Metro Mayors join forces to boost home-building

The former Longbridge car plant is almost like a new small town

Remember "Ecotowns"?

They were the last Labour government's Big Idea to deliver the new homes so urgently needed to close the gap between supply and demand.

Middle Quinton was meant to be an ecotown of 6,000 carbon neutral homes outside Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire.

That was until furious local campaigners mustered a series of epic marches across the proposed site, gathered support in Parliament and stopped the whole idea in its tracks. Eventually all the ecotowns went the way of countless other housing initiatives under successive governments.

More recently, Birmingham City Council's development plan for 6,000 new homes on the Green Belt in the Sutton Coldffield constituency of Andrew Mitchell strained his friendship with the Bromsgrove MP Sajid Javid almost to breaking point.

As Housing Secretary, Mr Javid is promising "tough decisions" on where the new homes should be built.

But all the time it becomes ever more difficult for rising generations to afford homes of their own.

Midlands Test-bed

Andy Street was elected Conservative metro mayor of the West Midlands last year promising to put the region on course for 165,000 new homes by 2030.

The need for housing is more acute in urban areas

And it was at his invitation that a cross-party gathering of the five metro mayors from the biggest city regions outside London assembled at the University of Birmingham this week.

Undaunted by the anguished history of earlier housing projects, they agreed to work together across party lines with local authorities. As a first step, they signed a joint letter to the prime minister with an ambitious offer:

"The metro mayors stand ready to deliver".

Mr Street reminded me that the Chancellor Philip Hammond had set aside £44bn for housing in last Autumn's budget.

The mayor said he hoped to win "more than our fair share" of that so that the West Midlands could become a "test-bed" for the Government's entire mass home-building project.

It is in the those urban areas represented at the mayoral get-together that the need is most acute.

It's where the jobs are and the transport links converge.

Andy Street is hoping for a large slice of the government'ss £44bn set aside for housing

But experts including housing consultant Gerald Kells warn development is skewed towards greenfield sites outside the towns, which compete with those brownfield areas which often require costly, time-consuming, decontamination.

Now though, armed with the West Midlands Combined Authority's Land Remediation Fund, Andy Street is convinced he and his fellow mayors can make a break with that troubled history.

He may be in an unusually strong position. The mayoral charm offensive to the prime minister has broad political backing. At the same time, he is a Conservative mayor under a Conservative prime minister. They both who have similar objectives on housing, and a shared ambition to make a success of Mr Street's term in office.

It could turn out that he's pushing on an open door.

We will have more in this weekend's Sunday Politics Midlands in our usual 11.00 slot on BBC One this Sunday morning, 25 February 2018.