Estate Renewal Passports
The Aberfeldy estate was built on bomb-damaged land near London’s docks. It used to be poorly connected and economically isolated. However, with the arrival of the DLR and Jubilee line and the regeneration of the Docklands, the estate now has easy access to the City and the West End and is within walking distance of a global hub of finance at Canary Wharf. The terraces and flats have fallen into disrepair and are built at a low density, meaning that this superb location could be redeveloped to benefit more working families.
A plan to regenerate the existing 330 council homes into 1,582 homes had overwhelming support from residents. In a ballot, 93% voted in favour with a turnout of 91% because they would receive newer, larger properties. These replacement social homes for current tenants would be paid for by selling most of the other new homes. Despite the strong support for the project, it was rejected by Tower Hamlets’ Planning Committee.
Aberfeldy is just one example of a much larger problem. Most council estates in London are built at low densities. Our analysis suggests that the average council estate in London has approximately 70 dwellings per hectare, about three times less dense than neighbourhoods like Maida Vale or Marylebone. Many of these properties are now in poor condition; more than half do not meet new minimum energy efficiency standards and 54% lack any insulation.
When estate renewals do happen, they’re immensely popular with existing residents. Of 30 estates balloted on renewal, 29 voted it through the first time and the other voted for it after some changes were made. But, as in the case of Aberfeldy, just because the residents support it, doesn’t mean that the renewal will go ahead.
To solve this and get more housing built, the Government should introduce an estate renewal passport. If a majority of residents vote for a plan to densify their estate, they should get automatic planning permission, subject to a few restrictions on building safety, light planes, green space, replenishment of social housing stock, and affordable housing. In places with high housing costs, estate renewals can often pay for themselves.
Current national policy on estate regeneration is limited to just a suggestion in the National Planning Policy Framework that local planning authorities ‘consider’ the benefits, without any incentive to deliver. Therefore, not enough renewal projects happen, even though there’s great potential, as councils only progress a project or two at a time.
The residents should also directly have access to a share of the profits of the uplift to help compensate them for the disruption, reward them for the value that they’re creating, and further encourage them to vote for more homes.
If existing London estates were roughly doubled in density to between 126 and 146 dwellings per hectare, more than 500,000 new homes could be delivered. So great is London’s housing shortage and the lack of density of existing estates, that the estate renewal passport could produce an estimated surplus of more than £80 billion. This could be spent on infrastructure upgrades, rewarding residents, or building more social housing.
These new homes should be built to higher energy efficiency standards. If they had an EPC rating of A, the average council tenant would save almost £800 a year on their gas and electric bill.
It is rare in Britain’s housing debates to have a policy where everyone wins, but estate renewal passports are the closest we get to this. Existing tenants will get new, larger homes and the potential to profit from the regeneration. More homes will be built in prime areas, helping more working people live in our most productive cities. Projects can be fully-funded through the sale of new homes so in the long-run there is no net cost to the taxpayer. People that live near the estate get to see the old buildings replaced with refreshed designs that can reduce crime with more CCTV, street lighting, and modern security designs. Simply giving people the direct vote over their estates can transform our cities.
New Towns
For the first time in 50 years, there is a national commitment to building a new generation of new towns. With high housing costs hurting working people, this is exciting news. But as history shows us, the location of new towns is critical to them growing into prosperous and liveable communities. Trying to create self-sufficient new towns far from existing cities where workers would struggle to get to well-paying jobs has failed before and would fail again.
For many working people, one of the most important criteria for choosing where to locate new towns is that they should have easy access to places where there are plenty of well-paying jobs. Wages in London are higher than anywhere else in the UK. In fact, Londoners earn around 15% more than the national average. Yet, people who move to London do not end up much better off. Once you take into account housing costs, Londoners only take home 1% more than people around the rest of the UK.
Cities like Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol and York face similar challenges with well-paying jobs, but not enough homes for workers to take advantage. New towns should be built near these cities to make it easier for workers to get to jobs with higher salaries.
These are also places where the average price of a home is much higher than the cost of building a house. That means every house that is built unlocks surplus value that can be captured to provide upgrades to infrastructure, better green spaces, and more social housing.
In a report co-written with the urban design firm Create Streets, Britain Remade proposed 12 sites for new towns that would be built near existing cities with high-paying jobs. These include expansions of Cambridge, Oxford, York, and Bristol. There’s also scope for new developments around underused railway stations that could see more capacity if strategically planned new towns were built around them. Places like Winslow on the new East West Rail line, Iver and Langley on the Elizabeth line, and Cheddington on the West Coast Main Line could all be vibrant and liveable new towns if they were given the opportunity to expand.
The report also identified many stations like Hatfield Peverel in Essex and Salfords in Surrey where there’s a town on one side of the tracks and nothing on the other side. By mirroring the town, the community can naturally expand around its railway station. These ‘mirror towns’ provide a great opportunity to sustainably build more homes near good public transport, allowing more working people to afford their own home with easy access to well-paying jobs.
Clean Energy Zones
To cut bills and become energy secure by 2030, we need to unlock an additional 70 GW of renewable power generation. This is a massive challenge, but it is deliverable – even the largest offshore wind farms where 200 m tall turbines are installed in difficult conditions can be constructed in just two years. The problem is construction is only a small part of the timeline. Three times more time is spent on navigating the planning system and even then projects can be stuck in limbo waiting for a grid connection.
