LONDON LETTER:An often-derided town in southeast England is an example of what is needed to solve the new housing crisis
FOR CENTURIES the lands around Bletchley in north Buckinghamshire remained unchanged, dotted with villages and busy farms, before being criss-crossed by roads and canals as the Industrial Revolution took hold.
In the late 1790s, Thomas Harrison had bought thousands of acres, though the holding did not become known as Bletchley Park until it was bought in 1877 by Samuel Lipscomb Seckham, who had made a fortune as a property developer in Oxford.
By 1938, it had seen its best days when it was bought by a builder who, seeking to profit from the shortage of houses in the district, planned to knock it down and build a housing estate.
However, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who served as the director of naval intelligence, the head of MI6 and the founder of the British government’s Code and Cypher School, heard about the plan before the planned demolition. Using his own money, he bought the estate, which was within walking distance of Bletchley railway station, serving both Oxford and Cambridge – and thus within commuting distance for the mathematical geniuses he needed to break Germany’s codes.
Having paid £7,500 for it, Sinclair turned Bletchley Park into “Station X” during the second World War. It housed on its grounds the thousands of intelligence staff who broke Germany’s Enigma codes.
In the early 1960s, Bletchley village lobbied to be the centre of the planned new town of Milton Keynes, one of many planned to deal with acute housing shortages. It lost out, relegated to being but a suburb.
Over the years, Milton Keynes, often the butt of jokes, has become home to 215,000 people, benefiting from millions of trees planted in its early days, with traffic-free paths that allow cyclists to travel its full distance within 15 minutes.
Today, housing experts warn that Britain, and particularly England, needs 250 new towns such as Milton Keynes to cope with a new housing crisis, one that threatens the social fabric unless urgent action is taken.
Back in 1968, at the height of a building boom that changed the face of England, nearly 420,000 new homes were built. Last year, however, just 102,000 homes were completed, the lowest figure for 80 years.
Warning of an impending crisis, the Home Builders’ Federation said planning permission approvals dropped in every quarter last year, adding that the British government’s own figures made clear that 225,000 homes are needed every year for the next 25 years.
The average number built annually over the last 20 years has been 160,000, but this rate, if it continued to be the average for the next 15 years, would still leave Britain short of up to 1.2 million needed homes by 2025.
Producing different figures, the Institute of Public Policy Research agrees that a crisis lies ahead: London will be short of 325,000 homes; Yorkshire and Humberside short of 151,000; the east of England 132,000.
The shortages elsewhere are smaller: the southeast will be short of 77,000 homes; the east midlands 66,000 homes; the west midlands 28,000; the northeast 16,000 homes and the southwest 7,000.
Only the northwest of England could cope with demand, with 40,000 extra homes compared to the number of households, due to the high rate of unoccupied premises at present.
Though demand is strong, few are able to get mortgages. Just 28,500 were given in January, a drop of 26 per cent on the December figures, compared with the 90,000 per month that were typical before the financial crisis.
Faced with shortages and, presumably, higher prices, families will be driven towards needing local authority housing, with the Institute of Public Policy Research warning that more than 500,000 State-provided properties will be needed unless something changes dramatically.
Currently, 1.8 million families – about 4.5 million people – are in the queue for local authority housing, though the Conservative/Liberal Democrats coalition has halved the construction budget for the next three years. The demand for housing is accelerating, with one small lobby group, the 250 New Towns Club, arguing for a universal right to build on freehold land – a measure that, if implemented, would cause outrage in many villages that do not want to grow dramatically.
Since it took up office, the Conservative/Liberal Democrats coalition has been pushing both ways on planning – arguing on one hand for greater development, but also readying to offer more control to local communities to decide what gets built in their area.
Under the Localism Bill, proposed by communities secretary Eric Pickles, residents, even those living in a particular group of streets, would be able to define themselves as neighbourhoods, with the power to agree a development plan, subject to a local referendum.
For some, Pickles’s plan, which has still to clear legislative hurdles in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, will end up being turned into a Nimby – Not In My Backyard – charter, regardless of the intention.
Having twice come to the attention of property developers, Bletchley Park decayed after the war. In 1991, the government decided to sell it for housing – but then discovered that it couldn’t, for it was realised that Admiral Sinclair had never been paid for the building that helped win the war. Today Bletchley Park houses two museums, the National Codes Centre and the National Museum of Computing.
