The Next Big Housing Lever: Street Votes
Britain’s housing shortage restricts the options of ordinary people and drives high housing costs, but our adversarial planning system is simply not delivering the number of homes we need in the right locations.
The Labour Government has made progress on its pledge to deliver 1.5 million homes with planning reforms such as grey-belt release. But this alone will not be enough to meet the scale of the challenge. The Government risks missing its housing target, while ordinary people miss out on the higher living standards and growth that new homes would provide. Lengthy, adversarial processes are not the only route to deliver homes.
Labour’s next big home building policy?
In expensive cities around the world, resident-led schemes like street votes have successfully boosted housebuilding. Where residents are able to drive change, the tangible benefits go to those communities that welcome new homes and create positive plans. Street votes offer aspiration that is rooted in community, not individualism. In Britain, this could be Labour’s next big home building policy.
In a street vote, residents get together with an architect to collectively design and then agree on new rules which allow more housing on their street. Those rules could be a design code for home extensions or for new, extra homes on the street. In a similar system in Seoul, this often meant two new flats for owners in the new apartment buildings built on their land – one for the existing resident, and one for their adult children. A strong motivation for NIMBYs to become YIMBYs.
Based on the examples of cities that have schemes similar to street votes, street votes could:
Deliver 30,000 new homes per year in the parts of the UK with the biggest housing need.
Deliver them quickly because they reduce our reliance on large schemes with slow build-out rates and deliver permissions across multiple sites at once. We could see the first houses delivered with street votes before the end of the Parliament.
Produce more attractive and sustainable streets because residents design the street that they want to live in, and any new homes are in good locations.
One final push
England can be the first nation to implement street votes.
Implementing street votes requires just one final push from the Government. MHCLG has already consulted on the detailed rules and completed 90% of the required legal drafting. The Statutory Instruments could be laid before Parliament with a few months of additional work by the team of 4-5 officials and external individual specialist lawyers who were previously working on them, plus a few months to await responses from statutory consultees and laying before Parliament.
And it is a ‘no regrets’ policy. Even if they deliver very little, the cost of allowing street votes is minimal because no homes would be built without local support. They could, however, deliver thousands of new homes in areas of highest need. This is why street votes are supported by leading economists including Jonathan Haskel and John Fingleton, leading lawyers including Christopher Boyle KC and Neil Cameron KC, architects like Russell Curtis and Dr Riëtte Oosthuizen and housing activists from campaigns including Generation Rent.