House prices in Crawley

The Guardian recently produced a map outlining the housing situation across the UK. Nationally the picture isn’t great, with the vast majority of the country south of Manchester falling into a category where most couples can no longer afford to buy, but the picture in our area is even worse than the norm.

Crawley is already as expensive as much of outer London and as people on higher incomes are forced to move further out from the city to find somewhere to purchase we are increasingly moving towards the levels of unaffordability in central London. It’s a long way from the promise made when the New Towns were built, that there will be land for you, your children, and your children’s children.

Now, admittedly the figures where are from last November and over the last couple of months the prices have fallen slightly, albeit from a very high level, but that isn’t a lot of help for people looking to buy for several reasons.

The first is that prices are falling because the demand has dropped off, with higher interest rates and the cost of living crisis squeezing incomes to the point where buying a house simply isn’t something people can access the borrowing to afford.

The second is that when prices fall people just tend to stop selling. Speaking with a public policy expert from Shelter a few years ago, they highlighted that when prices drop, people stop selling to avoid getting into negative equity or simply because people always imagine that the greatest price their house could command to be the true one. As a result, there’s a reduction in supply (which will in time result in prices increasing again), with housing only being sold when people are forced to, mostly due to the three D’s: debt, divorce and death.

If we want to stabilise the cost of housing then there really is no alternative to massively increasing the supply of housing, both in terms of social (council) housing and owner-occupation. For that there is really only one answer: New Towns.

Endless urban extensions to existing towns simply cannot generate the volume of housing we need to house the generation trapped at home, trapped in the rental sector, or trapped in emergency temporary housing. The only time since the Second World War where we managed to make serious in-roads into housing delivery was when we built the New Towns like Crawley.

Unlike urban extensions, New Towns can plan out the infrastructure and services they need. It doesn’t even have to come at significant cost to the Treasury, the original New Towns bought land at rock bottom agricultural prices and developed out commercial units which helped to pay-off the cost of the development. Best of all, it gets around the planning processes and land-banking which ultimately constrain the flow of new properties and a rate which enables them to maximise profits, making housing genuinely more affordable.

That’s what the next Labour Government can offer those desperately in need of housing. That’s what a Labour Government can offer towns which, like Crawley, are currently trapped in a housing emergency.