I have just returned from the UK Passivhaus Conference 2012, held in Nottingham. Two days of lectures, networking, eating, drinking and schmoozing in East Midlands Conference Centre and a night sleeping in the brand new Orchard Hotel next door, so new that it wasn't actually finished.
As is so often the case with events like this, you come back down slowly to earth with a huge swathe of unnoticed feelings and unformed opinions, and only gradually do you assimilate the drift of what was going on there.
Some obvious things stand out: Passivhaus is a success if measured by the number of projects underway in this country (75 underway or completed, up from very little last year), and the spread of people taking an interest has widened to include lots of businesses I had never heard of before. There is a surprising amount of interest from RSLs who are more concerned with whole-life costings than up front capital costs, and see a genuine payback in using Passivhaus principles if measuring over a 25 year period. Many of these 75 schemes involve several units: they are not all one-offs.
And there is also great interest from the schools sector and one or two offices. I also talked to a man who was sussing out whether Passivhaus would be suitable for a fire station.
If there was a theme this year, it was summed up by the number of presentations, especially on Day Two, on Post Occupancy Testing. Lots of figures, lots of graphs and lots of tables, all rather hard to take in slide shows if truth be told, but with one over-arching theme — Passivhaus delivers what it says on the tin. Whereas the building world has been bedevilled by many so-called green projects which turned out to be anything but, Passivhaus standards, if properly instigated, seem to hit their targets unerringly.
But, you might argue, we knew that already. Well, yes it's true: there have been lots of testing carried out in Germany and Austria and the reason that Passivhaus is catching on elsewhere is that it has been proven to be effective. Post Completion Testing is construction's equivalent of the Double Blind Trial — a little bit of scientific rigour brought to bear.
What's interesting about this is that it puts Passivhaus firmly into the enlightenment camp of people who believe in logic and science and physics in particular. Not all green construction resides here and there were many people there uneasy about some of the reductive nature of Passivhaus. If Passivhaus works, does it follow that we should be building compact, rectangular boxes, all clad in white render in a vaguely international style? Does engineering have to trump aesthetics every time? And what about if you want to build using more cuddly materials like straw bale, or turf roofs? Do they have a place?
Well of course they do, because there are already examples of straw-bale Passiv and very traditional, vernacular-style buildings as well. Passivhaus boxes clever here because it says it's not prescriptive, it's just a standard and that you are free to interpret it in any way you see fit. But that ignores the fact that it's an engineering standard more than an architectural one, a standard whose primary design tool is a spreadsheet (PHPP) not a drawing board. Elegance, in the world of Passivhaus, is simplicity not ornamentation, and whilst there is nothing to stop you indulging in architecture with a capital A, in doing so you veer away from the essential message.
That's not to say that, for all its scientific rigour, Passivhaus has all the answers. No, there are still questions to be resolved, primarily to do with resilience. The three corner stones of Passivhaus are insulation (lots of it), airtightness (v. tight) and ventilation (MVHR please). It works in models and it works in practice. But how will it work over the lifetime of a building? Will the airtightness be compromised by inhabitants putting in cables for their TV sets or cat flaps for their pets? Or just knocking houses about for the fun of it? And what about these ventilation units? Will they get adequately serviced? Will they continue to work as planned? Indeed, will a new certified Passivhaus circa 2012 still be a Passivhaus in 2022, or 2052? If a Passivhaus is difficult to design and build (it is) then it will surely be difficult to maintain?
This was brought out a couple of times by speakers relating what had happened to some of the social housing Passivhaus projects. Some of the tenants had tinkered (i.e. messed up) the MVHR settings, many of them had installed huge plasma TVs (Lord, help us), one kept a window open all winter long so that he could run an extension lead into the garden to power up the jacuzzi. And you could tell the ones that smoked dope from the state of their ventilation filters.
