Michael Gove’s dream of multistorey loft conversions won’t solve the housing crisis

When Michael Gove was appointed secretary of state for “Levelling Up, Housing and Communities” the mindless mumbo jumbo of his job title would not have been lost on him. A year on, he appears to have come up with a solution, which is to take the whole thing entirely literally.

He has now, with a year to go before any general election, released his big plan for housing, and it is to build communities by levelling up. Yes, that’s really it.

His speech on Monday morning on the subject was less an actual plan, more an essay, but by now such things are to be expected.

We would hear, not for the first time from him, about the “Medici effect” – about how good things happen in small places. He would talk of the need for “urban regeneration” not “suburban sprawl.” That the answer is to build denser cities, not “concrete over the green belt”, which is clearly going to be the basis of his imminent attack on Labour’s plans over the next year (more on that later).

All this sounds nice enough, as a kind of thoughtful column on housing. He spoke of Edinburgh’s Old Town, which is a nice place. Of Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century Parisian revolution – namely how you achieve both beauty and urban density through Paris’s signature style of seven and eight-storey stone mansion blocks. This was to be contrasted with the UK’s mess of one and two-storey housing pockmarked with tower blocks.

One, self-evidently, is better than the other. But how do you get from one to the other? Well, Gove was there to announce, there was to be a cutting of “red tape”, a relaxing of planning laws. And then, somehow, by some alchemic process of people building whatever they like, our city centres will be transformed into 19th-century Paris through the power of self build multistorey loft extensions.

The Medici effect, at least according to Frans Johansson’s 2017 book on the subject, is about the dramatic effect on creativity and innovation through the power of proximate diversity. Gove’s most, if not only clear idea about how his own Medici effect would be created was through reforming planning rules to allow homes to be built on high streets, in place of takeaways and betting shops.

You could hardly wish for a more potent example of back-to-front thinking. Fading high streets of betting shops and Chinese takeaways are not in need of renewal through shutting the last remaining shops and putting in houses. High streets are fading because no one has any money because they’re having to spend it all on housing. A real plan for housing involves finding a way for millions and millions of people to actually be able to afford one, through whatever means, very much including social housing.

The death of the high street is a symptom of failure, not an opportunity. Meanwhile, Pret A Manger is currently expanding to the suburbs, to capitalise on the home-working revolution. Local high streets, potentially, are on the brink of a reversal of fortunes.

There were, of course, so many of the classic Govian tells. The premise of the speech was that the Conservatives have “met their manifesto commitment” of building a million homes, sidestepping the reality that they have failed to meet their simultaneous manifesto commitment of building 300,000 homes a year, which all housing associations and industry analysts consider to be the crucial number to even begin to deal with the housing crisis.

But this kind of self-declared success allows Gove to attack Labour’s plans to build on green belt land, as well as urban regeneration, which is the only viable way to actually meet his own targets.

He has released lots of pretty pictures of his big new plan for the “Cambridge New Quarter” – to more than double the size of Cambridge and somehow turn it into a rival of Boston or Silicon Valley, which is conceptually possible, but at this stage in the proceedings is rather likely to require buy-in from other political parties.

Thirteen years into a government feels a tiny bit late for your big plan on housing, when it is well known that the housing crisis began in earnest via the financial crisis of 2008, the thing that propelled the Conservatives to power to begin with, just four general elections and five prime ministers ago. Who knows what can happen, but there is a fair amount of scepticism out there, and it could well be that the “Medici effect” is not the answer.