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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Like our new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, I would like to consider myself a Yimby, not a Nimby. When it comes to building homes, my motto is: “Yes, in my backyard.” I had no idea the universe would take me so literally.
When I bought my first flat in London this summer, I knew that planning permission had been granted to extend the Victorian workshop next to my garden and add new accommodation. I looked up the plans on the internet and convinced myself that it would be a temporary and tolerable inconvenience.
I suspect this government is about to be confronted with a lesson I have already learned the hard way: it is easy to support development in the abstract, but it is not so easy to maintain that conviction while lying down at 8:01 on a Saturday morning and listening to a team of bricklayers doing vocal warm-up exercises, followed by several hours of what sounds like a bulldozer hitting a slab of concrete.
During my tenure as the FT’s property correspondent, fate had it in store for one foreigner to teach him some personal lessons about the UK property market.
It all started after several months of professional effort on my part to try and pin down the elusive statistics on whether UK homeowners are selling up in droves due to higher mortgage rates, my landlord announced that he wanted to sell our flat due to higher mortgage rates.
After a year of hesitating about buying a flat, it was clearly time to get down to business.
The search was instructive. Buying a flat in England is like eating on a plane: a reduced menu of bad options. The leasehold system, another of Starmer’s reform targets, is an ugly anachronism: it turns the “landlord” of a flat into a different kind of tenant from the “freeholder”, an arrangement rife with opportunities for abuse.
We were lucky to find a condo where we shared ownership. But overall, the conditions for managing this investment, the largest one most people make in their lifetime, are unfavorable compared to the condominium system I was used to in my home country of Canada, which has more standardized rules for governance and reporting.
In a very nice flat in a large block, I asked the agent how the co-owners organised themselves to manage the building. “They have a WhatsApp group,” he told me. “It seems to work quite well.” I was sceptical, judging by the large brown damp patches visible under the roof.
(Nearby, another lesson on how to keep your neighbor from selling. Put a big sign on your door defending the rights of tarantulas as pets. Reader, I promise you this is true.)
It’s equally strange that you don’t necessarily meet your fellow landlords before buying, let alone check their financial situation or references. I imagined telling a commercial real estate investor that I was planning to invest 100 percent of my equity in a co-investment with parties I’d never met.
I belong to a generation that is struggling to get their hands on a home of their own. But when I finally got the keys in my hand, fate had one more lesson in store for me. Once you’ve managed to get on the property ladder, it’s hard to resist the temptation to pull it up in order to preserve your little castle in peace and privacy.
Starmer wants to build 1.5 million homes in five years, a level of housebuilding not reached in almost half a century. His government unveiled sweeping planning reforms last month, promising to “make the tough choices needed to build what Britain needs.” The proposals include tougher housing targets for local governments, based on the principle that “planning should focus on how to provide the homes an area needs, not whether to provide them.”
These measures have been welcomed by housebuilders, but the sector should temper its optimism about what Labour can achieve within a planning system that will still give local opponents a strong say.
When it comes to the complexities of national development goals and local politics, I fear that the new government – like the construction crew scraping its bulldozer for the umpteenth time over the exterior concrete – has only scratched the surface.