decades and it hasn’t recovered. We must not waste this crisis and return to bad old British ways of building homes ‘fit for zeros’ when the upturn happens. It’s not that we don’t know how to build great places and homes. England’s full of them. But caring about stately homes and historic buildings is one thing: what about stately places, great settlements and the future thereof?

As some kind of advisor to every housing minister between 2005 and 2010, I claim my share of blame, though my crimes are few compared with the planning process, the financial regulations and the house-builders’ business model. These are at the heart of the modern, national failure to build the homes we need, in the right places, to the right quality. The planning process has become too expensive and onerous to navigate and is a barrier to entry for small companies. There is a link between the high transaction costs of English planning and the dominance of six mega-builders who at the peak of the bubble built 50 per cent of the stock. In Australia the top 100 companies built a third.

Planning has given an anti-competitive advantage to big guys and the stuff they build. Before the bubble popped 70 per cent of that ‘stuff’ was one and two bed-roomed flats on brown-field sites at high ensities. The demand was not driven by need but the availability of cheap credit for speculators. Wrong stock, wrong place. What else was wrong? Those who built it, and how. Despite the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and warehouses of guidance – some written by me –  the point is missed. Design quality in the UK is rooted in the housebuilders’ business model and incentivising other models must be the object of public policy.

House-builders have a scarcity model of provision. It was a delusion of the last Labour government to assume on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis that they would increase production to 230,000 extra homes a year. Their model requires a 22 per cent return on capital before they will lay a brick. If by building ‘too many’ in a local market they endanger that return, they stop. They sell on scarcity and will not entertain raising productivity and lowering margins. When commodities are scarce the seller has the upper hand. In government  and in the housing department, we simply didn’t understand then the business model of the house-builders ,though the great Tony Pidgley of Berekely Homes did try and explain it to us. In 2006/7 we just didn’t get it.

I started getting it when I helped write the Housing Green Paper of July 2007 which called for alternative models to those of the house-builders which led to the emergence of the Local Housing Company model (another great idea of mine which never took off ,partly because of Treasury resistance to new models not thought up  by them and partly through the usual Departmental inertia .I note en passant that the team which brought us that inertia was also responsible for the HIPs fiasco and now the planning crisis in which the Tories find themselves.The Romans used to throw people of the Tarpian Rock to encourage others to do better.Why CLG continues to reward failure is beyond the ken of rational beings).

But there’s more. The model is one of ‘build it and bugger off ’. The house-builder does not want a long-term interest in stock or developments. Speedy disposal is the norm, releasing cash to build another box. The heart of darkness of the British design fiasco is here: the things that create quality homes and places – long-term engagement, a market based on consumer not producer choice – are undermined by this model.

Pleasingly for English Heritage the answer is ‘back to the future’. We know how to do this. The great London squares and model English villages, indeed the great centres created in our cities by Victorian civic leaders, show us the way. We just need to understand the real sources of their design quality and emulate it. That means enabling models that deliver what we want and punishing the rest. It also means empowering consumer choice and accepting the consequences.

What works well? A market of small builders with competing business models offering real choice. Sole traders, cooperatives, self-build. Take an axe to regulatory burdens – and copy the way that Dutch local authorities dispose of land. They don’t sell freeholds to the highest bidder at top dollar and wash their hands as in Britain. They master plan it, put in infrastructure and keep a long-term interest in land. There, a myriad of providers enters the housing market. Diverse housing styles and long-term management result. To be fair to UK house-builders, their failed model is centred on the fact that they have been expected to take too much risk on land. We need approaches that reduce that risk. This is an opportunity as well as a problem – and one that should renew interest in quality private rented provision. The London squares showed what a single owner, leasing land and using a high-quality pattern-book approach to design, can produce. Only four or five types of homes were allowed in such places but all marvellous, using the best in traditional designs combined with innovation. The leasehold arrangement meant long-term oversight and management of quality- of the place and not just the houses. What’s not to like? The single owner need not be private. It can be a municipal or not-for-profit owner such as a housing association. The civic centres of our great cities were built through the municipal model of development with not a house-builder or Treasury official in sight.

So we must restore local government to its historic strength, in control of its own destinies and finances, renewing its own places. Civic renewal and pride require civic freedoms. Localism, anybody? Not a slogan but a necessity if we are to rebuild as well as we first built. Enhancing diversity, local discretion and choice is dangerous. Before we know it people will live where they want in houses they love. There is evidence that the part of the housing market that is still active has turned to seeking land on green-field sites for houses not flats. Where I grew up. Highly desirable, maybe sometimes unsustainable, but where we all want to live. Well-designed homes in good places. It cannot be beyond public policy to enable us not simply to visit excellent houses from the past but live in them in the future. Can it?