process you can invest more in quality of space and quality of design. Because you’re financing over a long term, you’re not looking at individual mortgages, you’re looking at longer term investment of at least 35, 40 years. I would like to get us to match the investment term to the life of the asset which in my view is 60 years. That’s what we ought to be doing. You can then start to make much longer term decisions about the quality of design and construction.
I would like to get us to match the investment term to the life of the asset which is in my view is 60 years.
Energy performance etc. Particularly energy performance, you can look at highquality components, design and provision because you are taking a long term view... You buy a place that’s going to be suitable for you and your family into the future and you stay there. That’s the intention of most people, to create a home, not necessarily to move up this so-called ‘property ladder’ The tradition, certainly since the 1980s is that you start small and you buy a bigger and bigger house. You don’t need to do that and increase your asset because as your income goes up you don’t need to move you can increase your investment while staying in the property. So you can take a much longer term view over the quality of design and stability of the communities, because we’re trying to remove that pressure for people to move out. And we don’t necessarily know the full quantified benefits of that to communities. Well we do know some of them. We know what the value is – we’re beginning to get methodologies whereby we can evaluate some of those benefits. Some of them you can’t, they’re qualitative not quantifiable but some of them you can. We’re beginning to be able to develop a matrix, a framework whereby you can say, actually we can say there is a value in community safety, there is a value in security for old people, there is a value in mutual support for young children, safe neighbourhoods where children can grow up. So you can say it’s beneficial even if you can’t put pounds shillings and pence on it. You also design for human interaction – for use. You design for communities which are where people are going to relate to one another. Simple things: you don’t put backs to fronts of houses. We’ve never done that, in the coops we’ve always tried to ensure that people interact in a constructive and positive way.
I think climate change is a big issue I think we haven’t touched on.. it’s about houses which are zero carbon in use. You can’t afford that if you’re a Barratt or Berkeley homes or Redrow and your target purchaser is someone who is on the property ladder who is going to be there on average for no more than ten years. You’re not going to be able to sell that. Also a lot of the design elements that you would need cannot be individually owned, if you want groundwater recycling, you can do a bit of that on individual properties. If you want ground source heat pumps, you can’t do that. If you want a Combined Heat and Power plant, you can’t do that. It’s impossible. You’ve got to have some form of collective ownership of those assets. If you want to do photovoltaic panels its got to be on the south facing roof, and it shouldn’t matter whose roof that is, and it should be funded by the community for the benefit of the community.
If you want a Combined Heat and Power plant, you can’t do that (INDIVIDUALLY)... You’ve got to have some form of COLLECTIVE ownership of those assets...
You can’t use those technologies on an individual ownership basis. So mutual ownership has a lot going for it there. It makes those investments highly rational. Rational and fundable because it’s not about how long the individual stays, it’s about how long the community is going to be there using those. The individuals can change, but the community has the benfit and continues to fund those elements of design and construction. What are the big steps that need to happen in the next 20 years for mutual ownership to become a mainstream form of housebuilding? I think two fundamental things need to change, the first is to have methodologies that actually value the non-financial benefits for investing in this type of thing. Now I’m not saying that a local authority putting land in should give up all potential aspiration to get capital out of it, but they should factor in that external value. The second thing, and this is absolutely fundamental, is that the investors need to see this as a credit rated, sustainable, attractive investment. Now that’s our challenge, to get them to see that. I think that’s getting easier. I think they’re much more interested now than they were, say, 12 months ago. But it isn’t plain vanilla, it’s matching their aspirations with ours, and I don’t think we’ve yet matched their aspirations and ours. We have to get it accepted as a secure, credit rated investment.
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