14 May 2025
Harpenden solicitor and campaigning Conservative Aaron Jacob considers the high price we might pay for increased house building in the district.
As someone who took the time to attend and sit through over two and a half hours of SADC’s development management committee meeting that decided the 550-home development at Cooters End Lane, it was disappointing to see that my local district councillor, Ayesha Rohale, abstained on such a significant application.
This was especially disappointing given that more than 1,800 public objections were received over three consultations. This proposed development brings into sharp relief just how precious our green spaces are.
The adage is that you never appreciate what you have until it is gone.
Perhaps it is age, or perhaps, like so many others, the pandemic really did induce a love and attachment to green spaces that I had not hitherto experienced, but green spaces are critical for our mental and physical health.
We should preserve them for the here and now, and we should do our utmost to preserve them for future generations.
This is to say nothing of the environmental and ecological benefits associated with preserving green spaces.
The current Labour Government is intent on building more homes. In theory, there is nothing wrong with that. However, they have changed the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) to add a new definition of “grey belt”.
This allows development in less significant areas of the Green Belt, provided certain criteria are met. Rather than add clarity, this nebulous concept has resulted in, as far as I can see and understand, redefining existing Green Belt land so that it becomes ripe for development.
As Redbourn independent Cllr David Mitchell said during that planning meeting: “Grey belt just means Green Belt by another name, as far as I can see. It’s a way of releasing Green Belt by making it sound like it’s grey belt, whatever that is.”
I agree. This is a poor outcome, and it should be reconsidered.
The common refrain is that we need more housing to counter high house and rental prices. This was cited by Tom Davies, on behalf of Legal & General, during the meeting. This assumption has also found its way into the draft St Albans Local Plan, which states that: “There is a clear need for more new homes because of the national situation, high house prices and also a need for more local people to have the opportunity to live and work where they were brought up.”
I will leave aside the fact that it is difficult to restrict the purchase of property in any given market even partly to “local people” (whatever “local” might mean). Furthermore, Oxford Economics have concluded that a one per cent increase in the number of houses, or a one per cent fall in the number of households, would reduce house prices by 1.8 per cent. This is unlikely to significantly improve affordability.
This Government fails to understand what determines house prices. Aside from supply, there are other broad factors which have driven house prices in the UK.
Obviously, demand is relevant. The UK population is estimated to have increased by around 9.3 million between 1997 and 2022.
Household composition is also a key component of demand. The ONS estimates that people living alone in 2023 represented 30 per cent of all households. This is a dramatic shift from the early 1970s, when 17 per cent of all households consisted of one person.
There is one other factor beyond these broad trends that has driven the housing market. Monetary policy.
I do not want your eyelids to droop just yet, as this esoteric subject is critical to understanding high house prices. It has been estimated that rising earnings and falling interest rates, rather than insufficient supply, drove the boom in house prices between 1996 and 2006.
This was exacerbated when the Bank of England adopted an extremely loose monetary policy in response to the financial crisis.
Interest rates were slashed to record lows, and the Bank, in line with other major central banks, implemented the unconventional policy of Quantitative Easing (QE).
Under QE, the Bank created £895 billion in new (electronic) money, which it used to buy bonds – mostly government-issued bonds.
The rationale behind this was to suppress bond yields and, by extension, reduce long-term interest rates, with the intention of encouraging investors to redirect capital toward the real economy, particularly through increased lending. Whilst its consequences overall are at best contested, it is largely accepted that in terms of distribution, QE benefited wealthy asset holders disproportionately by artificially inflating asset prices.
Whilst more housing should be built, it is hard to accept that our precious green spaces should be sacrificed on the altar of a faulty analysis. The stated policy aim should be to increase home ownership, and the focus should be one of ends, not means. As Oxford Economics have concluded: increased housing supply is not a policy that will raise the rate of home ownership.
To add insult to injury, an ill-thought through policy of indiscriminately increasing house building currently co-exists with increasing SDLT for first-time buyers. This illogical policy position smacks of a dilettantism that has thus far characterised this Government’s actions.
This is happening all the while our precious green spaces are either under threat or being destroyed, and actual, existing local people pay the price with increased stress on existing infrastructure.
So, yes, let’s stick up for our green spaces secure in the knowledge that our analysis and our priorities are correct.
