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.

The main problem is the concentration of "good" jobs in London and a few other cities. There's been a brain drain to London. Graduates rarely return to their home towns to live and work as there are usually few, if any, graduate jobs in the run down Northern towns, run down seaside towns, or rural/tourist areas.

If we want people to start living in the run down areas where there are rows of empty homes, we need to relocate jobs to those towns to stop the exodus of youngsters leaving and start to entice people back to live there.

@ohdamnitjanet i live in the countryside where i was brought up and my house is hardly lovely it’s a HA property (which yes I’m incredibly lucky to have) but it is falling down around my ears and nothing is being done about it (no money to keep on top of their current stock but plenty money to build new houses, which is great but not when current tenants are told there is no money for upgrades or repairs)

Blimey you should live in South London..lots of new flats but no new open space, hospitals, schools. The madness that says build 300 thousand homes every year when the size of the country stays the same unless more people are willing to live away from cities..but they too need schools, doctors, etc.

One of the world's most nature depleted... Not splitting hairs, but important to get it right if you want to be taken seriously and not simply being alarmist.

We have almost 1 million net immigration into the country. Some people would like to see more of it. We don’t have enough houses and yet you are saying we are building too many.

Which is it?

My issue is lack of quality and stupidity of planning, which needs to properly consider the impacts on what is already in place and not believe the developer bullshit of what they say they will do, when all they want is to build on green land as it is cheaper and reaps much higher profits for them! Where's the care for how a community deals with having to support more, with less, with the noise, lack of transport.... We just are not planning properly and need to stop and fix what is, before building more developer profit boxes, which I doubt, in many instances, will have a long future given the poor approach to their construction.

I agree with you about holiday lets and also would restrict second homes. Given there is so much empty or low use commercial and retail property, I'd be happy to see a presumption against new commercial/retail space. Ground floor housing does not just benefit older people.

@Mammajay exactly, the rural area I stay in has the highest number of elderly in the whole of Scotland but has a massive issue recruiting and keeping GPs yet they continue to build, a lot of those builds are then bought up by retirees from other areas who then struggle to get appointments and could eventually need social care which is also very bad here as all the youngsters leave for better opportunities, vicious cycle

With Net Immigration last year at 700,000, they have to live somewhere.
Round here, everytime a house is sold, then it is knocked down and flats put up instead.
I even had a distant neighbour (ie a house I pass, the owner stopped to talk to me). She was selling her house, but the prospective buyer was not interested in looking inside; just wanted to see the size of the garden, etc, as he intended to knock it down and build flats. Frankly, as flats would be totally out of keeping in this road, and the houses were largish 1930s style 4 bedroom, I am not sure that planning would be granted.

Decimated means 1 in 10. I think losing 10% of our green space to house people seems fair enough.

If I were in power I would bring in the following reforms:

• a ban on residential property ownership by people who are neither ordinarily resident in nor citizens of the UK, with a reasonable period in which to sell up for non citizens who have previously been resident owners and have subsequently left the UK
• massively limit landlords' ability to evict tenants or to raise rents above a certain very low amount per year - essentially landlords should only be allowed to evict tenants due to persistent poor behaviour by the tenants, if they plan to sell the property or if they plan to live in it themselves, and in the latter case they should not be allowed to let the property out again for a minimum of five years from the date their last tenants moved out
• set up a dedicated dispute resolution service for tenants, encompassing the deposit protection scheme but also extending to things like liability for repairs and maintenance, and if a landlord is found to be in the wrong three times they get a one year ban on letting out any of their properties which are currently empty and a punitive tax on any of their properties which are currently occupied
• tax on unoccupied properties

I don't mind the building, I mind the ugliness.

Barcelona has millions of flats, but it's beautiful. Why are all new buildings in this country so brutally ugly? They are offensive.

Because the people designing them are often metropolitan city-dweller types. The country generally has forgotten how to make and build nice things.

I’m with you on fewer Airbnb properties. I was shocked when I checked out the village I live in and saw what was built as “affordable” (@ £330k) houses are all on Airbnb site. My neighbour has bought up 3 houses in the village in the last year and turned them all into holiday lets. No wonder young people can’t get on the housing ladder here.

And often inexplicably decked out with hideous dark grey carpet. I've also found a lot of the layouts are impractical, such as nowhere to easily put a sofa and no built in bedroom storage/room for a wardrobe.

I say let’s have A LOT more solar panels and wind farms.

There are more pressing matters than how pretty things look.

And yep - we need more housing - especially social housing/council houses. Stop the greedy landlords and charge a fair rent.

Come on. This has GOT to be a post from the Reform party. Farage out. PR wheel in motion.

or the ERG alternatively

We need a lot more homes than we have at present. If we don't build more, we need to take some radical action. Clamping down on second homes, short-term lets and long term empty homes alone is not going to do it.

The only alternative to building more is radical redistribution of property - a huge overhaul of council tax hat massively disincentivised people under-occupying property would probably be effective. Want a spare bedroom? - be prepared to pay through the nose for it. But I expect that would be even less popular than building new homes.

New builds on three points of the compass here - and warehousing on the other (close to major motorway). Also a solar farm coming to run alongside the only level surface linking this village with the next.

A friend of mine has had the land next to them (redesignated Greenbelt) built on; mainly larger houses, with one small section of "affordable". Last night their garden camera picked up a load of rubbish being dumped on what remains of the green lane alongside their property.
It had paperwork among it (yes, they were that stupid). They are from the new development 🙄

Never seen so many people quoting immigration figures in one thread

That might be because immigration is a massive problem.

@Kazzyhoward yes the issue is a global one. Our only model for prosperity currently, anywhere in the world, is continued growth which is obviously unsustainable, not least on a climate/sustainability front, and yet no country has cracked this yet. Countries with steeply declining population trajectories like Japan, South Korea and Italy will soon hit huge, huge issues, as we will in time. China has created this situation of its own making via the one child policy and is now coming off the rails in part because of it (obviously lots of other issues going on there too). I am not remotely smart enough to know what the solution is (maybe AI will save us all??!) although it almost certainly will involve younger people paying a lot more towards, and spending a lot more of their time and energy, supporting older populations, which will feel extremely unpleasant.

Unfettered immigration is clearly out of control in U.K. .
Australia and NZ are far stricter.
UK is still seen as an easy touch - because it IS.