There's loads of houses being built in the UK (often of questionable quality, built for maximum profit, packed into minimal amounts of space).
It may still not be enough to match the demand, but the real problem is we don't seem to be building any infrastructure to support these homes.
More people and more homes requires more roads, railways, hospitals, police stations, power stations, sewer capacity, even reservoirs, and lots more. And this rarely seems mentioned in discussions of the housing crisis or rising immigration. And as a nation we're incapable of building infrastructure without cost and/or timescale spiralling completely out of control. See HS2.
Infrastructure isn't perfect, but we talk about housing shortages because people earning double the national average wage rent rooms with other professionals in houses designed for a single family whilst trying to save up double their annual wage for a deposit on a >25 year mortgage on a flat. Whereas for all the UK's infrastructure problems, power brownouts due to lack of generation capability or lack of a local police station aren't really things people suffer from.
Hard to pretend the real problem is the rail network when we have more miles of rail network and fewer houses per person than most of the rest of the world. And the UK talks about its healthcare issues non-stop, but not in the context of housing because it isn't the same problem.
This comment shows up the other issue, the London-centric nature of UK politics.
If you think the UK transport network is OK, but pick the most extreme examples of housing costs, you're probably a Londoner. The housing situation is awful elsewhere, but still a long way from London's extremes.
But if you live elsewhere, try getting anywhere by road or by rail, and it's usually a grim experience.
These two issues are related everywhere outside London.
The reason why transport infrastructure is "so bad" is because in every city apart from London, you cannot build outside the city so developers often have to get planning permission on sites in rural areas and they can't connect transport to nearby cities.
It is quite maddening because building is often actually blocked in some of these cities because of infrastructure concerns too...even though, the problem would be solved at a higher level by building closer to cities.
The whole thing is bad intention arguments the whole way down.
I don't live in London any more. Probably won't again, for reasons of housing cost.
But I also live in a real world where most developed countries have significantly cheaper housing but nowhere near as many rail lines as the UK as a whole, and where it's a lot easier to build more affordable homes than to ensure there are enough roads for nobody to ever experience a traffic queue.
We need to build houses at least as fast as the population grows. Because this has not happened for decades, we need to build houses even faster than that, to clear the backlog. This is not happening.
Meanwhile, no-one will build infrastructure for settlements that do not yet exist, and we consistently elect a party that believes in less, rather than more, infrastructure in general. Rather than an investment, Tories fundamentally see infrastructure spending as an unrecoverable loss.
At least if more housing gets built there will be more people in the area pestering their MPs for solutions to infrastructure problems - perhaps even enough to outnumber the NIMBYs. One can hope.
The irony is that historically, a lot of rail was built for settlements that, while they may have existed, did not support the cost of rail, and this has driven a lot of development.
And this is both how it ought to work and means that the UK has a lot of existing rail that could help solve this problem if the government would just commit to streamline planning processes and to increasing routes and frequency to stations where there is a potential for density increases at lower cost.
I think this is a really interesting perspective. This could decentralise the population and solve many problems that way, and also reduce the costs and risks associated with utilising fully modernised technology; no need for compromise
I think about this more than I should, because it drives me crazy how many rail routes in the UK are there but ridiculously underutilised because few people live there now, but so many of those stretches of rail also have immediate surroundings of rail station with no historic value, yet built on, that could provide extra density very cheaply if only people felt they could rely on faster commutes.
This is around 0.3% of the population. The population increase year on year is consistently larger than this.
We need to be building new houses much faster than we are. We need to build at 1960s rates or faster at least until it is possible for people on median wages to have somewhere sane to live again.
> The current population of U.K. in 2023 is 67,736,802, a 0.34% increase from 2022.
> The population of U.K. in 2022 was 67,508,936, a 0.34% increase from 2021.
> The population of U.K. in 2021 was 67,281,039, a 0.33% increase from 2020.
> The population of U.K. in 2020 was 67,059,474, a 0.42% increase from 2019.
