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Professor Chris Hamnett (Chair), Professor in Human Geography, Kings’ College London (0.45 mins)

What contribution do you think geography and social science can make in addressing this issue?

• London’s housing crisis has been growing for the last 4 to 5 years.
• Geographers look at the distribution of phenomenon in space. Housing is a particularly important aspect of this.
• House prices, rent and affordability are geographically uneven. There are many places, particularly in London, where the great majority of people cannot afford to live.
• The geography of housing supply and land for housing is also important.

What do we mean by ‘affordability’ in a London context?

• The concept of affordability is problematic.
• ‘Affordable’ used to mean that the majority of households could afford to rent or to buy a property. What it has come to mean in the last few years, in policy terms, is housing which is 90% or less of the market rate. It is not really affordable.
• We need an increase in ‘really’ affordable housing, as opposed to ‘technically’ affordable housing.

What one recommendation would you make to policy-makers on how to address this issue?

• I would like to see policy-makers control the extent to which foreign buyers and investors can purchase in London, particularly, if they then leave the property after purchasing.
• Because of the quality of life you can find in London, a lot of people are trying to invest or park money in London – so we aren’t talking about ‘Buy to Let’, we are talking about ‘Buy to Leave’.
• A property occupied a few weeks a year by a wealthy family from somewhere else in the word, is a property lost to a family in London.

 

Rt Hon. Nick Raynsford, former MP and Housing Minister (5.40 mins)

Why is it important and timely that the RGS-IBG holds an event on this topic?

• Housing is one of the most important issues affecting London and Britain. It dominated the debate in the Mayor of London election earlier this summer (2016) and is a major concern for many Londoners who want to afford to live and work in the city.
• There is a very spatial and geographical dimension to the problem.

What will you be talking about at the event tonight?

• I will talk about the ways in which we can achieve a substantial increase in the numbers of homes that we produce (but without compromising quality and sustainability).
• The current government policy is predicated on encouraging owner occupation. Whilst it has a role to play, it is only a part of the picture.
• There is a large section of London’s population who cannot afford home ownership, even with government assistance. They rely on renting.
• We need a comprehensive policy approach which looks after all sectors in the population, and ensures a range of housing of different tenure and costs.
• There are agencies able to deliver on this, but we need the policies to encourage them to contribute for maximum impact.

What one recommendation would you make to policy-makers on how to address this issue?

• It is important to think long-term. All short-term policies bring unexpected or unwanted outcomes and not a satisfactory outcome.
• A good example is the ‘Decent Homes Programme’ (which I was involved in). This transformed the condition of millions of council homes and social rented homes, which in the late 1990’s were in very poor condition due to under-investment and neglect.
• This 10 year programme required consistent planning and implementation in order to be successful.

 

Barney Stringer, Director, Quod (10.04 mins)

Why is it important and timely that the RGS-IBG holds an event on this topic?

• Population growth has reached a point where we can’t ignore the housing issue any more.

What will you be talking about at the event tonight?

• We (Quod and Shelter) have done a lot of research on the spatial issue of where homes should go.
• It’s difficult to produce homes if you don’t have somewhere to put them – one of the most urgent questions is to look at land for where these homes can be built.
• I’ll be looking at options on the greenbelt, the potential to build taller, densify the suburbs and introduce new housing in retail centres and along transport corridors.

What one recommendation would you make to policy-makers on how to address this issue?

• The most important thing is to have political leadership, because we haven’t prepared the public for the scale of development that is needed to provide the homes required.

 

Robin Nicholson CBE, Senior Practice Partner, Cullinan Studio, (deputising for Lynne Sullivan OBE, RIBA Sustainable Futures Group) (11.50 mins)

What will you be talking about at the event tonight?

• I’m going to be talking about all three aspects of climate change – the social, environmental and economics. As an architect, we have to work across all three sectors.
• In the 60’s, we made a lot of unsustainable buildings – in the way they were built, managed and designed.
• Now, we are under huge pressure to do more with less. Environmentally, this is a good thing, but if we are doing more with less, only to make more profits, it is not very sustainable.
• Housing has to last 200 years. Currently, we pull down an office building after 20 years. We have to be better at articulating these issues.

What contribution do you think geography and social science can make in addressing this issue?

• It’s so easy to think of climate change as technical but it’s about behaviour change.
• We need to understand from a social science perspective how you bring about a change at the scale we need.

What one recommendation would you make to policy-makers on how to address this issue?

• Make climate change an essential part of school curriculum as it is children who will change their parents and you can’t address climate change without creating sustainable communities.

 

Professor Paul Cheshire, Economic Geographer, London School of Economics (14.10 mins)

Why is it important and timely that the RGS-IBG holds an event on this topic?

• Housing in London is a real crisis.
• The palliative measures that have been taking place over the last five years, are making no difference to it.
• In some cases, such as the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme, measures are making it less easy for the majority of people to buy houses.

What contribution do you think geography and social science can make in addressing this issue?

• Geography and other social sciences can make a critical contribution to the discussion. We can bring dispassionate evidence to bear on what the actual problems are. This includes dispelling misconceptions.
• The Barker Review of Housing Supply in 2006, brought together evidence to show what a very small portion of England is actually urbanised (less than 10%). Of that 10%, only about half is covered with buildings.
• I used a Geographic Information System (GIS) to show that the area of golf courses in Surrey is greater than the area of housing.
• We (geographers) also need to understand how markets work, as policies can have opposite outcomes to the ones desired.

What will you be talking about at the event tonight?

• I’ll be talking tonight about how our ‘rationing’ of space since 1955 has created the current problem.
• Planning is an economic activity – allocating a scarce resource – but it is doing that allocation without any regard for the effect it has on price.
• We have to respond to market signals, not obsessively though, because sometimes they will tell us to do the wrong thing, e.g. we need to preserve land that is of high environmental quality, but markets are working under the surface all the time.

What one recommendation would you make to policy-makers on how to address this issue?

• We need radical reform (not palliative reform). We have to recover the capacity to build housing that we have destroyed over last 15 – 20 years.
• There is no quick fix to the problem that we are in but the first thing we need to do is to respond to land. We need to incorporate markets into our planning allocation systems.
• I’m going to emphasis the idiocy of having a tube station that serves London, in the middle of the greenbelt, where you can’t build housing.
• We don’t want to develop on Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), however, we have over 0.5 million ha of greenbelt in London, of which 40% is totally uninteresting in those terms.
• If there is an environmental reason not to develop, we can ignore market price signals, but we can’t ignore them across the board.
• We also need to be more willing to build higher. It used to be impossible to build above 7 stories in Islington. Most of London has similar restrictions.
• High buildings can be beautiful, efficient, environmentally satisfying, and they help to reduce commuting.
• We also have to provide incentives to local authorities to allow building. I would advocate a 20% development tax, the proceeds going entirely to local infrastructure, services and development.