Britain should learn from nations that have dramatically shortened planning timelines for renewable projects like Spain. In anticipation of EU-wide legislation to speed up renewable deployment in the wake of the energy crisis, Spain moved to a new zonal system for renewable planning. Under the new model, using existing protected sites legislation the Government would identify land of negligible biodiversity value and designate them as go-to zones for renewable projects. Onshore wind and solar projects in each area would be exempted from existing requirements around environmental impact assessments and a rule of positive silence would be applied to consents from environmental regulators. Put simply, unless an environmental regulator brought a timely objection, the project could proceed without producing the usual lengthy paperwork. Independent forecasts of Spanish renewable deployment have increased substantially since the measure was brought in.
Instead of requiring renewable developers to produce 15,000 page environmental impact assessments, Britain should adopt the Spanish approach and designate zones of low environmental value where the default requirement for environmental impact assessments for all onshore wind (75 MW and under) and solar projects (150 MWs and under) is removed.
Aberfeldy estate before versus plans for renewal
Modernise Environmental Protections
Britain’s system of environmental protection is delivering the worst of both worlds: many key nature indicators are in long-term decline while infrastructure projects are delayed and forced to spend millions on ineffective solutions. For example, EDF has been in a long-running dispute with Natural England and the Environment Agency over the requirement to install an auditory fish deterrent at Hinkley Point C. This deterrent would at best protect the equivalent of a single trawler’s annual catch while adding costs to an already highly expensive project and creating dangerous work due to the requirement to maintain the system in difficult underwater conditions.
The Government’s proposal to move to a system where environmental impact assessments are replaced with shorter ‘living’ environmental outcome reports and compensation for impacts to protected species is delivered at a higher strategic level through a new nature restoration fund are both welcome. However, as they stand, the proposals will not be sufficient to prevent the requirement to produce expensive and complicated mitigations such as HS2’s £100 million bat tunnel in many cases. The key issue is that the EU-derived Habitats Regulations will still apply and insist on ‘bat tunnel’ style mitigations for individual projects that have large impacts on protected species when an environmental delivery plan cannot, or is yet to be, put in place.
To keep the cost of building new infrastructure down and avoid unnecessary delays, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill should include measures to diverge from the “The Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017” and allow the strategic approach to compensation where the state uses developer contributions to deliver effective nature recovery solutions, linked to the species abundance targets in the Environment Act, to be used in more cases. This is a win-win for environmentalists and workers enabling us to deploy funds to protect nature more effectively while accelerating vital developments from wind farms to new housing developments.
Reform Nuclear Regulation
Britain used to lead the world in nuclear power. We split the atom, built the world’s first full-scale commercial reactor, and built ten more in the decade that followed. In fact, until 1965 Britain had more working nuclear reactors than the rest of the world combined. Yet, we haven’t built a new nuclear power station in 30 years and Hinkley Point C, currently under construction, is set to be the most expensive nuclear power station ever built. High costs threaten future investments in sites such as Sizewell C and Wylfa B. When two thirds of responding Community members think nuclear should play an important role in Britain’s energy, compared to just 21% who disagree, we need to solve our nuclear cost challenge.
The good news is our high costs are not inevitable. South Korea can build a new nuclear power station for six times less than Britain on average. France, building the same type of reactor as us, builds almost twice as cheaply. Regulation and the planning system are not the only causes of high costs – long-term failures to invest in the workforce and a pipeline of projects deserve equal blame – but they are a key factor.
For example, while Hinkley Point C uses the EPR design that France’s Flamanville projects also use, there were more than 7,000 design changes due to requirements from the Office for Nuclear Regulation and Environment Agency. They also made it hard to apply lessons in how to build more efficiently learnt in France and Finland. In the short-term, Hinkley Point C’s design changes have led to delays over the financing of a successor Sizewell C.
The UK Government’s recently announced changes to the planning system to allow small modular reactors to be built at a much-wider range of sites are welcome and will unlock the opportunity to co-locate energy-intensive manufacturing and data centres with clean nuclear power. However, there is a need to go further. The new Nuclear Regulatory Task Force presents an opportunity to tackle the disproportionate rules and regulations that have pushed the cost of building nuclear power up and forced us to rely on dirty imported fossil fuels.
Three barriers to Nuclear
This new task force should tackle a number of barriers that have held back a sector where each project provides long-term unionised jobs with good pay and conditions.
The Taskforce should ensure that the UK does not push up costs by reinventing the wheel for new reactor designs and instead automatically approves designs that have been classed as safe by other trusted international regulators.
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The requirement that new reactor designs go through an unnecessary, expensive and duplicative process known as regulatory justification should be removed.
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Many requirements appropriate for large-scale nuclear power stations are not appropriate for small modular reactors given their substantially lower risk profiles. In some cases, such as in large-break loss of coolant accidents, applying the same requirements to SMR would force them to invest in safety measures to prevent physically impossible scenarios.
Making Brownfield Passports Work
The Labour Government has proposed a ‘Brownfield Passport’ to make the default answer to any planning application on previously developed (‘brownfield’) land ‘Yes’. While details are still being developed, if done well, this could be transformative for working people who are struggling with unaffordable rents and are priced out of home ownership.
The Government should use National Development Management Policies to create an overwhelming presumption in favour of development for new six-storey developments within walking distance of stations and business hubs in cities where house prices are more than 7.5 times local incomes and housing targets are not being met.
A few restrictions should apply:
- There should be no net loss of green space.
- All new housing should be built to the highest energy-efficiency standards feasible and offer low-carbon heating options.
- All new buildings should be built to a design code developed with local people.
When Auckland, New Zealand adopted a similar policy, rents rose much more slowly than the rest of the country. One study estimated rents were a third lower because of the policy. That would save a couple renting a one bed flat in London £6,000 a year, providing a huge boost to working people’s budgets and ability to save for a place of their own.