Letter: Our National Parties Need a Reality Check

Published on: 18 Dec, 2024
Updated on: 18 Dec, 2024

From David Roberts

See: Government Confirms Doubling of Housing Target for Guildford and Local Party Leaders React to News of New Housing Target for Guildford

I don’t purport to understand the so-called “Standard Method”, which, though not mandatory, has been the default way to calculate local housing targets.

It is so obscure that no one except a small priesthood of property insiders does understand it. From this point of view, Labour’s new ambition to build 1,170 dwellings per annum (dpa) in Guildford (up from the Local Plan’s 562) fails the key test of commanding public understanding and consent.

To state the obvious, the answer is transparent, there should be fair burden-sharing across the country.

However you divvy up the 1.5 million, it’s impossible to reach a figure like 1,170 dpa for Guildford.

Guildford accounts for 1.1 per cent of the UK’s surface area, 0.22 per cent of its GDP and 0.24 per cent of its population.

As a share of the 1.5 million, this translates to a range of 110-240 dpa – far fewer than in the existing Local Plan which, as everyone accepts, is already based on inflated housing need data.

No one would object to a range of 110-240. Anything more reflects a futile effort to soak up housing demand (in this case a limitless overflow from London) rather than meet genuine local housing need as reflected in the borough’s size, population and wealth. And tilting the figures like this merely makes the UK’s serious regional inequalities even worse.

Just as much as the needless destruction of nature, this national “levelling down” is the real pernicious result of the Tories’ Local Plan and Labour’s new targets.

All our national parties need a reality check. A building industry spokesman says 30,000 skilled workers will be needed to build every 10,000 new houses. Three per house, which sounds reasonable. So 1.5 million will require 4.5 million workers. Short of mass immigration from China, this just isn’t realistic.