Here in Kingston the juggling act has suddenly become very real. We are being asked to comment on a Regulation 19 Local Plan intended to guide development to 2043 and proposing around 19,000 homes over its fifteen-year life. It has necessarily been prepared within the framework of the current London Plan, which requires Kingston to deliver at least 964 homes a year. Yet the new draft London Plan, published while Kingston’s consultation is still under way, proposes just 6,872 homes for the borough over ten years, or about 687 a year, a reduction of almost 29% from the current London Plan requirement. So while the national conversation is dominated by ever higher housing ambitions, Kingston is consulting on one set of numbers while City Hall is proposing a substantially lower one for the future. Neither figure can simply be substituted for the other. The new London Plan is still only a draft and Kingston’s Local Plan must presently conform with the adopted 2021 London Plan, but the change is far too large to dismiss as background noise.

It potentially calls into question not only the overall scale and distribution of growth, but some of the choices made to accommodate it. That is particularly important where the Regulation 19 Plan proposes development on Green Belt or Metropolitan Open Land. If part of the justification for releasing or reallocating such land rests on demonstrating that a particular scale of housing need cannot reasonably be met elsewhere, a substantially lower future strategic requirement must at least prompt the question of whether every one of those allocations remains necessary. It does not prove that they are wrong, but it surely strengthens the case for testing them again. This is exactly the problem with having so many balls in the air. Housing targets, site allocations, the Local Plan, the London Plan and national policy are supposed eventually to form a coherent hierarchy, but for those expected to understand, scrutinise and respond to them now, they are moving on different trajectories at the same time.

Almost every reform now carries some version of the same instruction: build more homes, release more land, increase density, speed decisions, reduce uncertainty, weaken obstruction, give mayors more power, give developers clearer rules and raise housing targets. We seem to have arrived at a national planning philosophy that can be summarised remarkably easily. If in doubt, count the units. Britain undoubtedly needs more homes and London needs a great many more, but somewhere along the way that incontestable fact has hardened into a much more questionable proposition, that if only enough planning permissions are granted and enough housing units are built, the housing crisis will eventually surrender. That is beginning to look suspiciously like the Prime Minister’s new clothes. Suppose the reforms work magnificently. Suppose planning committees approve faster, mayors intervene more readily, land is released, densities rise and hundreds of thousands more homes receive permission. Suppose developers actually build them. We are still left with the questions that the national obsession with housing numbers repeatedly manages to push aside. Who owns those homes, who are they sold to, who can afford them, what tenure are they, are they where people need them, are they large enough for families and do they actually meet the needs of the people for whom the housing crisis is most acute? A housing unit and a home are not quite the same thing, yet much of the national debate behaves as though increasing the former will automatically provide the latter.

London property also remains an international investment market. Overseas purchasers continue to buy a significant share of new-build homes, although the familiar picture of thousands of permanently darkened luxury flats owned by absent foreigners is far too simple. Many internationally purchased properties are occupied or rented and overseas pre-sales can help finance development. But that does not remove the more fundamental question. Why should homes created on exceptionally scarce land, their value profoundly influenced by public infrastructure and public planning decisions, be treated primarily as financial assets available to a global investment market? In fact, the passport of the purchaser may be something of a distraction. A British investment fund can financialise housing just as efficiently as an overseas investor. The deeper argument is not foreign buyers against British buyers. It is about whether the housing market is being required to serve society or whether society is simply expected to accommodate whatever outcomes the housing market happens to produce.