1 year old babies dont 4 bedroom houses of their own.
I'm not sure that posting the population growth figures over four years and adding a snarky remark about babies owning houses proves anything whatsoever other than your own ignorance and disinterest on the matter in hand.
You'd need to also think about not only the number of homes built, but the kind of homes built, the location they're built in, the cost at which they're built, the incomes of those who need to be housed and where they and their jobs are located compared to the houses. And to cap it all you'd probably want to look at it over a meaningful time period because I don't think anyone thinks the current situation with UK housing started in 2019.
Or you can save us all the bother and say what you really mean - you either don't care or you're quite happy with the current situation.
I already posted the numbers from 1950 to date, both from the perspective of population growth and house building. The numbers are clear, perhaps you were not interested enough to look or were unable to understand.
> Or you can save us all the bother and say what you really mean.
Its pretty obvious that there is a change in the size of the household over the 73 years I cited, which everyone is comfortable ignoring.
The number of homes built is clearly not the dominant issue, but the kind of homes built, the location they're built in, the cost at which they're built, the incomes of those who need to be housed and where they and their jobs are located compared to the houses is the issue.
I could magic up 10million studio appartments in the geographic center of the country - it would make absolutely fuck all difference to the price of a family home in Manchester or Bristol (it would probably make them even more expensive as it would drain all the house building resources of the country). It would however, fully satisfy and surpass the targets of those that "care or are unhappy with the current situation" and their caring solutions.
Actually a large number of issues did start just after 2019. Something happened and the demands and tastes changed drastically nearly overnight, suddenly the kind of homes built, the location they're built in for the prior 10 years was not what everyone wanted.
Will it last? Will it flip back overnight? I dont know. Obviously I am not as knowledgeable or as interested as you are.
You're right it's growing faster than that. E.g. Mid 2018 to mid 2019, it rose by 361k people. But the UK average household size is 2.4, so 200k new houses should in theory accommodate a population growth of 866k.
If those were the only numbers that mattered, it wouldn't be a problem. We'd catch up fast.
But all houses are not the same. A large part of the problem is people following jobs, and so a significantly higher rate of construction may be needed because people move, and needed types of properties change. Unless you can make the places people are moving away from to be more attractive, e.g. by infrastructure improvement to tie areas together in ways that make them attractive regions for businesses.
The bigger issues, however, I think are two structural problems:
1. As long as house prices go up at a sufficient rate, the soundest strategy for a developer may be to raise capital to buy land and then sit on it until house prices go up. Your cost of capital to finance it will be financing costs for the cost of the land for however many years you sit on it, and the financing costs for the construction itself only from you start construction until sold. Doubly so because if you're a large developer, holding a large parcel of land while you're, say, developing something else nearby, and releasing only limited numbers of properties onto the market contributes to keeping the prices up. Near me, one of the best properties in the area, a huge tract right next to one of the best connected train stations in the UK (East Croydon) remained undeveloped for over a decade because developers had no urgency to do anything. It's now slowly being developed, but they're taking their good time about it, because why wouldn't they?
You could address that by progressively harsher taxes by duration of under-utilisation, or strengthen ability for local government to take over land, to make it necessary for developers to either move at speed or unload the land on others, but if you fix the house price increases by other means, this problem will also go away by itself.
2. There is no political will to cause house prices to drop, because that would mean a lot of people who have seen this as a pension investment, and plan to downsize, will vote against you.
To fix this you probably need a combination of starting slow - reforms that gradually cause the market to stagnate so people stop seeing it as surefire way to make money - coupled perhaps with tax and pension adjustment structured to make it feel like your reforms are relatively neutral. E.g "package" it with substantial state pension increases, or allow for some degree of writeoffs for paper losses on declining property prices, perhaps limited to pensioners only, etc. Some of it you could sunset, and some might well end up being very unfair and effectively bribing people who shouldn't have gambled on their home as their main investment asset, but if that's what it takes to get support for crashing house prices, it'd be worth it.