It all sounded just a tad Victorian as these well-meaning philanthropists bestowed heaven-on-earth (aka Passivhaus) on these poor saps, only to find that they are a bunch of undeserving ner-do-wells, intent on a lifestyle of drink, drugs, fatty foods and general sloth. I'm sure that's a total exaggeration, but as always, it's the anecdotes that you remember, not the graphs.
Retrofit
There was lots on retrofit. Cost and test data is still coming in from the RetroFit for the Future schemes which are now complete. It's a much more problematic area than new build because, whilst there is undoubted elegance in creating a genuinely low-energy structure, almost nothing about retrofit could be described as elegant. It's an almighty kerfuffle and it's also incredibly expensive if done to Passivhaus standards, often considerably more than starting again from scratch. This poses problem for enlightened builders because logic would seem to dictate that we would be better to demolish every inefficient house and rebuild our entire housing stock on Passivhaus principles. But of course that ain't going to happen. Not only is there extreme opposition to it from the population at large, but it's also such a vast task that no way would we be able to complete it in a sensible timescale.
What we don't know — cannot know — is what the future holds in terms of energy supply. Will we have got to grips with the supply problem by 2050? Will we have lots of low-carbon energy to burn, or will it be a precious commodity to be husbanded carefully. And how much will it cost? Without this information, we can do no more than guess at how much effort we should make to "RetroFit" our existing building stock.
9 Nov 2012
1 Nov 2012
Green Deal: Reading the Runes
I spent Tuesday at the NEC in Birmingham, visiting an exhibition entitled RetroExpo. Running inside it was a Green Deal Summit which featured a number of Green Deal(GD) notables working through their PowerPoints. That's not to be disparaging about them, there were lots of very distinguished speakers, and the exhibition is to be congratulated for assembling them all together in one place. Surely, now was the chance to learn something significant about GD?
Well maybe, maybe not. I've yet to write anything enthusiastic about GD and my feelings haven't changed much as a result of Tuesday's deliberations. For a start, it's damned complicated, so complicated that presenters kept flashing up organisation charts only to quickly withdraw them because they were too difficult to explain. Not encouraging.
It seems to get a GD going, you have to start with an assessor coming to visit your property and carrying out a survey. How much will this cost? Various answers from £130 down to nothing. If it's nothing, that tends to suggest that the assessor will be a tied agent. Would you trust such a person to carry out an independent survey? I wouldn't.
Anyway, stage two is to put the survey results into effect. There is much talk of the Golden Rule which means that the works to be undertaken have to payback in 10 years. Or is it 25? Or something else? I'm afraid I still don't know. And do you have to take the GD Finance Deal (at somewhere between 6% and 8% APR — again no one can say for sure)? What if you decide to arrange your own finance, or just pay for it from savings, is it still a green deal, and will you get the guarantee? No one could answer these either.
How much will it all cost? It was here that I did learn something new although it still didn't fill me with confidence. The government has announced some kick start money to get the GD off the ground. I though this was just window dressing, but it turns out this may just be the start and that the energy companies will soon start to subsidise GD works in the way they have been doing cavity wall and loft insulation. They are required by law to undertake carbon saving measures, expressed in tonnes of carbon per annum (it's different for each company, depending on their size). Some of this carbon-saving cash is probably going to filter through to GD providers and it may end up subsidising works such as external wall insulation (EWI), which on their own are very unlikely to ever meet the Golden Rule.
So, for instance, if EWI is estimated to cost £10,000, and the expected saving is, say, £300/annum, then the householder might only have to pay £3,000 (which gets roughly a 10 year payback), with the other £7,000 being paid for via an energy company subsidy - or ECO as it's getting called. Or at least I think that's what ECO is — once again the slippery nature of the GD makes it hard to know what is what. Was ECO a fund or a mechanism? Or both?
If I am right, then you really need someone else acting as a broker, who could fit your job together with the appropriate energy company, the one who is offering the best subsidy for this kind of work.
At least, I think that may be how it will work. I could also be completely wrong. But then, if I am, I will not be alone.
