Blue-Collar Conservatism in Britain?

[Valin]

City Journal

Boris Johnson’s party answers to a different voting coalition—and could deliver major reforms, especially in housing policy.

Oliver Wiseman

January 10, 2020

Britain’s Conservatives won an 80-seat majority last month on a streamlined platform, promising to “get Brexit done.” Since that thumping victory, a focus on the defining issue since 2016 has transitioned to hyperactivity on all fronts. The recent Queen’s Speech, in which the government outlined its legislative agenda, contained the most proposed bills since 2006. These ambitious plans join additional measures made possible by an end to parliamentary gridlock.

The government is wasting no time using its majority to tackle the issue of housing, with a plan to overhaul Britain’s complicated and economically harmful planning laws. Leaked details suggest that these reforms will be more than tinkering at the edges. According to one report, Boris Johnson’s government plans to let developers and homeowners build up to two extra floors on buildings without necessarily requiring planning approval. It also plans to loosen rules that limit building on greenbelt areas. If enacted, these policies would enrage housing restrictionists—and the angrier they get, the more likely it is that the government is on the right track.

For decades, Britain hasn’t built enough houses. In the 1970s, U.K. buyers, on average, could buy a home for less than three times their gross salary; today, they need more than seven times that sum. Since that period, the average inflation-adjusted price of a house has more than quadrupled. No other OECD country has seen such a steep rise.

And Britain fails to build houses where they’re needed most. As Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics points out, housebuilding trends run contrary to economic logic. Reviewing a 40-year comparison of the shrinking towns of Barnsley and Doncaster with the university cities of Cambridge and Oxford, Cheshire found that the struggling localities—despite their economic disadvantages—built almost twice as many homes as the prosperous ones. Restrictionists often blame rising costs on predatory buy-to-let landlords, the empty houses of the superrich, and loose monetary policy, but in this case, the simplest explanation is the most plausible: housing supply hasn’t kept up with housing demand.  

(Snip)