House building is out of control

There's nothing wrong with flats, but they need to nice! Around here they have built flats targeting boomers/the elderly, spacious, light & airy, 2 bedrooms, lots of green space around and close to a big park where you can go for a walk but you don't have to maintain anything, good size balcony. Not too tall buildings, 4 stories high.

They are very popular, not scam like those retirement flats you can't sell afterwards.

The service charge is about a 100 pounds a month, but the upside to that is you don't have to do any outside maintenance.

Trouble is it's a pyramid scheme as the "new babies" or immigrants we need today will one day be old and need care themselves so population will be forever increasing on your plan.

What is actually needed is a long term plan to cope with care but in a controlled manner that includes provision for housing, education, healthcare, etc., but also carefully planned to control numbers so that the population isn't ever increasing and drawing in more and more. It can be done with a long term plan, working out numbers, birth rates, death rates/ages, etc - needs a small army of insurance actuaries to work out the numbers after all, actuaries work with all that data for life insurance, health insurance etc., so the same data could be tapped into to create a long term "plan" for population.

Yes, I think that is the gist of it x

Whilst airBNB and holiday lets are a problem, the numbers are insignificant on a national scale, though I accept, in some localities they're a local problem.

The truth is the growth in population due to immigration means we need to build more homes, both flats and houses.

A lot of the immigration is students going to UK unis driving up demand for student accommodation in Uni cities that the modern blocks of student flats just can't cope with - they can't build them fast enough, so students continue to rent what were previously "normal" homes converted into multi occupancy student flats.

Until we either drastically reduce immigration, or drastically increase home building so they've somewhere to live, the situation is unsustainable.

@lollo8 We either need to start having a lot more babies or we have to keep immigration high. We need population growth to support our aging population and those are our choices, unless we can start growing people on trees.

So, essentially, OP and her loved ones have homes, so screw everyone else?

@lollo8 I agree to some extent but not about forcing those on benefits to fill nhs jobs, some are just not suited to caring roles and it shows not to mention some of them will not be educated to the standard required to fill nurse and doctor posts. They need to bring the bursary back on England and try to be more flexible with staff especially considering a lot of the workforce is female many of child bearing age and so are restricted by rubbish shifts, unfair rostering and then when actually training lack of flexibility around placements

But this seems such a silly temporary sticking plaster to me.

It will just keep getting worse because immigrants and their plentiful dependants (due to the Tory’s relaxation on the rules around dependants) will ALSO will need schooling, healthcare and will get old.

We can’t just keep increasing the population year on year.

Well, we can. But say goodbye to a civilised country, social order and decent mental health as we cram more and more people in like cattle.

That isn’t a long term solution.

We need to move away from the simplistic notion that all migration is equally as good for the country, we are seeing what is happening when it is left unchecked. It is benefitting very few, mainly the very rich. It is actively making many people lives worse.

I’m worried about what huge demographic changes are going to cause AND about this fuelling a far right mivement which would harm us all. All it will take is someone to rally people and at least pretend to listen to the millions who are unhappy about this.

This Government has made legally binding obligations to increase immigration from countries who have agreed to speedy treaties with us, so reducing it is not going to happen.

It just makes not a bit of sense that there are so many empty houses/buildings/shops/offices/second homes lying unused yet we continue to build it just does not make sense. They should all be put to use first

Let's start by not letting an extra 700,000 people into the country every year, eh?

And before you start with 'wHaT aBoUt tHe NhS?', maybe we could train up some of the millions of current UK residents on benefits, rather than raiding poorer countries for their health staff. It's utterly immoral for a rich country to be stripping poorer countries of healthcare staff they have trained there and desperately need.

Anyway, mass immigration is one giant ponzi scheme that only benefits the wealthiest business owners and a small section the privileged who will never actually be affected by its downsides.

We own quite a bit of land and we’re trying to sell it for building in our village. We don’t want to but need the money

Building houses on farmland makes absolutely no sense at all. The houses are needed because the population is increasing, but we also need to increase the amount of food we produce.

I’ve got a great way to settle this argument discussion, let’s have a General Election and see if the population want the same we’ve had for 13yrs or to try something new 😁

And herein lies the problem. People on £34k a year, in their mid-to-late 30s, should not be finding themselves 'desperate for a home'. Yet here my friends and I are.

I was responding to a comment about social housing.

If it's fine for someone like me to live in a flat, it's fine for people in social housing to live in flats.

I was one of the posters who suggested converted offices and shops as homes and yes I would live in one if I was desperate for a home

0.7% of the power today is coming from solar. The rest is coming from gas and nuclear and very teeny-tiny amount of wind. Solar farms are no more than giant mirrors this time of year.

Actually, the biggest problem is the service charge, which I have no control over and the increase of which over the years (450%) has left me with no other option but to sell.

It's fine to live in a flat; I will most likely never be able to afford to live in a house. It's not fine to expect the majority of future homeowners to live in flats because people in houses don't want their view spoiled by more houses, which is the general impression I'm getting from a lot of people in this thread. I was simply pointing out the downsides of living in a flat, in my experience.

This thread seems to have a lot of NIMBY's x

If it were up to me every house built would have solar panels as standard make people think before they build low quality builds

They arnt selling! We have loads of houses in my area not shifting even some social housing is empty so we are building more houses for sale none of them social houses four bedrooms on fields that are currently growing food 😀 none of the others have sold why will these? (They won't no-one can afford them) best of all they are currently knocking buildings down to create "green space" while simultaneously building on green space......you just couldn't make it up!

The UK is a very tiny island, it has farms on it (for now) to grow food and it has natural flood plains and soakaways. But keep on building. We import a lot of our food and the flooding that we've always had due to not keeping the drains clear and continuous house-building? Well that's just climate change, right?

Ugly solar panels???? So we shouldn’t be looking at more sustainable energy because you think solar panels are ugly??? Seriously?

Really, all the fields round my way have either been sown with crops which will start to grow in the spring ready for harvesting next year or they are grass fields which may have some sheep in now but most will be currently be lying dormant as grass doesn't grow in December and cattle will be housed to avoid the land being poached. By next summer they will either be being used to graze animals, or they may be being rested to allow grass regrowth having already been grazed in the spring or they might be mowed for silage or hay to be used as winter feed when the grass growth stops in late autumn.
I suspect you may not have much experience of how agriculture works.