I live in Haslemere, a rural valley town in Surrey where a newly-built, three-bedroom detached home has just gone on sale for £1,595,000.
Despite the high prices, the construction of new homes is an incendiary subject.
The current talk of the town is the proposed second phase of the Scotland Park development, on the edge of the South Downs National Park and partly within the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).
Many a local resident has cursed the pesky badger when it comes to renovating their own home and garden, but the protection of our nocturnal friend is one of the reasons being pitted against these plans — along with the dormouse, the slowworm, ancient trees and a creaking road system.
“ There is a lack of a proactive council- and community-led housing plan to meet the needs of local people.”
Whatever side of the fence you sit on regarding this particular scheme, the detail distracts from a far bigger, systemic and widespread problem: a lack of a proactive council- and community-led housing plan to meet the needs of local people.
Fear of voter uproar in the southeast, a lack of funding, and the scrapping of enforceable housing targets last year by Michael Gove (secretary of state for levelling up, housing and community) means that the rate of housebuilding both in the capital and in the surrounding commuter belt is interminably slow, while the housing affordability crisis continues to gather pace and engulf the whole region.
The average house price to income ratio in London and Surrey, is 13.3 and 12.4 respectively.
“Gove has regurgitated the 30-year-old strategy.”
So, do this week's announcements from the Conservative Party on planning and building, in the run up to the Budget in March and the General Election in the autumn, tackle this tension in the housing market once and for all?
Gove has regurgitated the 30-year-old strategy of "turbo charging" housebuilding by prioritising brownfield sites in cities, as well as relaxing planning laws to allow the easy conversion of offices and empty shops into homes.
These rehashed policy plays create hollow headlines and do little to drive the delivery of homes in a meaningful way.
For example, in the year to April 2023 only 451 new homes were completed from the permitted development of commercial, business and service-use buildings out of a total of 234,000 across the country.
As for brownfield, there are not great swathes of post-industrial sites in London being turned down for development by councils.
“We cannot solve the housing crisis by converting a few empty shops into homes.
Marcus Dixon, director of residential research at consultancy JLL, describes these announcements as tinkering round the edges.
"None of these solutions do enough on their own,” said Dixon.
“We cannot solve the housing crisis by converting a few empty shops into homes and of course many of them won't be suitable for that.”
Gove also pointed a finger at borough and county councils.
He instructed them to be "less bureaucratic" and "more flexible" in waving through development on brownfield land. And yet with this empty edict came none of the much-needed funding to enable local government to even resource planning departments properly let alone galvanise them into efficiency.
“Neither Gove nor Khan wants to touch the political grenade that is the green belt.”
He slammed the London Mayor, Labour's Sadiq Khan, for "poor housing delivery in the capital."
But it seems both sides have something in common: neither wants to touch the political grenade that is the green belt.
In 2019 the national inspectorate criticised Khan's London Plan for avoiding the issue.
It said that a strategic review of the green belt that surrounds London is the only way to meet housing need, calling it an "inescapable conclusion".
"We are stuck at an impasse," says Emily Williams of Savills.
“We can build affordable homes without sacrificing natural spaces."
Both Williams and Dixon are calling for a "grown-up conversation" about the reclassification of different parts of the green belt.
CPRE (the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Britain) sums it up sensibly: "Local policy needs to better support sensitively designed rural exemption schemes to deliver community-led affordable housing. With that approach we can build affordable homes without sacrificing natural spaces."
While Haslemere's Scotland Park is arguably high-quality green belt of high ecological value, there are plenty of old petrol stations in villages and scrub land surrounding rural railway hubs that technically sit within home counties' green belt, locking in the capital, but are of lower quality in terms of biodiversity than some brownfield sites.
But that's an inconvenient truth in an election year.
