John Harris insists that housing is top of the Labour agenda for change (Labour, beware: Britain’s housing crisis is driving voters towards populism, 23 September). Labour promises to build 300,000 homes per year for the next five years. Targets are necessary, but quantities are not enough. Labour needs to build neighbourhoods. There is no precise specification for a neighbourhood, so it will need to address the difficult task of drawing one up. Housing needs to be clustered into highly organised densities, because every house dweller needs to be within walking distance of amenities. We can ask of any new housing scheme: does it increase social isolation and dependence on the car, or does it foster community life?
Harris notes that the commercial market is not able to build neighbourhoods, which is why there is so much poor housing. The government is considering lifting planning restrictions to promote construction, but it will not lead to better housing. Unless new housing is inventively integrated with public spaces that host the daily life of its inhabitants – including supermarkets, hardware stores, bookstores and cafes, and public amenities including parks, doctor surgeries, libraries and bus stops, within walkable distances, none of which are possible in the homebuilder business model – a massive housing programme runs the risk of creating social discontent in the future. This will require public investment.
Whether the government builds houses in existing neighbourhoods that can handle the housing load or builds new neighbourhoods, it will need an operational specification for neighbourhoods – even if it is provisional – as much as it needs housing targets. It should draw on design research on neighbourhoods and sustainability in UK universities.
Dr Lorens Holm
Reader in architecture, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee
• John Harris is right, right and right again. In housing triage, the nation needs to prioritise people without homes of any sort, and those who are being harmed every day by their unfit, dangerous, overcrowded housing. The next priority, but in parallel, is housing also for everybody’s sons, daughters and grandchildren. This will not be achieved by inviting developers to build their usual fare on green belt. There has to be thinking and planning.
The government needs to specify what proportion of new homes is to be for social rent (50%? 60%?) and empower local authorities to build and manage them. In the overblown private rented sector, a strong body of inspectors, largely self-funded through fees and fines, could enforce the existing legislation, so landlords fund the measures to keep tenants healthy and safe.
An immediate quick win to the Department for Work and Pensions of millions of pounds would be to reduce by stages the money paid to profiteering “supported exempt accommodation” landlords, make extra payments dependent on proof of outlay on qualifying costs from landlords, and no longer exempt them from ordinary houses in multiple-occupation regulation.
And finally, quickest win of all, give local authorities the duty and resources (they already have the power) to bring the 260,000 long-term homes that are empty back into use within two years.
Good housing saves lives, saves costs to the NHS, and gives children a chance. John Harris is right: let the work begin.
Frances Heywood
Healthier Housing Partnership
• John Harris rightly calls out continuing right to buy as counterproductive to any Labour drive to reverse our housing crisis. It’s so sad that Angela Rayner just plans a long, drawn-out consultation on altering the discount, while retaining purchase rights. My father and grandfather built many council houses in Weaverham as part of the postwar Labour government’s social housing drive. About three in four are now sold off.
I finished my career as chair of a Welsh housing stock transfer. We had 3,000 homes, but if right to buy had not existed, we would have had more than 9,000 units available to relieve the area’s dire housing needs. That now costs the council millions in sourcing temporary accommodation.
The Welsh Labour government has had the strategic vision to ban right-to-buy sales over the last several years. Learn from Wales Labour, Angela Rayner.
Jim Illidge
Rhos on Sea, Conwy
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