High-rise flats could help Labour hit its housing target

Good morning. The government has an ambitious housing target that would be easier to achieve if it could do two things: better support the construction of tower blocks, and dispel some of the fears that put people off living in them.

One measure the government is bringing in which will help somewhat is the widespread introduction of commonhold as opposed to leasehold. But density has to be attractive to builders as well as buyers. And the current policy mix, thanks in large part to the last government, is not good.

I have a very large conflict of interest here, as I own a flat in a high-rise block, and I’m currently in the process of upsizing to another, larger high-rise flat. I am also very unusual in that, unlike most people in England, I actively want to live in a tower block, and my only non-negotiables in our search for a bigger home were that we continued to live in one and we avoided the ground floor.

These are commonplace requests outside of England. And one of the challenges for the government as it tackles the long-term causes of our housing crisis is making people like me less unusual. Its plans on commonhold go some way to doing that. But unless Labour reckons with the consequences of a highly flawed law from the last government, it is unlikely to get much benefit from them.

Safe as high-rises

If the UK wants to build homes in the places that need them, then living at density has to become the proactive choice of more people. England has to learn to love flats. Even in London, where a narrow majority of homes are flats, only one in every five is a high-rise (six storeys or higher), per the London Assembly’s most recent survey.

In some ways this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can come up with all sorts of poetic claims about why I like living in a high-rise flat, but it’s probably as simple as I grew up on the fourth floor, so living in the sky is my ‘normal’ setting. Large numbers of us will always be drawn to residences that remind us of our family home. And the more we successfully build at density, the more people will choose that as the default.

Equally, if we fail to build more decent tower blocks, prospective buyers will see them as an interim or inferior option to buying low-rise flats or houses. And fewer prospective buyers means fewer interested developers able to secure the funds to build them.

The May government’s response to the Grenfell Tower fire essentially said, ‘if you are in a high-rise and something bad happens, it’s not the fault of the state that regulated the construction industry; you’re on your own, unless you happen to be in an ex-council flat’. This was partially remedied by the 2022 Building Safety Act, which did at least extend useful protections and guarantees to people in high rises. But it has done long-lasting damage to the market for flats, which in turn did damage to developers’ ability to build them.

It also exposed the vulnerability of leaseholders, who have little control over building repair costs, service charges and ground rents.

Now, again, declaring my interest here, I am a leaseholder. But in practice, being a leaseholder in an ex-council flat works pretty well because your freeholder is the local authority. The problems of a distant, opaque freeholder whose flaws and powers you only discover after buying don’t really apply. And as with many older flats, our ground rent is only nominal. (I’m not saying there aren’t any problems with local authority freeholders. They are just more predictable and easier to hedge against.)

But many leaseholders in commercial new-build flats face a complete wild west with incessant price gouging and absurd restrictions. My new favourite example comes from this i piece by Hannah Fearn, in which a woman had to fill out a form and pay a fee to have a cat on her property.

The government’s new revised commonhold system — which would bring England in line with most other countries, including Scotland — ought to make flat-dwelling a more attractive option for people wanting to own their own home. It makes it much easier to replace the person or organisation in charge of maintaining your flat, and institutes much better practices for preparing for repairs and other crises. This should make living at density a more attractive prospect and boost the market for high-rises.

However, while the 2022 act has provided a degree of relief for those of us in tower blocks, it has created serious and damaging barriers to building more of them. The last government seemed to be more familiar with the business model of housebuilders, where you can build it as you sell it, than with that of high-rise builders. For the latter, cash flow and construction time are much more important, because you can’t realise your profits until much later on in the project. Building 100 houses is a very different task to building 100 homes in a high-rise for this reason.

The problem with the Building Safety Act is that, by design, if you submit an application and it is rejected, the process starts anew. There is no mechanism for the building safety regulator to compel tweaks that mean your high-rise can go ahead. That both delays construction and deters developers. As it stands, many projects are caught in limbo, at a time when rising interest rates and demand for workers are adding costs.

In tackling leasehold and moving towards a high-density approach, the Labour government is doing the right thing. It is fixing a decades-long, cross-party failure. But if it doesn’t also build on the last government’s attempts to improve safety, it is going to find precious few companies that are willing or able to actually build high rises. Even as they become a more attractive prospect for would-be residents.

Now try this

I am very much enjoying Laura Misch’s new single Alchemy.

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