I came away surprised by:
a) how much I already knew about the Green Deal — I kept thinking "I know that" — but
b) how much I didn't understand — like how is it all going to work.
I wish it well, but I don't think the runes are looking too helpful.
Well maybe, maybe not. I've yet to write anything enthusiastic about GD and my feelings haven't changed much as a result of Tuesday's deliberations. For a start, it's damned complicated, so complicated that presenters kept flashing up organisation charts only to quickly withdraw them because they were too difficult to explain. Not encouraging.
It seems to get a GD going, you have to start with an assessor coming to visit your property and carrying out a survey. How much will this cost? Various answers from £130 down to nothing. If it's nothing, that tends to suggest that the assessor will be a tied agent. Would you trust such a person to carry out an independent survey? I wouldn't.
Anyway, stage two is to put the survey results into effect. There is much talk of the Golden Rule which means that the works to be undertaken have to payback in 10 years. Or is it 25? Or something else? I'm afraid I still don't know. And do you have to take the GD Finance Deal (at somewhere between 6% and 8% APR — again no one can say for sure)? What if you decide to arrange your own finance, or just pay for it from savings, is it still a green deal, and will you get the guarantee? No one could answer these either.
How much will it all cost? It was here that I did learn something new although it still didn't fill me with confidence. The government has announced some kick start money to get the GD off the ground. I though this was just window dressing, but it turns out this may just be the start and that the energy companies will soon start to subsidise GD works in the way they have been doing cavity wall and loft insulation. They are required by law to undertake carbon saving measures, expressed in tonnes of carbon per annum (it's different for each company, depending on their size). Some of this carbon-saving cash is probably going to filter through to GD providers and it may end up subsidising works such as external wall insulation (EWI), which on their own are very unlikely to ever meet the Golden Rule.
So, for instance, if EWI is estimated to cost £10,000, and the expected saving is, say, £300/annum, then the householder might only have to pay £3,000 (which gets roughly a 10 year payback), with the other £7,000 being paid for via an energy company subsidy - or ECO as it's getting called. Or at least I think that's what ECO is — once again the slippery nature of the GD makes it hard to know what is what. Was ECO a fund or a mechanism? Or both?
If I am right, then you really need someone else acting as a broker, who could fit your job together with the appropriate energy company, the one who is offering the best subsidy for this kind of work.
At least, I think that may be how it will work. I could also be completely wrong. But then, if I am, I will not be alone.
I came away surprised by:
a) how much I already knew about the Green Deal — I kept thinking "I know that" — but
b) how much I didn't understand — like how is it all going to work.
I wish it well, but I don't think the runes are looking too helpful.
27 Oct 2012
Bonfire of the Building Regs?
Building regs front page news. Here. That's twice in one year, after the Conservatory Tax fiasco back in April. What's going on?
It's hard not to conclude that it's the work of the headline-grabbing tea party tendency which seems to have taken over the Treasury, the rip-up red tape at any cost brigade.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with turning the building regs into a political football. In fact, I welcome it as it's actually a fascinating area. The regs are constantly under review in any event, and that doesn't always mean they get stricter and more expensive. I have sat in on a dozen or so government-sponsored meetings in the past five years which were seeking input from the selfbuild/DIY sectors, with a view to simplifying the building regs. What struck me after all this is how slowly the wheels turn and how good intentions very quickly get watered down. If there really is to be a bonfire, it will probably take an age to catch fire and we won't see its effects for about five years. Long after the next general election.
On the other hand, there's no doubt that the heavy hand of state intervention is writ large across our building activities and, thanks to this, we now have building standards that are far in advance of what we were required to meet even in my building lifetime (which began in 1980). Sometimes the regs are intrusive and seem petty, but mostly everyone is happy to accept them as they do make for better, safer homes. And if everybody has to comply, then there is no feeling of being cheated.
