House building is out of control

[Caterpillarsleftfoot]

Every where I turn at the moment the countryside is being turned into housing developments. If we carry on like this our habitats and green spaces will be decimated. Not to mention the flood risks. Also our beautiful rural way of life that we associate England with will be lost.

There is no way we need this many new developments. The latest one I saw is on the edge of a beautiful historical town in the countryside in a neighbouring county.

We need flats for council properties to save space and fewer air BnB properties.

I don’t have a problem with building BUT developers are using the current planning laws to force through undesirable developments on green field sites, which have been objected to by local residents and councils. There are multiple brown field sites available but the developers don’t want to use them, and the government doesn’t force them to use them.

My town is turning into a donut, with new developments on green land around the perimeter while the centre is allowed to fall derelict and is not being redeveloped. It’s wrong and the government is at fault for permitting it.

Totally disagree.
The day they build houses and they are left empty I will change my view.

I follow an urban explorer page on Facebook who explores lots of empty houses that have been left to rot, some by families of elderly relatives perhaps locked in feuds over wills and some left who had no family/abandoned. This is absolutely ridiculous when these could be bought over and done up to house people but no just continue flinging up concrete boxes on green space

I live in Glasgow and see more and more of these 'executive housing developments' creeping out into greenfield sites outwith the city.

I agree that we need more housing and, as a PP mentioned, social housing should offer more than a wee box apartment in a slightly shitty urban area, but these houses tend to start - START - at ~£450k plus, are car-centric due to being miles from any public transport network and have no concomitant infrastructure such as schools / GPs / shops etc.

In addition, they're often tightly packed together and pretty unattractive to look at.

I have quite a wide social circle and I don't know anybody who is spending the better part of half a million on a new house every few years, so is buying them?

Ordnance Survey data suggests that all the buildings in the UK - houses, shops, offices, factories, greenhouses - cover 1.4% of the total land surface

It depends where you live. England is much more densily populated than the other home nations, and is the most densely populated in Europe. Also consider a third of the population of the UK lives in the South East, therefore if you live here, as I do, you are well aware of losing precious green space.

This - where I grew up semi rural this is very evident.

People want the houses - and prices are extreme there- they also want HA housing as need workers in lower paid jobs.

The old industrial sites in the towns were first to be built up as council favoured them for past few decades. 20 year of high house prices and most young people struggle to stay in area - many rely on HA parts of new estates to stay which are being built at edge of town often with infrastructure to get past planning.

It's odd older generation moan at house prices when their kids try and buy in area but then also moan how packed in modern housing is and dislike any new proposed building.

I agree with many of the points made by @Flickersy upthread. And would add that unless and until Councils uphold their own planning policies and/or VAT and central planning policy is changed, there will be more greenfield land being built on than brownfield being repurposed. Time and again, developers are allowed to get away with saying it's 'uneconomic' to demolish or reuse brownfield sites, so they are allowed to use green fields. Councils also need to stop allowing development and taking S106 payments for things which never happen, (often the amounts don't even get paid) and there is too much reliance on formulae which state x number of houses = y number of patients, which is 0.xyz of a doctor's time, ergo here's £15k to pay towards healthcare - when the local surgery will say that they are at capacity. We aren't training enough doctors, or nurses and we don't have enough social care workers NOW, let alone in 10, 15 years time when the majority of the population is aged. School places, traffic infrastructure, parking etc etc etc are all presumed to be magicked up without an single extra bit of funding from central Government - and Councils are going bankrupt as it is.

We cannot have a sensible conversation about housebuilding, without having a sensible conversation around migration - if we allow (in numerical terms) a city the size of Leeds to arrive in this country every year, we need to find space to put those people. IF people don't like the numbers arriving, then we need to pay people more to do the jobs that other people are coming here to do......and all of us need to accept that more land is going to be needed. We still have a tiny percentage of our green space developed overall. We also need to have sensible conversations about our food security, where our water is going to come from, and how we are going to power it all. Sadly, there is almost no joined up thinking or strategic long term planning from governments - whatever their persuasions or colours.

I agree. Planning has just been given for 150 houses on a local sports ground. We are on the edge of the green belt and there is a huge amount of development on the bits that fall outside it. The area already suffers with flooding. And of course the infrastructure will become even more stretched.

In my view we need significant financial penalties for holding empty properties. And harsh taxation on second homes.

Almost 9% for England only though..... Scotland is very sparsely populated, so skews the figures for the UK.

Yet you get loads of towns up and down the country (particularly coastal) that are practically ghost towns and full of boarded up shops and boarded up streets.

Why not build there and get these places populated again before we pave over the countryside for soulless housing estates in the middle of nowhere, that you need a car to get in and out of. They talk about 10 minute cities, yet build these ghastly estates 10 minutes from nowhere.

The repeated quoting of this bland out of context statistic is pointless and meaningless - it ignores

The need for agricultural land
The fact building isn't possible of desirable in large areas

My question to wonks who post this is how much do they think would be OK - 50%? 90%?

The vast majority of land in the UK is used for agriculture and has little or no benefit to wildlife. I can see a wider range of wildlife in my city than my in laws rural village. The reality is we need more housing and it has to be built somewhere. The push to build on 'brown field' just causes houses to be built in unsuitable locations. It would be better to provide housing in suitable locations and in the low density that most people want.

Population density is the key factor as well. We're already one of the most densely populated country in Europe and insist on growing that by hundreds of thousands every year.

We need more housing, but it worries me that not a lot of effort seems to go into matching what is built to what we’re short of. So lots of tiny flats without balconies. Family houses with tiny rooms and tiny backyards. Retirement flats that just feed a Ponzi scheme that makes the existing ones unsellable, so they just sit there taking up land. Estates without the facilities and infrastructure they need to make decent communities.

And then a lack of joined up planning: older people want bungalows with gardens to entice them into selling their big family homes. But there aren’t enough, so they stay put. And then there’s more demand than supply for big family homes, so people buy bungalows and convert them, reducing the number of bungalows even further. And every time this happens more green space is concreted over, more resources are used…. It should be viewed as criminal.

Ugly solar panels? You’ve obviously never benefited from them.

@User135644 yes exactly what I’m trying to say all of these empty buildings/homes and second homes should be repurposed first before building

This.

Even worse is listening to the planning committee meetings - they accept that developers are producing sub-standard crap and that they have no real powers to stop them.

That's why it's impossible to build anything in this country, people complain about everything.
We live in a village but where is the wildlife we are surrounded by fields, not a single tree around.

I've been watching channels on Youtube recently about the decline of the high street and the decline of different towns and cities, where there's just nobody about and the high streets are deserted and all boarded up. Why aren't we building there? This applies to Labour as well with Starmer talking about new towns (which means concreting over the countryside). Why not go into the election with a pledge to rebuild the red wall ghost towns?

We know London/South East is stupidly overcrowded (a result of London-centric policy over decades) but plenty of areas have seen a decrease in population.

we need new houses. but we also need to stop allowing billionaires the world over using London as they money stash. over 20 billion quids worth of property in London are not used and mainly foreign owned. while key workers travel for hours to work in the city and homelessness is rife.

Exeter?

They seem to be building inner city at the moment, like they did years ago with the high rise blocks, & terrace back to back. But now it’s 4 bed homes, & they are not for rent.

There’s far too much land in the countryside, you can drive for miles & see nothing but empty fields. We need this land for council homes.