OP YANBU.
I don't know what the numbers are. However I do know that I live in an area not too far away from where I lived 30 years ago.
You can't fail to notice roads are much busier, it's harder to get away from people when walking, basic services can't cope with the number of people, houses are more crowded than they used to be and on smaller plots.
If we hadn't messed up the housing market by allowing BTL and then making it worse with the pension freedom act so lots of people at 55 took out cash and bought BTL. I know this is all been clamped down on now but house prices are just far too high now compared to incomes. We would have been far wiser to stick to what was working 30 years ago. More babies would have been born here as families could afford to survive on one wage and buy a house. (I know it is more complicated than that for example pension annuities stop being viable because interest rates were slashed after 2008 etc so thus people turned to BTL)
The biggest problem I see now is nobody will just stand up and go STOP. Close the gate now. We are full. Then start to fix all the problems.
If we did that we could start to sort out the current position and eventually in 10 years or whenever we could evaluate if we are still full or if we now have further capacity.
There are some areas that are just costing the goverment a fortune and they don't add any value and need to be addressed.
These are amongst others-
1 Council paying for temporary housing for months/years at a time as no where to put people entitled to help. We either need to build council houses or take away the entitlement of these people so the goverment is no longer paying a fortune to private landlords or hotels or whatever.
2 Immigrants in hotels. Just obvious. Basic barracks would be fine. I hope they go through with this. I suspect they won't.
3 Social care for elderly. I know from personal experience after watching how my own elderly mum was handled. She had attendance allowance £400 per month, carers in 4 times a day paid for by council. I don't know how much the council would pay to the carer agency for these staff but quite frankly they are a waste of money. Now there was the odd one that was good but many of them were young girls clearly just doing the job for the sake of a job (okay can't blame them for that). However my mum was meant to have say a half hour visit. They would come in and ask my mum if she needed help with anything. They would make my mum a cup of tea and occassionally empty the kitchen bin. There was loads of stuff they weren't allowed to do. Most of the time they left after 5 mins as my mum said no she didn't need washed (even though she did).
So actually i did most of it (daughter) which meant I gave up working for 5 years and never went back to work. We either need to pay for these carers but have them actually do the caring or accept this system is very expensive and not really working. This has got to be why councils are struggling so much with these huge bills.
4 Benefits - enough said on this. We all know how the bill has increased by spades. We can't afford it. Full stop. If your kitchen cupboard is empty you don't feed next doors kids for free to be nice do you.
5 NHS - we either make people pay an amount to use it which would help fund it and stop people being so wasteful or we scrap it and just have a funded insurance based system.
6 Goverment Debt - much like people who find themselves in a spiral of credit card debt our goverment is using a ton of it's money in interest payments and worst of all continuing to increase it's debt each month. Where does anyone think this is going to go. For anyone who has got their selves overextended you will realise this is a bad place to be.
Okay so I have digressed but how sensible to just say stop, close the gates. Now start working on all the above issues. We either have council houses or we stop with the obligation to house people. We can't afford it etc
It's very hard to assess and start to fix problems when it's a moving target ie numbers coming in keep going up. We have to 'stop the rot' and then start to repair/replace as necessary not patch things up while the roof is still leaking and bills to the trades are going up and up.