South of England 'must allow green field homes'

Hundreds of thousands of new homes will have to be built on green field land in southern England if a crisis in public service recruitment is to be avoided.

Owner occupiers will have to throw off "the folk memory of the slum clearance disasters of the 1950s and 1960s" and see their homes compulsorily purchased, demolished and rebuilt.

These are among the conclusions in a study to be published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation later this month. The foundation, the largest social research charity in the country with a large portfolio of housing studies, has lent its prestige to a head-on challenge to what the study calls the "anti-development lobby".

Its report, which advocates a new generation of new towns around London, is to be released at a conference to mark the centenary of the establishment by Joseph Rowntree of a model village at Earswick, near York.

It has been compiled by a panel of academics, builders and planners including such distinguished names as Christine Whitehead of Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. They call on Labour to remember it was the party that passed the 1957 Town and Country Planning Act, and on the Tories to recall their role in building up the new towns.

The report says England needs a "pro-active planning culture" to allow the government to take such controversial steps as compulsorily purchasing large tracts of suburban housing to redevelop at higher densities; to force councils into accepting growth; and to capture increases in land value for the public benefit.

The report says Labour has deliberately underestimated demand for housing by nearly half a million units by 2016.

In a direct appeal to the chancellor, Gordon Brown, it predicts bottlenecks restricting economic growth and damaging the UK's international competitiveness unless housing development is allowed in London and the south - and the government provides higher subsidies allowing affordable flats and houses to be built.

The report says the imbalance between housing supply - the housing industry is building fewer homes per year than at any time since the early 1920s - and demand will not show through in people sleeping rough on the streets.

The problems will be increasing recruitment problems for both private and public sector employers, with rising prices exacerbating the difficulties.

Date: 4th March 2002
Source: The Guardian