Why can't the UK build 240,000 houses a year?

JencParker

Carl31 wrote: »

why dont councils build anymore? surely this is a big part of the problem, and the solution the government can control easiest?

Of course it is, but they don't want to.

Short term gain and profit is the priority and has led to the situation we now find ourselves in.

theEnd

Do we really need to build that many houses?

Even in London, rents are barely tracking inflation. There are very few people living on the streets.

Is there also a chance the population will start to drop? Birth rates in Europe very low? Boomer generation beginning to reduce?

ging84

Most of the issues are linked, they call come back to the extremely tight restrictions on land which can be built on.

Robin9

As theEnd said - do we need that many houses?

1 Improve the legal process - following the owner's death a house in my road stood empty for 18 months

2 Encourage owners to downsize or sell; my 93 year old MIL lives in a 4 bed semi but there is a shortage of sheltered accommodation

3 Empty flats over shops.


In my town of 3000 properties there are probably 100 which fit the above

TheBlueHorse

we'll all be slaughtered by Islamist extremist soon, so I wouldn't worry about it to be honest.

theEnd

Robin9 wrote: »

2 Encourage owners to downsize or sell; my 93 year old MIL lives in a 4 bed semi but there is a shortage of sheltered accommodation

You see that a lot. Older people in massive houses where they only use a couple of rooms. A lot of these will be freed up for the use of bigger families, or split to flats over the next couple of decades.

Everywhere you look in London they're building more homes. I'm really not certain we need them all. Would only take a few events to reverse immigration.

cells

daveyjp wrote: »

If the end value doesn't cover the total costs of construction the houses don't get built.

It is as simple as that but you need to ask why it is the cost of construction is so vastly different in different parts of the country.

for example, in Telford they are building a lot of new homes and plan to do so for the next 20 years. About 1,000 homes a year, if you scale telfords population to that of the UK it would be equal to the uk building 380,000 homes a year. Prices are much cheaper than almost everywhere else in England yet the builders are able to build at a per capita rate that is 3x higher than the national average

The cost of materials is the same in Telford as elsewhere in England, labour is also virtually the same as most places in England. The only difference between a place like telford is that the local council is pro building and they have set a good ample target and try to meet it. as a result development land is ample and its price affordable and the output new built homes are sold at a far lower price than new builds elsewhere in england

cells

theEnd wrote: »

You see that a lot. Older people in massive houses where they only use a couple of rooms. A lot of these will be freed up for the use of bigger families, or split to flats over the next couple of decades.

Everywhere you look in London they're building more homes. I'm really not certain we need them all. Would only take a few events to reverse immigration.

there is no realistic way to reallocate housing in that manner and nor should the state or society take from those older people who bought and want to stay in their larger homes.

also the trend is actually the other way, more and more single person households.


plus the most important factor is occupancy rate and most people, including yourself, don't really understand it. we dont need more homes for immigrants we need more homes for the people in the UK

eg there was a period in the uk between 1974-1983 where the population was flat at 56.25 million. ie zero population growth. so a lot of people would think wrongly...no population growth no need for more homes...the reality was that during that time of zero populaion growth the uk added more than 2.5m additional homes.

The result was that during those 9 years the ocupancy rate fell, as it has done for a hundred years in vertually all countries in the world


The same needs to happen, the uk ocupancy rate is currently about 2.35 it has to head down towards 2.10 and even lower

That means even if the population was flat at 65m for a decade we would still need to build 3.2 million homes to get the ocupancy rate down. the same as was needed and happened in the 1970s (as well as 1960s 1950s 1980s etc)

chewmylegoff

theEnd wrote: »

Do we really need to build that many houses?

Even in London, rents are barely tracking inflation. There are very few people living on the streets.

Is there also a chance the population will start to drop? Birth rates in Europe very low? Boomer generation beginning to reduce?

There is a chance that the population will drop, yes, but there appears to be a pretty broad consensus amongst basically everyone that rather than dropping it is going to continue to increase at a fairly rapid rate for the foreseeable future. Net migration is about 250,000 a year for a start.

cells

theEnd wrote: »

Do we really need to build that many houses?

the idea of us or government setting a limit for housing itself is somewhat silly, we don't have quotas for cars or cheese or eggs or shoes or pretty much anything so why housing?

in most nations you need to apply for permits to build but in most nations there isn't a set limit to these permits and as such you have countries like france building 400,000 homes a year (vs about 130,000 a year in the UK) and they do this by giving out some 500-600k permits a year and knowing that 1/3-1/4th will lapse and not be built

In the UK councils have plans going forward 10-20 years setting out the needs they think will be required, but whats clear as day is that they have totally failed to judge the needs accurately over the last decade (and its imo clear they are also grossly underestimating needs going out to the next 10 years). so we are in a system of qotas for housing which is at least half as much as demand