In the UK we are witnessing record increases in homelessness at the same time as soaring property prices squeeze the next generation out of the market. Essentially the demand for affordable housing significantly exceeds supply, a function of continued population growth, lack of new home construction, and, in the South East at least, steady demand from foreign buyers.
The new Labour government has committed to build 1.5m homes in England before the end of this Parliament. That equates to 370,000 homes annually. Will this address what Ministers say they believe to be the challenge?
By the late 1960s over 400,000 were being built every year
The first question is whether such a building programme can actually be achieved? It’s certainly been done before, as with the Labour government’s 1946 New Towns Act which established an ambitious programme for building new towns. This gave the government power to designate areas of land for development and new towns were built in places like Basildon, Bracknell, Crawley, Hatfield, Harlow, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City.
This and other housing measures enabled successive governments to increase the number of houses built in the UK from about 200,000 pa in 1949 to over 400,000 pa in the late 1960s.
When it came to power, the Thatcher government put restrictions on the building of council houses and since then the number of houses built has hardly exceeded 200,000 in any year. Hence the shortages.
Changing the planning system
The new Labour government has now set a new higher target and intends to use the planning system to help meet this. While this is much the same policy as failed under the Conservative governments of 2010 to 2024, this time the Labour government will remove many of the ways in which local communities can oppose new housing developments.
How will this work? Each council will get their share of the 370,000 annual allocation and they will be required to approve planning applications to meet their annual allocation. The primary flaw in this approach is that whilst local authorities can give planning permission, they can’t force builders to build the houses.
There are several other assumptions which may not hold: What if developers don’t come forward with enough planning applications? And what if permissions are given but the developer decides not to implement the permission in a timely way?
Private developers only build houses if they can sell them at a profit. The problem is they’re not building enough. The Architect’s Journal reported in 2024 that a third of homes receiving planning consent are not being built. In 2020 the Local Government Association carried out a survey of how many planning permissions had been given and found 2.8m homes were approved since 2010-11 but only 1.6m were built.
Leaving it to the private sector?
Government’s response to this is focused on facilitating and incentivising private sector development but there are huge, possibly insuperable challenges: a severe skills shortage in the construction industry, an aging workforce, and the impacts of Brexit have all been highlighted by industry leaders as serious obstacles.
An additional problem is deciding the right place to put new housing. It’s hard to argue with Transport for New Homes when they suggest new housing should be:
- Located to avoid people being dependent on cars.
- Near existing good public transport connections.
- Prioritised for walking and cycling.
- Sociable and environmentally sustainable and have community facilities and amenities nearby.
And what about GP surgeries, health care services and schools? No thought has been given to how these services will be provided. There has also been much talk about pollution of our rivers and coastline, but the government does not seem to be linking planning permission with the capacity of sewerage farms to deal with new developments. And probably the building industry will have reservations about building houses if they think potential buyers might be deterred when they see what the proposed new estates look like. Probably builders will just do what they did under the Conservative government, that is ‘land bank’ their planning permissions.
Some local authorities are trying to wrestle with these challenges The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment reported in December 2024 that most local authorities are scrambling to find more development sites than they had envisaged in their local plans. Some local councils like Lewes District Council in East Sussex are actually in the middle of developing a new local plan but it seems it is likely to be overridden by the dictates of the new housing allocations. Either way, readers should comment on the proposed plan (closes 28 February 2025).
In reality, the whole process of planning is a mess. A fundamental problem is population growth. The Office of National Statistics have predicted that between 2022 and 2032 the population of the UK will increase from an estimated 67.6 million to 72.5 million. This begs the question: where are all these people going to live?
Same old housing estate design
Another part of the problem is the way we build housing estates. Housing layouts have not changed for over 100 years or more. Most planning applications simply consist of conventional terraced, semi-detached, and detached houses, along with the standard garden and driveway for the car. This leads to vast housing estates which will inevitably encroach on greenbelt and farmland and almost certainly lack any sense of community.
It would be advantageous to all if, before this government’s housing ‘free for all’ really takes hold, a fundamental policy review was to take place.
The best outcome would be for government to ‘bite the bullet’ and provide the money to build council houses (social housing) and genuinely affordable homes, as the Labour government did after WWII.
Unfortunately this is unlikely, but campaigners should be at least demanding a ‘design review’ of housing layouts with a view to providing genuinely low-cost homes clustered around amenities and transport hubs, with a balance being struck between housing for single people and couples as well as homes for young families.
As the UK population ages, we need accommodation for one and two person houses as well as family homes. Large expensive ‘executive’ style home should be a low priority.
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