The plight of personality politics

I’M COMPELLED to add my voice to those of Richard Digard and Andy Sloan in these pages last week and Horace Camp before them as being concerned with the fractured state of our States.

I don’t lay the blame entirely with the current assembly because the die was already cast, although some of the perpetrators remain in government.

What alarms me most, and perhaps Policy & Resources should be thanked for its honesty, is the admission of what many of us have long suspected that our behemoth civil service, not our deputies, is now running this island. What P&R should not be thanked for is its timidity in trying to grab back the reigns.

This capitulation feeds down to each and every committee not coming to terms with the harsh reality of living within its means at the expense of the harsher reality that comes with not living within its means, as any family and private sector business will testify.

As this is my farewell contribution to these pages, I look back across some of the 60 articles over the past two years that focused on the political impact on housing locally.

Last year I wrote about Guernsey’s lost decade in describing Guernsey’s response to the 2011 States Housing Needs Study, then the most comprehensive appraisal of our island’s accommodation in the face of a severe housing shortage at the time. A lull in the housing market saw low levels of development in the private sector that should have propelled the States to profit from enterprising building programmes, providing much-needed work for the industry and adequate housing for the tax-paying public, who directly and indirectly repay the exchequer in abundance.

Two years ago, I asked the States to look at the wider picture by adopting give-and-take land use classes for the residential, commercial and industrial sectors, identifying wholesale redevelopment models with broader objectives and aspirations. There is serious demand for more appropriate and higher quality industrial space. The large industrial units at Pitronnerie Road, for example, are no longer suitable and their sub-division is unviable, whereas the site is ideal for residential development if the owners were tempted by that.

In return, the former data park at Route Militaire is ideal for a low-profile light-industrial complex that the States could develop and rent to various businesses on full-repairing leases. It’s still not too late and the investment would soon produce dividends and provide much-needed premises for essential trades within the island. The plumbers, electricians, etc. we all depend upon and complain when they’re not available at the drop of a hat.

Property development is not rocket science, it just takes acumen to combine what is already States-owned property with an underused borrowing facility plus the well-resourced housing and planning departments working within their own policies to develop, manage and thereby invest in rather than merely pander to its people.

There is generally a regrettable air of apathy within the States about its property portfolio, the tarnished family silver. A long-standing culture of neglect has seen buildings that produce substantial capital returns being maintained on shoestring budgets. The current strong market might be a good opportunity to cash in, however in June I gave two examples of States-owned potential development projects in the same road swiftly sold or under offer without the planning options having been explored by the DPA. Even if not for its own purposes the uplift in value when selling such properties with approved planning options is huge, rather than marketing them as just redundant buildings.

In the same month, Health & Social Services in conjunction with the Guernsey Housing Association proposed allowing eligible islanders to buy newly-built homes at 75% of their market value. This would release massive public wealth into private hands and further diminish the island’s stock of rental properties merely in order to make a quick buck under the pretence of helping islanders who aspire to home ownership.

With so much emphasis on young and first-time buyers the States is neglecting the wider market. New housing aimed at older people would release family-size houses for younger generations. The mid-range properties they sell would soon be filled by others vacating starter-homes and make better use of Guernsey’s already vast and varied housing stock.

In that regard more than 250 derelict vineries have been pin-pointed by the States and applications by beleaguered growers to replace them with new housing vigorously rejected for more than 40 years. The time has come to reconsider this rule in a pragmatic and mindful way. Not to open the flood gates by using them all at once and definitely not every square-inch of them, as at Pointues Rocques.

In each case only half of the available space should be designated for development with time-penalty covenants attached to the planning permission for the vinery owner or developer to clear and return to grass in perpetuity the remainder of the site, thereby improving the locality’s green agenda and compensating for the alarming loss of agricultural land to domestic use – more than 300 vergees (120 acres) – under the current Island Development Plan.

It’s also time to develop the elongated and often vacuous gardens behind roadside ribbon development along the arterial routes across the island. These roads already hold sufficient mains services and will withstand a traffic impact assessment. Regular public transport is on the doorstep and food shops and schools are for most in close proximity, particularly along the southern stretch of the island.

The creditable practice of active travel and shared mobility, however, should remain a personal choice. Keen buyers of new flats and houses in the besieged northern parishes might believe they’ll embrace the new ideal but some will soon revert to owning their own set of wheels, creating a strain on public parking in the area. Those such as van drivers for whom vehicles are essential have no choice.

It’s largely the affordable housing sector these mobility limitations are being foisted upon, although of the 185 new houses in the private sector last year only one is designated as an affordable home under the lame-duck ‘GP11’ rule. In fact, the one and only in five years of waiting. Last week’s Annual Monitoring Report on planning highlighted between 239 and 519 potential units of affordable housing, which without a means of bringing them to fruition only exemplifies the inadequacy of the Development & Planning Authority’s policies.

The 2016 IDP neither was nor is fit for purpose and merely tinkering with it is not enough. The written policies are backfiring and planners are hamstrung by their flawed logic. Before matters worsen the DPA needs to suspend the IDP altogether and instead use it as a guide and allow the planning authorities discretionary powers until an altogether better plan is hatched.

Furthermore, Guernsey should adopt the principles of the UK’s 1947 Housing Act by asserting proprietary rights when granting planning permissions. Landowners would benefit from a minor quantifiable percentage of the land’s uplift in value that comes with planning approval, but not today’s jackpot profits if they want to avoid punitive taxation. The initial saving would offset the price of new housing and engineer a ripple effect on the market as a whole. Moreover, with proprietary rights the DPA would have full control to consider applications on merit and suitability without being tested by cute interpretations of the written policies.

People ask why, with so much to say about the States, I don’t stand for election myself. Indeed, I have a family pedigree of such insofar that my late father, John Cooper, was a five-times re-elected Vale deputy between 1968 and 1982, at which point he was Father of the House. A builder by profession with his own construction company, he’d been president of Housing, among other departments, and held every position in the Vale douzaine, including junior and senior constable, before standing for election as deputy. He regarded public representation as an honour and a privilege.

For myself, I have no faith in the present electoral system and no time for the current penchant for media-led personality politics, which has been described by whom I know not as reducing citizens to spectators and encouraging a politics of feeling rather than of thought, as demonstrated in my opinion throughout the recent equality debate.

The German professor Ute Frevert wrote earlier this year: ‘Politics in the 21st Century is buzzing with emotions [and] a growing tendency by politicians to appeal to people’s emotions and by citizens to act emotionally. Emotions have invaded political campaign rhetoric, thanks to the rise of populist parties with their antagonistic and polarising agendas and the ubiquity of social media.’

I couldn’t have put it better myself.