But in practice, any change in the building regs causes problems and upheavals. They are not easy to implement and they take years to bed in. If the government chooses to turn back the clock and make our building standards less exacting — and cheaper — that's its prerogative. But the way to do it is to bring it in as a fait accompli, not to announce to the world at large that it's undertaking a review. That's just political posturing which is likely to cause a good deal of confusion. The one thing it won't do is to "Get Britain Building" or some such silly nostrum. If anything, it's likely to make people pull projects they might otherwise have been considering on the grounds that they might just save a few quid.
It's hard not to conclude that it's the work of the headline-grabbing tea party tendency which seems to have taken over the Treasury, the rip-up red tape at any cost brigade.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with turning the building regs into a political football. In fact, I welcome it as it's actually a fascinating area. The regs are constantly under review in any event, and that doesn't always mean they get stricter and more expensive. I have sat in on a dozen or so government-sponsored meetings in the past five years which were seeking input from the selfbuild/DIY sectors, with a view to simplifying the building regs. What struck me after all this is how slowly the wheels turn and how good intentions very quickly get watered down. If there really is to be a bonfire, it will probably take an age to catch fire and we won't see its effects for about five years. Long after the next general election.
On the other hand, there's no doubt that the heavy hand of state intervention is writ large across our building activities and, thanks to this, we now have building standards that are far in advance of what we were required to meet even in my building lifetime (which began in 1980). Sometimes the regs are intrusive and seem petty, but mostly everyone is happy to accept them as they do make for better, safer homes. And if everybody has to comply, then there is no feeling of being cheated.
But in practice, any change in the building regs causes problems and upheavals. They are not easy to implement and they take years to bed in. If the government chooses to turn back the clock and make our building standards less exacting — and cheaper — that's its prerogative. But the way to do it is to bring it in as a fait accompli, not to announce to the world at large that it's undertaking a review. That's just political posturing which is likely to cause a good deal of confusion. The one thing it won't do is to "Get Britain Building" or some such silly nostrum. If anything, it's likely to make people pull projects they might otherwise have been considering on the grounds that they might just save a few quid.
24 Oct 2012
Do we really need any new homes?
There is a an unspoken problem at the centre of our housing debate. Are we short of new homes? Almost every commentator states that we are and that we therefore have a housing crisis on our hands. But the evidence for it is thin on the ground and what there is is almost always constructed from data which is only partially relevant.
Like the length of council house waiting lists, which is long and growing longer, but this only tells us the demand for council/social housing. Which, in turn, tells us that either private housing is too expensive or social housing is too cheap, but it doesn't really inform us as to whether there is a shortage of housing overall.
Or rents. Rents are going up in the South-East, having been pretty stable for many years. The reason seems to be that the population is increasing, private housing is too expensive to buy, mortgage finance is difficult to come by and so private renting is the only option for many. The squeeze is on, for sure, but this still doesn't lead to the conclusion that we are short of houses.
For to be short of houses, we have to have some notion of how many houses there should be. We don't. The nearest we come to it is something called the rate of household formation, popularly believed to be around 250,000/annum in the UK as a whole. This is used as a yardstick against which to measure our pitiful attempts to match it.
In the 20 years I have been writing about housing, we have never got close to this target. It's only ever been an aspiration. In the Blair boom years, we achieved about 180,000 new homes a year: now it's down to around 100,000. In the past five years, we have fallen short of this notional target by an accumulative 750,000 homes, so you'd think house prices would have rocketed as a result. Which, of course, they haven't.
Which perhaps in turn tells us that the notion of a rate of household formation is bunkum. Households form when they can afford to. When times are tough, they hang together. A household formation rate is a nebulous idea which may well be derived from historical data but it tells us nothing about the situation as it now stands.
To have a housing shortage, you have to have something more concrete to measure it against. Like what? Well, some sort of housing standard such as number of bedrooms per head of population. Or national housing floor area, or some such Domesday Book type data (which the national census doesn't seem to collect). If we had such data to hand, we could then set a standard — such as there must be 1.5 bedrooms for every man, woman and child living in the UK — and then we could judge whether or not we have a shortfall.
