shortage of homes in the UK?

theGrinch

old hat. its been the case since macmillan was a housing minister in the 1950s.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

And another article....

For much of the past five years housebuilding has been on its knees.

The crash, which started in 2008, led to new builds plunging to levels not seen for a century.

As an upshot, the industry desperately needs re-skilling if it is to have any hope of reaching the magic 200,000, Mr Turner said: “It can’t be done overnight, we have lost skills in the recession and there are very basic things like opening new brick kilns for instance.

And it doesn’t stop at infrastructure, we need to be sure that the mortgage finance is there to allow people to buy and the planning system as it stands has not been delivering enough land to build 200,000 homes a year.”

This is in sharp contrast to the refrain of politicians that developers are sitting on lots of land and should be taxed for the privilege.

“It makes me laugh when I hear politicians say developers are sitting on lots of land so as to see its value rise. There is barely a year’s supply of land out there to develop and they can’t sit on it as they need to keep building to survive and turn a profit.

There have been several reports including those by Kate Barker and the Office of Fair Trading which have rubbished the idea of land banking,” the National House-Building Council’s commercial director Richard Tamayo said.

Even if 200,000 was achievable – and most industry experts think it is unlikely for several years – that would not even be enough to meet current demand.

The Office for National Statistics estimates up to 220,000 new households are being formed each year due to divorce, bereavement, immigration and the UK population growing faster than at any time since the 1960s.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/trendy-flats-will-not-fix-our-housing-shortage-8865160.html

cells

lord_tyrannus wrote: »

I completely agree with you they are greedy and they want to squeeze as many people in as possible to maximize profit. Really there needs to be minimum square footage for new builds backed up in law but would the house builders then use this excuse to drive prices up

I keep referencing it but they really need to build a few Milton Keynes size city's to deal with the demand but even then MK was started in the 60's/70's and it's still not finished

It would be illogical to not build new towns and cities because every town and city was at one point new. So yes please

But there is definitely a lot of scope to just add to existing settlements.

The uk has close to 27.5 million homes. adding 1.25% to existing towns and cities means we would get 344 thousand homes a year

So a village of 500 homes just needs to allow 6 new homes a year to do its bit that will hardly kill the village