Building your own home is normal in most of Europe – and they don’t even need Kevin McCloud

Last year, in a presentation on theNational Model Design CodeI used a personal example of the Bordeaux suburb of Mérignac. For 20 years we spent our summers there at the house of my wife’s cousin Cécile. She and her partner had bought two “flag plots”. I didn’t know the term either, but a French colleague explained that these are plots in the centre of a block accessed by a track between two frontage plots.

They had built their own home on one of the plots and the other was a massive garden. At one point we broached the idea of building a house on the vacant plot, but it was explained that this was a non-starter – not because anyone thought it a bad idea you understand – but because the Floor Area Ratio for the block had been met and, in a non-discretionary planning system, that was that. This was my message on design codes; they created certainty but not always the right outcome.

However my story is also relevant to theBacon Review published last week按照首相的要求，建议扩大自建和定制住房的方式。理查德·培根(Richard Bacon)的报告包括六条建议，稍后再详细介绍。It also opens with a quote from my recentbookbut I won’t let that sway me!

The point of the Mérignac story is not that we couldn’t self-develop but that almost every other household had done so. This was a typical suburb and these people were not doing anything out of the ordinary. As Bacon says, on average 40% of new housing in most European countries is self-developed. This would translate to 120,000 homes a year in the UK compared to our current figure of around 13,000.

The aim of the Bacon Review is to transform this situation. While the early chapters cover familiar ground, he finds some nicely turned phrases: Housing is the “new pollution” and if new homes were cars they would be “Trabants”. With an eye on his conservative colleagues he suggests that, if people aren’t given a stake in capitalism by developing their own home, don’t be surprised if they turn to socialism.

He concludes that there is just as much appetite for self-development in the UK as there is elsewhere. It is just that the system is so stacked against the self-builder that only intrepid souls willing to risk everything can live the dream – a point reinforced by the narrative arc of every Grand Designs episode. In France and elsewhere there is a whole industry catering to self-development, the market makes land and finance available and zonal planning systems de-risk the process of getting permission.

The question is whether Bacon’s recommendations can really bring about the scale of change he wants. After all, it is 10 years since the government’s housing strategy set out to do something similar (within a decade). Since then we have had the “Right to Build”, changes to planning and taxation policy, the Custom Build Homes Fund and the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act. Every year there has been some government initiative including the “Self- and Custom-Build Action Plan” earlier this year. And yet the number of self-developed homes in the UK has risen only marginally.

培根认识到这一点，并把他的建议集中在土地供应上，英国住宅作为一个主要的开发商，提供服务地块，提供财政支持和贷款。他建议建立一个定制的自建“表演公园”，以提高人们的意识，让一切看起来不那么可怕，并支持社区自建者和租赁计划。

>> Also read:Building Study: Marmalade Lane, Cambridge, by Mole Architects

>> Gillian Darley:The communities where neighbourliness is part of the design

He recommends a planning designation for custom and self-build that replicates a zonal system and a series of tax changes. The route map, as he calls it, sees these measures as a catalyst to kick-start the market so that attitudes will change, markets will respond, the number of small builders will grow, and financial institutions will create new products.

I really hope that it will work, and there is much common sense here. But whether it adds up to a revolution remains to be seen. To paraphrase the old joke, the route map may be good, but I wouldn’t have started from here!