Without such an approach, there is really no way of knowing whether we have too many or too few homes, anymore than we might know whether there is a road shortage or a supermarket shortage. Relative to what?
The only hard data we actually have are house prices which are very efficient at allocating resources, so that supply and demand are kept in balance. For every buyer who thinks prices are too high, there is a seller who think they are too low. Do the sellers thus conclude there is a housing surplus? No. So why do buyers insist there is a shortage? Because they'd like to see lower house prices, naturally.
But the sellers — largely the elderly half of the population — want house prices to stay high to pay for their retirement. They certainly don't want them to crash. And, surprise, surprise, it's the oldsters who are mostly dead set against new building in their area. They are the classic NIMBYs. They are not stupid.
So in a nutshell, the young would like there to be more homes so that the prices might inch down a little, whilst the sellers are perfectly happy with what we've got, thank you. That's the essential tension between the young and the old which creates our housing market. It doesn't however follow from that that we have a housing shortage.
Like the length of council house waiting lists, which is long and growing longer, but this only tells us the demand for council/social housing. Which, in turn, tells us that either private housing is too expensive or social housing is too cheap, but it doesn't really inform us as to whether there is a shortage of housing overall.
Or rents. Rents are going up in the South-East, having been pretty stable for many years. The reason seems to be that the population is increasing, private housing is too expensive to buy, mortgage finance is difficult to come by and so private renting is the only option for many. The squeeze is on, for sure, but this still doesn't lead to the conclusion that we are short of houses.
For to be short of houses, we have to have some notion of how many houses there should be. We don't. The nearest we come to it is something called the rate of household formation, popularly believed to be around 250,000/annum in the UK as a whole. This is used as a yardstick against which to measure our pitiful attempts to match it.
In the 20 years I have been writing about housing, we have never got close to this target. It's only ever been an aspiration. In the Blair boom years, we achieved about 180,000 new homes a year: now it's down to around 100,000. In the past five years, we have fallen short of this notional target by an accumulative 750,000 homes, so you'd think house prices would have rocketed as a result. Which, of course, they haven't.
Which perhaps in turn tells us that the notion of a rate of household formation is bunkum. Households form when they can afford to. When times are tough, they hang together. A household formation rate is a nebulous idea which may well be derived from historical data but it tells us nothing about the situation as it now stands.
To have a housing shortage, you have to have something more concrete to measure it against. Like what? Well, some sort of housing standard such as number of bedrooms per head of population. Or national housing floor area, or some such Domesday Book type data (which the national census doesn't seem to collect). If we had such data to hand, we could then set a standard — such as there must be 1.5 bedrooms for every man, woman and child living in the UK — and then we could judge whether or not we have a shortfall.
Without such an approach, there is really no way of knowing whether we have too many or too few homes, anymore than we might know whether there is a road shortage or a supermarket shortage. Relative to what?
The only hard data we actually have are house prices which are very efficient at allocating resources, so that supply and demand are kept in balance. For every buyer who thinks prices are too high, there is a seller who think they are too low. Do the sellers thus conclude there is a housing surplus? No. So why do buyers insist there is a shortage? Because they'd like to see lower house prices, naturally.
But the sellers — largely the elderly half of the population — want house prices to stay high to pay for their retirement. They certainly don't want them to crash. And, surprise, surprise, it's the oldsters who are mostly dead set against new building in their area. They are the classic NIMBYs. They are not stupid.
So in a nutshell, the young would like there to be more homes so that the prices might inch down a little, whilst the sellers are perfectly happy with what we've got, thank you. That's the essential tension between the young and the old which creates our housing market. It doesn't however follow from that that we have a housing shortage.
22 Oct 2012
What David Cameron should have said
Imagine going to fill up the family car at the garage and being confronted with a menu.
