WHAT'S WRONG WITH MOCK-TUDOR?
The Nimbys are impoverishing us and destroying freedom, says Ross Clark
JOHN PRESCOTT must wish he could hitch a lift in a time-machine back to the 1940s. The moment he stepped out from his Whitehall office to announce that 1.1 million more new homes were going to be built in the South-east over the next 17 years, he would have been mobbed. `Prescott announces another million homes fit for heroes,' the newsreels would have announced within the week. 'It's thank you and goodbye to the pre-fab.'
Yet back in our mean-minded 1990s, what happens when poor Mr Prescott announces, apologetically, that it might be necessary to build more houses in the South-east, but they'll be as small as possi- ble and we'll try to squeeze as many of them on to the sites of old sewage works as we can? You can hardly hear him speak for the squelch of green wellies marching through the shires in protest.
There was a time when both main politi- cal parties were essentially committed to improving living standards. Whomever you voted for, you could be pretty confident they were in favour of better and cheaper food, better and cheaper housing, better and cheaper everything. But no longer. When rationing of eggs and butter ended, to much relief, in the 1950s I bet few would have pre- dicted that 45 years later politicians of all hues would be intent on rationing houses: rationing them to the point at which a mod- est two-up two-down in a city like Winch- ester costs £120,000, and families on average incomes desperate for a decent home are left fighting over a few old council houses.
Why do we put up with planning policies that are quite obviously impoverishing us? Why do we tolerate a situation that has driven up the price of building land in the South-east to 11 million an acre and ensured that we have to pay twice as much to put a roof over our heads as do the Americans? Because the Nimbys have got to us, that's why. Nimbys like the Prince of Wales, who earlier this year threw his royal weight behind a campaign by locals in the Herefordshire village of Kingsland to block a scheme of affordable houses on the grounds it would have detracted from the views from their sitting-rooms. Nimbys like Boris Johnson, editor of this maga- zine, who in these pages last week had a good old moan about new housing devel- opments in Sussex.
And, worst of all, Nimbys like John Red- wood, whose suggested Nimbys' charter would give local authorities the right to block all new housing developments. I'm coming to the conclusion that this is the most irresponsible policy to come out of a shadow Cabinet since Michael Foot com- mitted his party to unilateral nuclear disar- mament. Local authorities already block every new house they think they can get away with — which is why, of the 176,000 new homes deemed by the government to be needed each year, only an average of 148,000 are actually being built. The rate of new house building in this country is now so low that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calculates that our homes — yes, even the damp, jerry-built Coronation Streets — will have to last longer than the Pyramids.
Investing any more power in the Nimbys will bring the economy of the South-east to a halt. The same people who squeal about house-building now will be squealing all the louder when they can't get their boiler fixed, can't get a hospital appointment, can't find a decent school for their children, because scarcity of houses has forced the price of the meanest cottage up to 5100,000 and driven out all the plumbers, doctors and teachers. Redwood is completely turning his back on the policy which earned his party its election victories in the 1980s: encouragement of home ownership (it was after all Nicholas Ridley who coined the term Nitnby). For the children of the generation which bought their council houses, all a future Tory administration would have to offer is a card- board box or a forced eviction up north. And all for the sake of preserving a few EU- `Suing for libel could be a big misiaks Mr Pinocchio.' subsidised turnip fields down south.
In 50 years' time, the Cambridgeshire farmer Oliver Walston tried to fri en
in the Sunday Telegraph last month, farms like his are going to become 'like surrey or Connecticut'. Does he not realise what joy that prospect brings to huge numbers of ordinary suburban Englishmen? Oh good: does that mean his treeless, godforsaken corner of East Anglia is suddenly going to sprout silver birches, leafy golf courses interspaced with sandy heaths, and become dotted with glorious mock-Tudor architec- tural curiosities? Is it going to mean long back-gardens full of wildlife rather than a mud-pan from which all animal life has long since been exterminated by EU-sub- sidised chemical farming? Give me a choice between Surrey and Oliver Wal- ston's farm, and I'll take Surrey any day.
It's no use, though, trying to argue with Nimbys that house-building can actually have environmental benefits. Their minds are made up: they have a pathological hatred of any house built after 1910. When, grudgingly, the good countryfolk of the South-east have to allow housing in their backyard, it always has to be a pastiche of some miserable 18th-century peasant's hovel. It's no use showing them pictures of wonderful modern prefabricated wood and glass pavilions, already developed in other countries, which could cheer up the less special corners of the Home Counties and bring cheap housing, too.
Nimbys think only in terms of large grey blobs on maps: don't you realise that the new planning guidelines will mean a new Swindon in the South-east every year? they ask. Why do they always pick the ugly places with which to make their comparisons? Why can't it be two new Oxfords or three new Baths every year?
The Nimbys do have one point: a lot of modern mass-produced housing does have a dreary sameness about it. But it is house- rationing that encourages mass-production. It is a corrupt system. When local authorities are presented with housing quotas, most of them take fright at the collected forces of Nimbyism, and try to squeeze all those hous- es into a few large sites removed from the main Nimby villages. The large-scale house- builders effectively buy planning permission in return for building the odd school or gyra- tory system.
I've got a better idea: pick out some of the less attractive corners of the South-east and simply free them from the shackles of planning law. Mark out a few roads, paths, parks, but beyond that let anything go. Let people buy plots of land and engage in their own little architectural fantasies. Leave the Nimbys alone in their silly little squirearchies and create elsewhere islands of opportunity where free men can build what they like on their land. Let's have tur- rets, towers, modernist dreams: in other words, let's re-create the planning free-for- all which gave us all that pre-1910 architec- ture that the Nimbys so admire.
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