Newsnight: Housing shortage the biggest social justice crisis of our times

ash28

Graham_Devon wrote: »

Funnily enough, what George states is deemed enough of a problem for those very regulations to be bought back.

But ONLY for social housing. It hasn't been extended to private dwellings. So theres a somewhat bizzare situation where we appear to have gone full circle, and social housing is now to a bigger (and better?) standard that what can be sold to the desperate public. For example....all the new social housing here has to have a higher quality of products in bathrooms, kitchens etc. This aliviates the damage which can be done by tenants, such as breaking the thin plastic bath, and creating an insurance water damage claim.

However, the private dwellings get a lower standard (or did up until around 2006 when my family were involved in the game.....lot of higher quality home family homes being built now as builders have changed their game).

Far cry from social housing being substandard and new builds being of a higher standard and quality.

When you talk about space and regulation you're talking about the Parker Morris Standards that were brought in during the 1960s - they were abolished in 1980 as they were deemed too expensive by the government of the day.

http://www.singleaspect.org.uk/pm/index.php

The space standards applied only to new towns and council housing - they never applied to private housing though some private builders did use the standards none of them were required to.

There are no national space standards. There should be.

Unlike the USA and Europe we seem to use the number of bedrooms to define the size of a home.

When we bought our first house in 1982 - we saw some pretty small new build houses that our furniture wouldn't have fitted into.

A friend has a relatively new 2 bed house - it's small but it has an ensuite and she has a kingsize bed - the ensuite door has to be either permanently open or permanently closed because you can't actually open or close it because the bed gets in the way...

zoominatorone

there really isn't much point in only building 1.5 million new homes when we've had 3.5 million migrants arrive in the last ten years along. If they buitl 3.5 million for the migrants, it might be a start.......

PaulF81

there are standards. the last labour government introduced minimum planning densities which resulted in the stalinist commune estates that were thrown up as a result.

BobQ

Is this Plan B?

Seems the Housing Minister knows about the £47 chicken too.

CLAPTON

zoominatorone wrote: »

there really isn't much point in only building 1.5 million new homes when we've had 3.5 million migrants arrive in the last ten years along. If they buitl 3.5 million for the migrants, it might be a start.......

one might question if each individual migrant requires their own house; maybe two could share?

grizzly1911

CLAPTON wrote: »

one might question if each individual migrant requires their own house; maybe two could share?

Having seen some of and those nice "sheds" and "garages" in west London, not to mention some of our other popular cities with hot bed housing, I think you could add a factor of ten to your suggestion..

GeorgeHowell

Interesting, but not surprising, that in all these debates the lefties make very little, if anything, of the impact that mass immigration has obviously had on housing availablity. It all has to be the fault of people they perceive as voting Conservative.

the_flying_pig

zoominatorone wrote: »

there really isn't much point in only building 1.5 million new homes when we've had 3.5 million migrants arrive in the last ten years along. If they buitl 3.5 million for the migrants, it might be a start.......

(1) people have migrated out as well as in during that time;
(2) people tend not to need one house each. a house per 2-3 people is usually enough.