Why EU rules are not to blame for not enough houses being built in Britain - and therefore why getting rid of old EU rules will not solve the problem
You’d have figured that the one unavoidable benefit of Brexit would be that the British government would no longer be able to blame their own mistakes and missteps on the EU. Turns out we don’t even get that much for comfort. Sunak and his crew have decided to tell everyone that a major obstacle to house building in this country over the last decade has been…….the EU Habitats Directive. It’s all the EU’s fault, as usual. They’ve said they’ll get rid of this piece of European Union “red tape”, left over from before we got our freedom back, and then everything will start to happen on the house building front.
There are several layers of nonsense going on here; I’ll peel them back one by one. The first is that the EU Habitats Directive is unnecessarily restrictive, to the point that it has genuinely held back housebuilding in the UK. Listen, there are many reasons why more houses aren’t built in Britain and the Habitats Directive does not make the top ten. The main reason we don’t build more in this country is purely political. The NIMBY vote is massive and crosses all political boundaries. There are loads of NIMBYs on the right who don’t want any development around them for many reasons, one being they fear the value of their properties being diminished; there are plenty of NIMBYs on the left who cite environmental concerns (while mostly being worried that the value of their house will diminish).
The Tories in particular fear NIMBYism as a political force given they almost certainly have the most to lose from it. The issue has been used effectively by other parties to defeat them in by-elections, most notably the Liberal Democrats. So, the reason enough houses don’t get built isn’t down to EU regulations. It has everything to do with British politics and how willing people are in this country to stomach new building anywhere close to where they live.
Imagine for a moment that the UK government gets rid of all remnants within the UK statue related to the Habitats Directive. This isn’t going to free up builders to start creating thousands more houses because you still have the basic political problem, one that is now going to manifest itself directly. Instead of having an issue with a law that’s derived from an EU Directive, you’re going to have people who care about this stuff for environmental and animal rights reasons ally with people who care about this stuff because they don’t want any building going on anywhere near them (NIMBYs of all stripes, in other words) and they will have more than enough of a collective voice to halt the building of houses. In other words, NIMBYism is so powerful in Britain that the effect of the Habitats Directive on halting new building is pretty much nil.
The second layer to peel back here is the value of the Habitats Directive itself and why getting rid of it is littered with problems beyond the ones I’ve already highlighted. Namely, that perhaps there are some things about the environmental regulations we got from our time as EU members that are not only good but in some ways necessary. Not that we need the EU regulation to be exactly as is, but you need something a bit like it, and in the end it will probably look a lot like what we already have.
I don’t believe for a moment that most people on the right, other than the most insanely libertarian amongst them, want to live in a Britain with no environmental regulation whatsoever. I have some direct experience of this - when I was doing the Red Tape Initiative, I was surprised about the strength of feeling from Tory MPs and their Tory voting constituents about animal welfare and preservation. This is a much bigger issue amongst traditional Tory voters than is widely talked about. In particular, there was widespread worry, in rural areas that have been Tory safe seats for ages, about bat populations and preserving their habitats against what they would describe as too much building. Now, some of this might have been a cover for self-interested NIMBYism, a sort of right-wing version of “We just don’t want any new building in our area because we don’t want to disrupt working class communities”, but nonetheless, a lot of Tory voters care deeply about this stuff.
Removing the Habitats Directive and replacing it with nothing will have all sorts of downsides, many of them that would be hard to predict from where we sit now but would look obvious in retrospect.
The final layer to remove here is a simple one and won’t take up much time: it’s obvious that the government doesn’t actually believe that getting rid of the Habitats Directive will make much of a difference to how many houses get built given they are looking at a range of other options. For instance, giving council tax rebates to people living in areas with a high level of development - “paying off the NIMBYs” in other words. I don’t think that will work but it is a better idea than torching the remnants of the Habitats Directive within the UK legal system.
Getting rid of EU law and making a big deal out of it is very on brand for the current Conservative party. But they should look at other things in this genre they’ve done in the last few years and figure out that this sort of thing has negative political consequences eventually. If you say you’re going to get rid of pesky EU laws stopping house building, and then no uptick in house building happens as a result, you make yourself look incompetent. You also make Brexit look bad, as yet another so called benefit of it turns out to be hot air.
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I suppose in this context I am a "traditional tory voter" (God forbid) - pro Europe, markets manufacturing, exports, savings and responsibility - but also pro conservation and landscape and wildlife habitat preservation. As expected, the lunacy of Brexit results in ever more desperate actions and reactions.
A quick word on "Nimbyism" : The planning system is already tilted in favour of developers- and once something is built, it usually stays built - no matter how ugly, unsuitable or unwanted. We can probably all cite unwanted local extentions, upbuilds, down-builds etc, which in recent years have been waved through - and which serve no other purpose than personal convenience and personal greed.