"Buy your first 10 litres for £2.00 and you can fill up the rest of the tank at just £1.15 per litre." Hmm, that sounds good. Or does it? Whilst you are trying to figure out if this is a good deal or not, you eyes alight on another option.
"Get your car serviced here and you can get 30p per litre off your petrol for six months." Excellent, you think. Except you now start wondering if its 30p off the first 10 litre price or the lower, follow-up price. Maybe it doesn't matter. Then there's another option.
"Pay by direct debit and we'll knock 5% off your annual bill." Gosh, this does sound good. A reward for loyalty. The more I spend, the more I save. You start to feel that you could spend your whole life cruising the motorways for free.
So you stand there on the forecourt not really knowing whether you are coming or going. You just wanted to fill up with petrol and you've ended up taking an IQ test and now you have a horrible feeling you've just failed.
I suspect you may know where this is going. Petrol and diesel on our forecourts may be horribly expensive but at least their purchase is a simple matter. You pay the price advertised on the sign.
Not so our domestic fuel bills. The menu of options described above is only the beginning for our gas and electric utilities. Most of them have 30 or 40 different tariffs, each with its own merits. When David Cameron made his off the cuff comment in the Commons last week about forcing energy companies to offer customers their lowest tariff, he stirred up a hornet's nest. Because the way fuel bills are constructed, it's almost impossible to tell what the best deal is. Price comparison websites can give you an indication of what would have been the best deal for you in the past, but have no way of knowing what the future deals will be, as the prices can and will change.
Of course, David Cameron has form on issues like this. So keen is he to appear to be a man of the people that he is given to making what he thinks are popular gestures which then turn out to be ill thought through. Or not thought through at all.
Had he called for energy bills to be simpler to understand, he might have been onto something. Had he demanded that the ludicrous two-tier tariffs, that all utility companies still base their billing on, be replaced with a petrol-pump style single price per kilowatt hour, he would have been making progress for all of us. At a glance we would be able to see who is offering what, and where we should place our money.
"Buy your first 10 litres for £2.00 and you can fill up the rest of the tank at just £1.15 per litre." Hmm, that sounds good. Or does it? Whilst you are trying to figure out if this is a good deal or not, you eyes alight on another option.
"Get your car serviced here and you can get 30p per litre off your petrol for six months." Excellent, you think. Except you now start wondering if its 30p off the first 10 litre price or the lower, follow-up price. Maybe it doesn't matter. Then there's another option.
"Pay by direct debit and we'll knock 5% off your annual bill." Gosh, this does sound good. A reward for loyalty. The more I spend, the more I save. You start to feel that you could spend your whole life cruising the motorways for free.
So you stand there on the forecourt not really knowing whether you are coming or going. You just wanted to fill up with petrol and you've ended up taking an IQ test and now you have a horrible feeling you've just failed.
I suspect you may know where this is going. Petrol and diesel on our forecourts may be horribly expensive but at least their purchase is a simple matter. You pay the price advertised on the sign.
Not so our domestic fuel bills. The menu of options described above is only the beginning for our gas and electric utilities. Most of them have 30 or 40 different tariffs, each with its own merits. When David Cameron made his off the cuff comment in the Commons last week about forcing energy companies to offer customers their lowest tariff, he stirred up a hornet's nest. Because the way fuel bills are constructed, it's almost impossible to tell what the best deal is. Price comparison websites can give you an indication of what would have been the best deal for you in the past, but have no way of knowing what the future deals will be, as the prices can and will change.
Of course, David Cameron has form on issues like this. So keen is he to appear to be a man of the people that he is given to making what he thinks are popular gestures which then turn out to be ill thought through. Or not thought through at all.
Had he called for energy bills to be simpler to understand, he might have been onto something. Had he demanded that the ludicrous two-tier tariffs, that all utility companies still base their billing on, be replaced with a petrol-pump style single price per kilowatt hour, he would have been making progress for all of us. At a glance we would be able to see who is offering what, and where we should place our money.
16 Aug 2012
Who are the real land scammers?
