New Homes Bonus will ‘send money south’ say northern housing experts
I had a very thoughtful response to the use of my term “anti-development lobby” last week from a Green Party Councillor. He rightly identified there are over 300,000 housing allocations nationally which are unfulfilled and has a strong view that economic forces not any form of Nimbyism are to blame for the lack of affordable housing. I posited the view that these allocations were most likely mis-matched with where people want to live and that very few would be in remoter and smaller rural settlements – following up with the point that inflexible settlement hierarchies meant many parts of rural England were not only too expensive for people of normal means to live in but also unsustainable for their residents without recourse to the private motor-car.
This article adds more fuel to my thinking – looking at how government intervention often offers peverse contradictions to its stated objectives. In sthe ame way that northern councils may get disproportionately less benefit from the approach covered in the article I suspect rural communities will also find they get less aswell in view of the complications many face in bringing forward new housing. The article explains:
“An incentive for councils to complete more new homes looks almost certain to take money away from authorities in the north and redistribute it to southern counterparts, which in general are in less need of such a helping hand.
We mustn’t forget that the three most deprived wards on the national index are in London, but even there the demand for housing is keener than up here and the prices often mind-boggling. Yet the New Homes Bonus offers similar incentives across the country; and it draws its ‘bonus’ from the overall local government spending pot; the sort of redistribution of existing public money which became familiar with assorted ‘new’ initiatives under Labour.”