> "Home ownership has increasingly become the preserve of the wealthy, with billions pumped into property purchases by overseas investors, landlords and retail banks."
So the UK population is not the complete set of entities that want to buy housing stock, and measuring population alone is not sufficient to capture the entirety of the demand. This means we need to build even faster! Saturate these markets. Those folks are giving us money to build empty houses; use it! Once supply outstrips all demand, prices fall - that's how markets work. Let the invisible hand of the free market inform the foreign investors that housing bubbles are a bad bet. Certainly nothing else has worked.
That’s what we’ve been doing for a while now - why hasn’t it worked? I guess we could deregulate and approve more building, but then we end up with a load of empty boxes of substandard/dangerous quality, with inadequate local resources, and a few very rich property developers. Sounds a foolish pursuit in the face of a climate crisis.
One of my pet peeves is that UK infrastructure focus seems to be about getting people to the centre of London faster, and that just makes the pressure on London greater at excessive costs, and then you start the cycle all over.
You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of focusing on lines towards London it'd have been better to strengthen the triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and pour money into effectively creating a bigger "third city". Then maybe link Birmingham, and purposefully delay any links to London.
The problem with linking everything to London is that while it makes it easier to work from further out, it also makes London ever more attractive.
But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending in the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the centre. E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon has rail towards multiple towns around London, but anything not on the main lines in towards London doesn't have commuter level rail services running on them, or in some cases have no passenger trains at all.
Which means that many towns are easier reached by taking a detour in towards the centre and out again, which again means there's an incentive for businesses etc. to be closer to the centre. Even when in towards the centre and out again would be the shortest route, it might be beneficial to encourage avoiding the busy routes towards the centre.
Which again means that a whole lot of towns where there are town centres that have huge potential for large increases in density, and potential for lower cost upgrades of other infrastructure, without affecting the green belt, but where the demand is not there for that density increase because of the lack of efficient transport.
Addressing the infrastructure problem by upgrading and committing to commuter level services to connect more of these towns together so they form more viable counter-weights to the city centres they are around would make it a lot easier to address the issues you're mentioning at far lower costs than yet another big infra upgrade like HS2 or another line in London.
Successive UK governments seem to have been more focused on retrospectively managing demand surges than planning ahead, and as a result seems to be inducing demand that drives more surges to be managed and ever higher costs.
> You see that even with HS1 and HS2, where instead of focusing on lines towards London it'd have been better to strengthen the triangle of Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, and pour money into effectively creating a bigger "third city". Then maybe link Birmingham, and purposefully delay any links to London.
Sabotaging London won't make the rest of the UK better - it will just mean less tax money available to subsidise the rest of the country. If you stop companies from expanding in London they won't go to Sheffield or Birmingham - they'll go to Amsterdam or Frankfurt or Paris.
> But even on a more local level, I wish instead of spending in the centre of London, focus shifted to bypassing the centre. E.g. I live in Croydon. Croydon has rail towards multiple towns around London, but anything not on the main lines in towards London doesn't have commuter level rail services running on them, or in some cases have no passenger trains at all.
They're trying that up to a point. Stratford has worked pretty well, and they're going to apply the same playbook at Old Oak Common. Croydon might be next on the list. But of course at the rate the UK builds anything that wil be what, 2060 before anything is done.
> Sabotaging London won't make the rest of the UK better - it will just mean less tax money available to subsidise the rest of the country. If you stop companies from expanding in London they won't go to Sheffield or Birmingham - they'll go to Amsterdam or Frankfurt or Paris.
It's not about sabotaging London, but about return on investment. It doesn't matter that companies for which going to Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Paris is an option won't go to Sheffield or Birmingham - if you draw companies that can go elsewhere in the UK, and often would love to, out to the regions, then there's plenty of capacity for those who desperately prefer London. I used to work in VC, and just the sheer number of companies founded outside of London that moved to London not because they wanted to but because they didn't see it as viable to stay in the regions was depressing. Apart from access to capital, a big driver for that was smaller commutable regions. WFH helps, but upgrading internal links within the regions would do even more.
