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Chronicle - 18 September 2007
Stephen Dorrell is a pretty cerebral sort of Tory, perhaps even austere. He recounts with cheerful self-deprecation the hilarity with which his father greeted his promotion to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Arts and Sport (but he made a point of paying for his own theatre tickets) before he moved on to Health. He made a brief and forlorn bid for the party leadership in
1997 before rallying to Ken Clarke but pretty well sat out the last Parliament concentrating on running the family business of manufacturing protective clothing (not a bad sector for a politician).
I suspect that the report from the policy group which he chaired with Baroness Cox (ex Ofsted) could well turn out to be the most influential of the bunch documents which have rained down in an early-autumn blitz of ideas. Iain Duncan-Smith’s report on “Breakdown Britain” certainly struck a chord with its emphasis on the need to repair the family as the key force in society, but I have doubts both about universality of the diagnosis of society’s ills and about the remedy to reward marriage in the tax system.
John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith have hit the headlines with their demands for environmental action but they are hoeing in a well-ploughed furrow and their policies have a seriously prescriptive top-down flavour.
At the heart of the Dorrell-Cox report is an analysis of British society which could at least sit alongside Duncan-Smith’s. Its starting point is a proposition which is held across the political divide – that social mobility is declining. The Dorrell-Cox report contains two eye-catching proposals, one designed to tackle persistently under-performing city schools and the other to break up the “dead-end ghettos” of social housing.
Tenants with five years of tenure under their belts and a record of acceptable behaviour should, Dorrell argues, be granted a dowry worth 10 per cent of the value of the home they are quitting to use as a down-payment on a home of their own.
It’s not a particularly radical idea- think tanks have been tossing around the idea of giving tenants incentives to free up social housing for some time. The real problem is the market place. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reckons that first-time buyers face near record difficulty in getting on the housing ladder. RICS found that a couple in the lowest quarter of earnings (and remember that the majority of council house tenants are either retired or not in work) would need to spend 44 per cent of take-home pay to service a mortgage. And the up-front cost of getting on the ladder in the shape of a deposit and stamp duty is now four times more expensive than it was 10 years ago.
And the market place has changed. The fall-out from the “sub-prime” crisis of which Northern Rock was the most spectacular casualty spell tougher times both for borrowers and house-builders. In the first half of the year house-builders began work on 86,000 homes – some 9 per cent below the previous year and lower than the same periods of 2004 and ’05. House prices themselves may well be set for “correction” but this is cold comfort if all it signifies is that a home is marginally less unaffordable than it was – and the mortgage will cost more.
Nor is this good news for the government. The Cooper targets of 3m new homes by 2020 which suggests an annual new build of more than 170,000 new homes always looked ambitious, however much she prods, pokes, cajoles and exhorts builders and local authorities. Significantly the sharper fall in new build came from social landlords rather than private builders – suggesting that lack of sites with planning permission has played a role. John Calcutt, former chief executive of English Partnerships has been commissioned by Cooper to look at ways of speeding the planning process – he will feel much hot government breath on his neck.
Three months ago the FT ran a full page article by Martin Wolf, its admirable economics commentator with the title: The new capitalism – how unfettered finance is fast reshaping the global economy. And, he might have added, reshape the plans and aspirations of politicians.
© Local Government Chronicle
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