Then there is planning’s most obliging adjective, affordable. We have somehow constructed a vocabulary in which calling a home affordable can become more important than establishing whether anyone on an ordinary local income can afford it. The draft London Plan deserves some credit here. It talks about genuinely affordable housing, gives substantial emphasis to Social Rent and recognises that housing delivery cannot simply be a numbers game. Size, tenure, type and quality matter too. Yet we still rely heavily upon private commercial development to provide a public good through Section 106 agreements, percentages, tenure mixes and viability negotiations. Social housing becomes something to be extracted from the development appraisal after everybody has agreed what the land is worth and what commercial return the scheme requires. We have turned a moral question into a viability calculation. Perhaps housing needs something equivalent to the settlement Britain made over healthcare in 1948. The NHS did not abolish private medicine. It established a national principle that access to essential healthcare should not depend entirely upon someone’s purchasing power. We have never made the equivalent settlement about a decent home. That would not require the state to own every house or build every development. It would require us to decide what the housing market is actually for, and then govern land, taxation, finance, investment, Social Rent, private rent and development accordingly.

At present we do almost the reverse. We alter the planning system again and again because planning permission is the lever government finds easiest to pull, while leaving much of the economic machinery determining who eventually gets the resulting homes substantially untouched.

There are two more balls in this juggling act which ought to be enormous but are strangely easy to lose sight of. The first is design. This is particularly odd because national planning policy itself attaches great importance to design codes. In principle they are one of the most powerful ideas in modern planning. Instead of communities fighting building by building, application by application and façade by façade, a design code allows a place to decide beforehand what sort of development it expects. Height, massing, street form, frontage, public realm, materials, landscape, movement and local character can all be considered while there is still time to influence the answer. Beauty ceases to be the subjective protest offered at the end of the process and becomes part of the rules at the beginning. Yet design codes remain among the great invisible instruments of English planning. Everyone praises them, national policy repeatedly invokes them and government guidance explains how important they are, but when major development actually arrives the code is too often absent, incomplete, generic, advisory, conveniently flexible or simply brushed aside by the supposed imperatives of viability and housing delivery. That is not a minor administrative weakness. If we are going to build substantially more, more densely and sometimes higher, the quality of what we build becomes more important, not less. The faster the housing machine is expected to run, the stronger its design discipline needs to become. Otherwise beauty is simply another ball allowed to hit the floor whenever keeping the housing target airborne becomes difficult.

Beyond design sits the largest ball of all, place. Everybody in planning talks about placemaking, but place itself is remarkably difficult to put into a spreadsheet. Homes can be counted, permissions can be counted, completions can be counted, affordable percentages can be counted, heights can be measured and densities calculated. Place is more troublesome. Place is the school with enough spaces, the GP surgery you can actually get into, the tree outside the window, the pavement wide enough to walk along, the shop on the corner, the pub that survives, the bus that comes, the square where people linger, the building you recognise, the view you would miss if it disappeared and the mixture of people and uses that turns development into neighbourhood. Place is what remains after the developer has gone home. Yet in the rush to deliver housing units it is precisely this cohesive whole that can become ungraspable. We can meet a housing target and damage a town. We can maximise density and impoverish public life. We can technically provide “affordable housing” which remains unaffordable to the people who need it. We can increase the number of dwellings while reducing the quality of the place in which old residents and new residents alike must live. We can even produce individually handsome buildings which collectively make a miserable town. That is why design codes and place cannot be decorative balls occasionally tossed into the performance. They are supposed to help govern the whole act.

The NPPF is in the air, the London Plan is in the air, Kingston’s Local Plan is in the air, housing targets, mayoral powers, Social Rent, affordability, viability and infrastructure are all up there too. Add design codes and place and the challenge becomes clearer. A competent government should not be congratulated merely because it can keep throwing more balls upwards, and housebuilding policy should not be mistaken for housing policy simply because the resulting numbers are easier to count. The real skill of juggling is coordination. Land, homes, affordability, infrastructure, design and place have to belong to one coherent act. If the only ball we are absolutely determined not to drop is the housing target, everything else eventually hits the floor. We may then discover, rather late, that in our frantic determination to build enough houses we forgot to build the places in which people actually wanted, and could afford, to live.

*the views expressed here are not necessarily the views of The Kingston Society.