Nick Boles's fait accompli: for housing you like, build on the countryside

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/28/nick-boles-housing-build-on-countryside

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"Concreting over the countryside" is an evocative phrase. It suggests roaring waves of bulldozers and cement mixers erecting serried ranks of tower blocks across our sites of outstanding natural beauty. However, as anyone who has seen an out-of-town development for the past 30 years knows, it means something quite different in practice. Winding cul-de-sacs of "vernacular" houses with gardens, with each street named after something that used to be there – thousands of Orchard Closes and Cedar Drives.

It's not as odd as it might initially sound to find a Conservative politician, planning minister Nick Boles, confidently advocating massive development. Apparently, "all we need to do is build on 3% of land and we've solved a housing problem". That means something around the size of Greater London. Rural campaigners have reacted with horror. So how did planning and conservation become the enemy of the party of order and conservatism?

For the past few decades, the Tory party has veered between two only seemingly contradictory impulses. One wing aims to stop urban and suburban development and to stringently protect the landscapes of southern England; the other aims for development at all costs, especially in lucrative southern England.

The concrete-over-the-countryside wing was dominant in the 80s, when Nicholas Ridley decimated town planning in favour of ex-urban "non-planning", with developers given carte blanche; the conservationist wing seemed to win out under John Major, when his government brought in restrictions on out-of-town developments. To use the language of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the Tories "de-territorialise", with the ruthless homogenising destruction that accompanies neoliberal economics; then they immediately "re-territorialise", dragging in flags, green fields and anthems to cover up the cracks.

What Nick Boles's comments on planning have done is offer a fait accompli to Tories. If you want everyone to have a house and garden, if you want the housing market to pick up, and if you want a house to be affordable for your children, then you must logically support building in the south-eastern countryside, not far from your back yard. There is, as always, no alternative. On his own terms, he's right, although his claim that the results would be "beautiful" is more improbable.

The problem is that the terms of the debate are so skewed as to make it completely pointless. Housing isn't kept expensive because of undersupply as such, but for an entire complex of reasons – the overdevelopment of the south-east over the rest of the country, the refusal to allow the building of council housing (and now even "affordable" housing), the concentration of land in the hands of a few powerful landowners, the refusal to regulate landlords or introduce rent control, a national economy that relies upon floating and refloating housing bubbles … but none of these can be confronted without challenging the power of builders, developers, landlords and landowners, who are even more crucial to the Tory party than outer-suburban nimbys.

Boles is tapping into something maybe equally fundamental in the rightwing psyche – the hostility to planning as such. In the Ridley era, planning was emasculated to such a degree that it still hasn't recovered – witness the miserable, gimcrack cityscapes built under New Labour. The last time Boles got himself in trouble for inflammatory comments was in 2010, when he advocated "chaos" in local government, as opposed to "believing that clever people sitting in a room can plan how communities should develop". Aside from a conception of what town planning is that would embarrass a GCSE geography student, you can see here some proper red-blooded libertarian thinking.

Ridley's destruction of town and country planning was partly influenced by a source from leftfield – "Non-Plan", a late-60s proposal by radical architects and thinkers to curb planners' power and let people do their own thing. As should be expected in something so capital-intensive as housing and development, that meant letting developers do their own thing. But the rhetoric survives – in his "chaos" comments Boles talked of the exciting flux of restaurants opening and closing, people unpredictably deciding to move elsewhere, and "lots of organisations doing different things in different areas". It sounds so much more attractive than what in practice means handing local government and planning over to Serco and Barratt.

Tellingly, Boles's proposals also give planners greater power – not the power of local government planners to plan but<strong> </strong>giving a "planning inspectorate" the power to overrule local authorities, who will not be able to appeal. That's a reminder that the conflicting rhetoric, whether cosily conservationist or stridently libertarian, obscures the common interest of the middle classes in housebuilding and home ownership. The means are different – stopping development keeps house prices up, encouraging it stops the developers from going bust. All agree not to think about the alternatives – building public housing on public land, for the five million people on the council waiting list, or taking over some of the 930,000 empty homes in Britain, 100,000 of which lie guarded and unused in London. And why should they, as how much profit would that make?