Polly Toynbee’s piece misses the central point about the housing crisis (In Kent, Labour has a fight on its hands – and a make-or-break test for its housing revolution, 19 November). It is a crisis of affordability, not supply, brought about by the over-financialisation of the stock through a decade and a half of interest rates close to zero.
Prices rose from three or four times average earnings to more than nine times as investors shifted cash from deposits to bricks and mortar. No arbitrary housing targets will ever correct that because simple arithmetic is against it, never mind that developers won’t increase supply to the point where they have to drop prices. And the threat of rescinding unbuilt planning consents would see material starts, so that forfeiture would leave a mess for early buyers to live with, and someone else to sort out.
Before automatic sacrifice of green space, shorter-term measures are needed, such as requiring holiday lets to have planning consent, to counter the commandeering of dwellings to turn into private profit streams – something that has decimated the rental market in some areas. Inherited property wealth, which has snowballed with market bloating and widened social division, should be a separate tax category. And, although higher council tax rates on non-principal residences have begun to bite, long‑term empty property should attract accelerated rates.
New-builds, meanwhile – and Toynbee doesn’t mention this – should focus on social housing.
John Worrall
Cromer, Norfolk
• The irrefutable evidence of the past 30 or more years is that the price of a home goes up and up regardless of the amount supplied – the housing market that responds to supply by reducing prices is a myth.
The MP Kevin McKenna is quoted as saying that developers “will only get permission to build if they raise the percentage of affordable housing and keep their community pledges”. The government may be able to extract such a pledge in exchange for granting permission, but no planning condition can prevent a developer from subsequently claiming looming impoverishment and applying for its social or affordable housing contribution to be reduced or removed altogether. This will continue to be the case until the government abolishes the viability test, which is the rotten core of the current system.
The test virtually guarantees a 20% profit margin on every development, regardless of what is sacrificed in order to achieve it. In the meantime, unneeded executive homes will continue to be the majority of what’s built, despite being unaffordable, and the country’s shrinking carbon budget for getting to net zero by 2050 will continue to be frittered away to maintain the flow of money from developers to the main political parties.
Ian Tysh
Green party councillor with planning and environment portfolio at Wealden district council
• Reading Polly Toynbee’s article, I was struck by the delightful artist’s impression online of the proposed Highsted Park development in Swale, Kent. And not a car in sight! I do hope, if and when it is built, you find room for a photograph showing it again. This time, no doubt, complete with cars everywhere, including on the pavements.
Sam Gibson
Ravensthorpe, Northampton
• Hidden in the vast swaths of nimbyism are real concerns about the lack of infrastructure that is needed for new developments. Where I live, they plan to increase the village population by 20%. This is typical of hundreds of villages facing this sort of expansion, and yet nothing is being done to expand local sewage treatment, cycle lanes, doctor’s surgeries, schools, road junctions … all of which are over capacity already. I would welcome new housing in our village if it meant that Southern Water would stop dumping raw sewage into Chichester harbour . Asking for local infrastructure to expand with the population is not nimbyism.
Andrew Gould
Bosham, West Sussex
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