> They're trying that up to a point. Stratford has worked pretty well, and they're going to apply the same playbook at Old Oak Common. Croydon might be next on the list. But of course at the rate the UK builds anything that wil be what, 2060 before anything is done.
Croydon town centre is extremely well connected already, and the town centre is filling up with highrises, w/several over 40 floors so far and one w/planning permission for 75. But the problem isn't for these places, but the places that could have better connections to places set further out from the centre of London to draw demand further out to lines that are poorly utilised.
E.g. places like Epsom and Sutton and smaller stations in between, or any of the train stations in Croydon not on one of the direct lines to London (West, East, South Croydon and the Purley stations are well served as is. E.g. put direct trains in places at commuter frequencies between Croydon and Guildford via Epsom, and you have a whole range stations that suddenly form a much more viable commuter pool and with capacity for increased building density, and makes several locations along the route more attractive to businesses that might otherwise pull further in. There are a lot of routes like that surrounding London.
The majority benefit of HS2 is significantly improved freight and passenger services throughput nationally which allows intercity lines to run many more trains in Birmingham.
The government knows this but completely missold it to the public.
I know that is what they're aiming for, but the point is that I'm disagreeing with the goal of prioritising transport to/from London because it actively encourages further centralisation, which keeps driving the need for even more upgrades while at the same time driving up the cost of doing them.
Part of why I think cities around the world went all in on highways is that its so much simpler and therefore cheaper to serve people with highways than to plan effective transit routes and schedules. With a transit route you have to consider that people will be walking to the station so its fundamentally a compromise: where one person has a 5 minute walk to the platform on the subway line inevitably means there are people not even very far away who now have a 15 minutes walk, and people farther out who might not even use the local subway because that means they add an hours walk to their day. To serve those people you now need to start planning bus or bike networks on top of the subway. All of these vehicles need operators who need benefits. You also need maintenance yards for rail and bus. Electrical substations. The actual subway line is just a part of it all.
With a highway on the other hand, it seems a lot easier to serve more people with less complicated infrastructure. When you run a highway to a town instead of the subway line example above, pretty much everyone in town is close enough to the local highway ramp with a car on the existing road network. You don't have to consider schedules or hire train operators, people drive themselves when it works for their commute. This highway also serves freight, so now you don't need to sell right of way to a freight rail company with the expectation they maintain the line to your town forever (they probably wont). A truck bay is cheaper to build for a business than a freight rail loading dock and maintenance of a rail spur.
A lot of cities in the US that are I'd say less than 1 million people without any geographic bottlenecks are a dream to get around with a car. You pretty much never hit traffic on the highway, so 20 miles is 20 mins away always. The highway network serves the entire region, so you can go just about everywhere in the area in 20 miles in those 20 minutes, not just a handful of places.
To offer that sort of convenience, turnkey scheduling with basically 25 minute door to door commutes, in transit form across lets say a 20x20 mile area would be enormously expensive, in the low trillions I'd guess given current american prices on subway tunnels per mile. Whatever we can afford to build won't nearly be so useful, and people are already so addicted to this sort of high speed car based transit that the cat is entirely out of the bag and now this is the expectation, this simply unachievable level of personal convenience using transit.
The infrastructure is often insufficient for existing homes nevermind for any expansion.
I've recently moved house but I'm having to stay registered to my Dentist & Doctors 30 miles away because the wait list to get registered in my new town is months.
They just built over 1000 homes near me, but not one dentist or doctors. Now the small local surgeries are expected to take these new households on. Again government policy not holding up to community needs.
To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home. First the homes come, then the residents move in. Those residents will have demands, such as health and dental care. Once those demands are heard, the doctors and dentists will finally build their offices.
Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world. But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention.
> Sure, this is true in a purely free-market world.
The world we live in, yes.
> But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention.
Sure, or we might end up growing the wrong crops per government order and experience massive starvation all across the country. I hope you like potatoes!
> To be fair, you can't "build" a dentist or a doctor like you can a home.
Sure you can. When you build an office block or a shopping mall do you put in toilets or do you wait till the shoppers start shopping then see if their demands include going to the bathroom?
You can build toilets just like you can homes. Toilets are standard in all homes and office buildings. You still can't build a doctor or a dentist. That takes a lot of hard work from someone who isn't you.
The problem with dentists isn't the shortage of accomodation for clinics; it's the dentists trades union restricting entry to the profession.
All the talk of NHS treatment being "free at the point of delivery" is bollocks when you're talking about dentistry; NHS dentistry isn't free, unless you're a child or a pensioner. And if you need something like a crown, you probably can't get that on the NHS at all.
There's a shortage of GPs. Two of the small local surgeries near me have reduced opening times because they don't have the staff to staff them. The need is still there - the villages are growing, but the villagers have to travel to the next village if they're lucky enough to be able to get an appointment.
Travelling to another country for treatment sounds like the luxury to be honest. The unluxury would be no health care, or travelling 100 miles within the UK by train/bus.
I am contesting the "having" part of that sentence. The UK has problems, but it is not a country in dire straits.
To be clear: We are talking about GP right? To say get your blood pressure checked, or some mild antibiotics, or a rash cream, or referral to specialist? Not a specific treatment or surgery.
GPs gatekeep a most referrals, it's often virtually impossible to get any substantial treatment or surgery unless referred by a GP. Furthermore, for NHS treatments, it has to be a referral from an NHS GP, so you can't simply pay for a private GP to check something out.
Or, you can just wait for it to become bad enough that you go directly from A&E to inpatient care.
Having to wait 6 months is not as bad as having no other option. Although, I do empathize for your inability to go somewhere local and need of another option.
For residents of small to medium sized towns and villages (where there's plenty of land available), the rapid sprawl and worstening traffic is incredibly visible.
If your definition of "loads" is based entirely on whether you're being personally impacted, divorced from the broader context, then even small amounts of housing construction can seem like a lot. If one house goes up on my block it might be disruptive enough to make me think there's a lot of construction going on.
But by no objective measure is the UK building "loads" of housing.
About 120-200k per year, about 0.2% of the population. Though those numbers don’t include houses being destroyed or eg conversions from a large house to flats.
The infrastructure issue is very much true. In my former town they got permission to build 2500 new homes on a patch of greenbelt land. In doing this they added a roundabout to the busiest road in the city, which is already suffering as it's a former country lane that is still fairly narrow.
They didn't build anything to support the new development at all, so now all the local schools which were already struggling from being oversubscribed don't have any capacity, meaning there's now a daily (paid) coach service taking kids to the next town to go to school.
Flooding has become a major problem in the area, the former field had a ditch system at the bottom of it, which no longer exists. That main road has now been closed on several occasions, and the older houses that run on the opposite side of the road endured several feet of water running through their houses last year. The solution? Slap a couple more drains on the road - those residents already know they'll be flooded again come winter.
UK's housing stock is the oldest in Europe [1], so the rate of new construction is definitely not high enough to be able to say there's loads of new construction. Compared to demand, and compared to total housing stock.
In the US, but I find that to be a great point. I only see this mentioned in the context of environmentalism (city dwellers use less resources). But yes! They use less city resources too.
It may still not be enough to match the demand, but the real problem is we don't seem to be building any infrastructure to support these homes.
More people and more homes requires more roads, railways, hospitals, police stations, power stations, sewer capacity, even reservoirs, and lots more. And this rarely seems mentioned in discussions of the housing crisis or rising immigration. And as a nation we're incapable of building infrastructure without cost and/or timescale spiralling completely out of control. See HS2.