Land bank scams are back in the spotlight. Land banking is nothing new: it was a feature of the selfbuild scene when I first got involved around 20 years ago, and despite our best efforts, it's still very much around.
This is how it works. Unscrupulous people buy fields which never have a hope in hell of being built on and then flog off little chunks of these fields as building plots. They pay maybe £20k for the field, they then charge £10k for a dozen plots, and they pocket the difference.
The poor saps who are persuaded to buy the plots are left with a meaningless subdivision of a field which they don't even have access to, let alone any hope of building anything on it. It's a scam, pure and simple, but it's hard to outlaw because there is nothing illegal about subdividing a field and selling it off in parcels: the fraud relies on exaggerating the hope value placed on the plots and that can be difficult to prove, especially as the land bankers don't use conventional marketing channels, instead mostly relying on high-pressure sales techniques. They will hold out the prospect of a fat profit, but only if you move quickly. Oh, and you don't need to bother with a conveyancing solicitor — you don't need one to buy a car, do you? And this is less than a new car!
Anyway, despite lots of media exposure, and parliamentary questions and such, land banking scams are still with us and may in fact be getting worse. Such has been the publicity surrounding Grant Shapps's "selfbuild revolution" that there is now a whole new cohort of potential suckers out there who know nothing about the perils of land banking.
But whilst the land bankers might trouser the odd £10k from the unsuspecting public, there is a a much bigger scam going on down at the town hall and this is one that the Financial Services Authority will not be investigating. We are talking impact fees, or development contributions, and these mothers are big.
For decades, big housebuilders and developers have had to make infrastructure contributions in return for getting planning permissions. It was par for the course. "You wanna build 100 new homes here? Make 30 of them affordable, and give us a couple of million so we can build you a nice access road with its own roundabout. And some swings for the kiddies. There's a good boy."
But times change and this sort of conversation is no longer for the big guns. It's filtered down to individual selfbuilds and it may even be on its way towards people adding extensions. "You wanna add an extra bedroom? That'll be another desk in the primary skule and that costs us £20k." Long gone are the days when the rates would cover local expenditure: too much local government money comes from central funding, so it's hardly surprising that local government looks at innovative ways of raising extra cash. That won't lose any votes. The squeeze is on.
Trouble is this just may to stop building dead in its tracks. In the past few days, stories of selfbuilders being asked for a £50k contribution have hit my screen, and in one case, mentioned in a Jason Orme blog, £187k. Call it S106 payments, Affordable Housing Contributions, Community Infrastructure Levy, it all amounts to much the same thing - a stealth tax on development.
Now, arguably, if this is all done and dusted before the selfbuilder ever gets hold of the land, and the extra expense is made clear at the outset, it's no bad thing, as in theory, the fees will be deducted from the uplift in value from the granting of planning permission. But this isn't always the case, and lots of would-be selfbuilds in back gardens will be rendered unviable by the introduction of fees. It all begins to make the land bankers look like amateurs.
Behind all this is the very odd way in which land tenure is handled. You can nominally own a piece of land or a house but if you want to do something different with it, the decision rests with others, namely the council. This used to be an entirely political matter — you simply had to convince the planners and your neighbours. But, in these straightened times, it looks like it's going to have a financial element attached to it now, over and above the mere cost of applying for planning permission. In effect, planning permissions will be sold for whatever the market will bear and any uplift in value as a result of that permission will mainly accrue to the council.
So you can see that the two issues — land bank scams and council contributions — are in fact closely linked and reflect two sides of the same coin. Namely, that planning permission is worth far more than land itself, and that this represents a type of public ownership of land by stealth. Granting planning permission on agricultural land is very similar to printing money because it creates value: it's hardly surprising that the ones granting the permission — the councils — are now trying to get their hands on the spoils.
The message is that potential plot purchasers now have two sharks out there to watch out for. The first is to avoid buying a piece of land with no hope of ever getting planning permission: the second is to make sure that if the land does stand a chance of getting planning, that you will be able to afford to pay for it when the permission is granted.
