Why your MP might be fighting to prevent new homes from being built.

A view from Greenwich Park with the National Maritime Museum in the foreground. The blue outline is where these new homes will sit on Morden Wharf

This morning, Matthew Pennycook, the Member of Parliament for Greenwich & Woolwich tweeted his incredulity at Greenwich Council’s decision to grant permission to build 1,500 new homes on Morden Wharf on the Greenwich peninsula.

The site is on the edge of London’s zone 2 and a short walk from North Greenwich tube station. Built on an industrial wasteland on an old dockyard, it is an ideal location to build plentiful and dense housing. Along with the new homes, the scheme will also include a park, nursery, healthcare facility and offer up £2.5m for a bus route to be diverted to the area.

So why was Matthew Pennycook MP objecting and campaigning against these new homes that he deemed too tall and part of an “impending race to the sky”? Pennycook would rather see this area of his constituency sit vacant for many more years, and housing density reduced in any future development of the area… because the flats will poke above the tree line beyond Greenwich Park.

Some people might be baffled by this stance in a city and a constituency being crushed by a weight of a crippling housing crisis, but I am not. As a local councillor and having worked for a Member of Parliament before, I have insights into why your representatives will often fight against new homes.

Buckle up…

1. Despite being a relatively young MP at 38, Pennycook is likely to be a homeowner and comfortably housed. Once a homeowner, new housing is viewed mainly as an intrusion — pressure on services and the impact on amenities (or views) matter most to you and fundamentally, you now benefit from a constricted local housing supply. There is no personal incentive to support new housing.
2. The types of people who will engage in the planning system and lobby their MPs are overwhelmingly asset and time-rich homeowners. Pennycook would have likely been bombarded with noise against this development. The noise might be from a small and narrow group of people but as humans, we’re not very good at sorting through this stuff. Receive 100 emails against a development, out of 77,000 constituents, and it can feel like the entire community is united against the proposals.
3. Private renters are mostly on expensive and short-term tenancies. They are precarious and will move in and out of wards and constituencies frequently. It is this rootlessness that often means that their ability to organise and lobby their local politicians is hindered. MPs very rarely hear from the voices that will be directly benefiting from new housing, for example, those who want to remain in Greenwich but can no longer afford to. The lived experience of a private renter on a lower to average wage is alien to most MPs.
4. Councillors on planning committees will be acutely aware that if they reject a proposed development on flimsy grounds, the applicant could win on appeal and the local authority could end up paying the cost and the build happening anyway. Moreover, councillors are aware of their housing delivery targets, for both social and market-rate homes. They know they will likely face political blowback for not delivering social homes and they will likely face penalties from central government for not delivering market-rate homes. Members of Parliament, on the other hand, are not usually held responsible for housing delivery. Essentially, if new homes don’t get built in their constituency it is ‘no skin off their nose’. It is why your local councillors are often a little bit more pragmatic about house-building than your local MP.
5. Most Members of Parliament simply do not understand basic housing economics and viability. Every time I see an MP object to new housing because 1. These are ‘luxury towers’ and 2. There is not enough affordable housing — it makes me want to wince. Essentially, the ‘luxury’ or market-rate properties fund the affordable housing. The more snazzy the apartments, the more they are sold for, meaning the more profit the developer makes. The more profit the developer makes, the more affordable housing the local authority can negotiate out of the development. 31% of the Morden Wharf development is affordable in part because of the luxury of sections of it — 20% is allocated for social rent and the other 10% will be shared ownership homes.

When I worked for a London MP, over 50% of our casework was to do with housing matters — overcrowding, homelessness, evictions and rent arrears, etc. The same will be the case for most other inner London MPs. The stories I heard and the sheer volume of them that I had to deal with, has had a lasting impact on me. Over 1,000 families live in temporary accommodation in Greenwich Borough but one of their MPs is lobbying to prevent 300+ new social homes for them. To understand this behaviour, you need to understand the cynicism that pervades politics around housing in London. London’s population has exploded in the last 30 years and house building in the South East has not kept up with demand, skewing rents and prices to such an extent that there is a feeling that the problem now cannot be fixed. Due to hugely inflated prices, new build market-rate homes come with ‘luxury’ price tags. Most private renters on low or average incomes, look at new build homes and shrug, ‘that ain’t for me’ — and therefore they won’t come out to support new housing. The short-term political cost for blocking new homes is minimal.

The climb needed to lower rents and house prices is so steep, politicians do not think it is even worth trudging up the foothills. Fundamentally, most politicians don’t want to accept that by building market rates homes at the rate we need, we can lower prices and rents for everyone — because to accept this, would mean one would need to fight against NIMBY-noise. While fighting anti-development voices might not lead to you losing your seat with a comfortable majority, it will be exhausting. And why exhaust yourself when truth be told, you’re fairly comfortable yourself?

As a politician, if you want to help struggling families, build enough market-rate homes to flood the local market. While under our current planning system, this is likely to be impossible, large housing developments on London’s brownfield — like Morden Wharf — will help slow the punishing increase in rents and prices which cause gentrification and push people on lower incomes out of their home boroughs.

I hope this blog gives you an insight into why so many of our MPs who pontificate about the housing crisis in the Parliament, fight to stop new homes in their own constituencies.