Phoenix Redux

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So, Michael Gove's 'nimby clause' on new build planning [viz. his blocking a 165 home development in Tunbridge Wells - no surprises there] when he was housing secretary, is to be reversed under the new government's revamped National Planning Policy Framework. Too damn' right. We need to build houses in quantity and at speed; we need to make them affordable, and we need to build social housing. Oh, and the stuff we build needs to be energy efficient - preferably energy-passive - housing. Tall order? I don't think so: proven technology, design and materials are already out there in the wild: it is possible to construct modestly-sized structures - up to four bedrooms - for less than £75,000 that would qualify.

What's needed today is a coordinated plan of procurement by government along the lines of the postwar Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act of 1944, which over the following few years gave us the 'prefab': relatively cheap housing mostly designed to plug the housing shortfall left by the war for around ten years. In the late forties/early fifties, the UK had proportionally more social housing than the Soviet Union of the time. Many of those 'temporary' houses that were built, as those pictured in Wake Green Road, Birmingham [in the 'Phoenix' design, many of which have recently been restored and have modernised interiors and insulation: still Grade 2 listed!] are occupied to this day, functioning into well over seven times their projected lifespan. Building new stuff to the same social ends shouldn't be an insurmountable task: it's routine in Germany and Scandinavia to construct high-performing housing stock affordably: all it takes is legislation and money. We did it before and we can do it again, and better still this time around.

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