This is how it works. Unscrupulous people buy fields which never have a hope in hell of being built on and then flog off little chunks of these fields as building plots. They pay maybe £20k for the field, they then charge £10k for a dozen plots, and they pocket the difference.
The poor saps who are persuaded to buy the plots are left with a meaningless subdivision of a field which they don't even have access to, let alone any hope of building anything on it. It's a scam, pure and simple, but it's hard to outlaw because there is nothing illegal about subdividing a field and selling it off in parcels: the fraud relies on exaggerating the hope value placed on the plots and that can be difficult to prove, especially as the land bankers don't use conventional marketing channels, instead mostly relying on high-pressure sales techniques. They will hold out the prospect of a fat profit, but only if you move quickly. Oh, and you don't need to bother with a conveyancing solicitor — you don't need one to buy a car, do you? And this is less than a new car!
Anyway, despite lots of media exposure, and parliamentary questions and such, land banking scams are still with us and may in fact be getting worse. Such has been the publicity surrounding Grant Shapps's "selfbuild revolution" that there is now a whole new cohort of potential suckers out there who know nothing about the perils of land banking.
But whilst the land bankers might trouser the odd £10k from the unsuspecting public, there is a a much bigger scam going on down at the town hall and this is one that the Financial Services Authority will not be investigating. We are talking impact fees, or development contributions, and these mothers are big.
For decades, big housebuilders and developers have had to make infrastructure contributions in return for getting planning permissions. It was par for the course. "You wanna build 100 new homes here? Make 30 of them affordable, and give us a couple of million so we can build you a nice access road with its own roundabout. And some swings for the kiddies. There's a good boy."
But times change and this sort of conversation is no longer for the big guns. It's filtered down to individual selfbuilds and it may even be on its way towards people adding extensions. "You wanna add an extra bedroom? That'll be another desk in the primary skule and that costs us £20k." Long gone are the days when the rates would cover local expenditure: too much local government money comes from central funding, so it's hardly surprising that local government looks at innovative ways of raising extra cash. That won't lose any votes. The squeeze is on.
Trouble is this just may to stop building dead in its tracks. In the past few days, stories of selfbuilders being asked for a £50k contribution have hit my screen, and in one case, mentioned in a Jason Orme blog, £187k. Call it S106 payments, Affordable Housing Contributions, Community Infrastructure Levy, it all amounts to much the same thing - a stealth tax on development.
Now, arguably, if this is all done and dusted before the selfbuilder ever gets hold of the land, and the extra expense is made clear at the outset, it's no bad thing, as in theory, the fees will be deducted from the uplift in value from the granting of planning permission. But this isn't always the case, and lots of would-be selfbuilds in back gardens will be rendered unviable by the introduction of fees. It all begins to make the land bankers look like amateurs.
Behind all this is the very odd way in which land tenure is handled. You can nominally own a piece of land or a house but if you want to do something different with it, the decision rests with others, namely the council. This used to be an entirely political matter — you simply had to convince the planners and your neighbours. But, in these straightened times, it looks like it's going to have a financial element attached to it now, over and above the mere cost of applying for planning permission. In effect, planning permissions will be sold for whatever the market will bear and any uplift in value as a result of that permission will mainly accrue to the council.
So you can see that the two issues — land bank scams and council contributions — are in fact closely linked and reflect two sides of the same coin. Namely, that planning permission is worth far more than land itself, and that this represents a type of public ownership of land by stealth. Granting planning permission on agricultural land is very similar to printing money because it creates value: it's hardly surprising that the ones granting the permission — the councils — are now trying to get their hands on the spoils.
The message is that potential plot purchasers now have two sharks out there to watch out for. The first is to avoid buying a piece of land with no hope of ever getting planning permission: the second is to make sure that if the land does stand a chance of getting planning, that you will be able to afford to pay for it when the permission is granted.
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