I am glad the hon. Lady says that, and I look forward to reading it with interest.
I was talking to Shelter at a meeting and trying to distil my policy. I have not come to this as a housing expert, but I look at the world and think that if we had got things right there would not be a problem, there would be an equilibrium between supply and demand, and I would not have to stand here in the first place. I distilled my policy down to six words: everyone should have somewhere to live. That is it; that’s what I know. More than that I do not know, and the rest in some ways is details. We must ensure that everyone has somewhere to live, and at the moment they do not. I think we need every available shoulder pushing on that wheel. Of course, if a big rock is in front of the wheel we need to move it out of the way, but I am up for any idea that increases the total supply of housing, particularly if it is done to the highest possible standard.
One simply cannot tell which parts of Poundbury are affordable housing. When they are pointed out, people look at them and think, “Phwoar—I’d like to live there.” They have no particular special status; people are taken off the local housing list like everywhere else, and Poundbury has its share of social problems. However, the shape of community that has been created does something to lessen some of those problems.
A YouGov survey two years ago indicated that 75% of people do not want to buy the product of the volume house builders which, as I said earlier, I think are acting rationally inside a systemically flawed system. One of the main constraints on supply is that the standard
house models of the volume house builders are attractive to only a small proportion of the total numbers of would-be buyers in the population. That makes it difficult to get above an average of 2.6 sales per month per site. Where there is a custom-build approach—or, as I might venture to call it, a customer-build approach—they can get two, three or four times that level of performance.
There is a wonderful development—it is not an experiment; it has happened—in the Netherlands in Almere on the opposite side of the ?sselmeer from Amsterdam. Many, many dwellings were allowed—it now has 3,000—and most are self-build and custom build. When the volume house builders around the edge were basically in stasis and nobody was buying their dwellings, there was a hive of activity in the middle of that development because the building of houses was being treated as if customers mattered.
A colleague recently retailed to me the story he had been told about a former Conservative MP who had been on the board of a major house building company. The former MP had said, “I have been on the board of this big PLC house builder for eight years. We have talked about land acquisition, finance, buying other businesses, the supply chain, cost control, staffing levels and skills. The only thing we haven’t talked about is houses.”
The truth of the matter is that we do not really have a housing market. If we did, there would be enough houses for everyone. What we have is a land market—which is very tightly controlled—and volume house builders which have access to the open capital market act rationally: they build when it is profitable to do so and take out an insurance policy to cover the down side. A farmer who is getting 3.5 tonnes of winter barley from a field is very happy if someone gives him £4,000 a year for the next 10 years for an option to apply for planning permission to build houses on it one day. That may never happen, but the only entity that can afford to do that is a large, well capitalised house builder. Small house builders cannot possibly do that.
It is even worth a large house builder’s while to employ someone—at considerable expense—to work out how to remove a joist that costs £76 from a roof. It is worth the investment of thousands of pounds and a considerable amount of time to figure that out, because for 1,000 houses on one site it will save £76,000. For someone who builds 9,000 or 10,000 houses a year, it will save £750,000. Over 10 years, that will amount to £7.5 million. What business would not want to save such a sum? But then along comes the purchaser, accompanied by the sales agent who, for some strange reason, often drives a pink Fiat. The sales agent is trying to sell that rather pretty little shoebox, containing furniture that is manufactured to deceive the eye. The width of a double bed in most show homes is about 3 feet 11 inches or 4 feet. Furniture for show homes is not furniture that could be used: it is specifically designed to make the rooms look bigger. The prospective buyers, perhaps a husband and wife with a baby, say, “We are thinking of having another baby. Can we extend into the roof?” But they cannot do that because the design, to save that £76, makes that impossible. The whole thing would fall down.
In a customer-driven environment, from the beginning the customer would say, “This is what I want now, and this is what I may want in the future”, and the market would respond. Some mathematician has worked out that if someone buys a Mini Cooper from the factory in Oxford, there are 126,000 different permutations to choose from.