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.

@milveycrohn honestly a planning system that rejects things for not being aesthetically in keeping is insane - it makes me furious - and is one of the biggest issues we face. What a preposterous reason not to build anew. Not only do we lack sufficient numbers of homes, but we have one of the oldest and most inefficient housing stocks in Europe. We should be replacing old and outdated homes with better new ones, and more of them, at as fast a rate as we can.

The issue I'm sure many will raise in response to this is that many new builds are ugly, badly built and inefficient - and that is true, but that is an issue with quality, not with the idea of building new homes per se.

Yes it's immoral that those wanting to be Drs, nurses etc have to pay fees

@Aquamarine1029 Well, yes developers have actually done this where I live. These overpriced detached houses have actually sat for two years and they are trying to sell some with the furniture included. The hotel next door to the site has applied for HMO status which is the way things are going here, with 30 rooms thus making saleability even more uncertain. Will it be contractors or go the same way as a hotel in the town centre which houses refugees. I just don't know. The housing policy seems to be a one size fits all, focussing on the SW.

Yet, another application goes in for land that floods in open countryside. Even if it is turned down at local level, the developers will appeal and win.

No dentists, doctors, schools. All full. No NHS dentist within an hours drive. Waiting now for telephone appointment for doctors for three weeks - even to discuss test results.

One or two social houses built, but as part of planning permission conditions on new estates. Believe me they are few and far between. I lived in a Council house as a child on a huge estate with a slightly dodgy reputation. They now sell in excess of £300,000. Not much by SW standards, but v expensive here.

@Lakielady Correct. In the town considered more downmarket nearby, a developer built on brownfield land alongside a railway track. The houses were decent enough, my dd bought one, 3 bed, garden, driveway £154,000. There was a waiting list but even in the urban areas there needs to be a restriction on buy to let/air b and b. There has been successful regeneration of poor quality housing stock in the town centre. We need to utilise less attractive sites.

The reason why they're badly built is because they're being thrown up so quickly. There is no care, thought or passion in the quality of the construction. It's all just put together as quickly as possible and signed off by the construction firm. One more house added into the pool. Looks good on paper, too.

My issue is that they seem to build new homes for either retired folk (tonnes of those retirement villages all around here) or very wealthy families. They are far too expensive to be bought by first time buyers, so new communities arent being forged with a good variety of home owners in them.

There is so much polarisation and f ideas here. In many cases we can do two things at once.

We can build anew and we can ensure it looks nice.

We can build new estates and make sure they have insulation/ green energy/ are integrated with services.

We can restrict second homes, foreign buying and we can redevelop city centres.

We can allow developers to go ahead privately, and we can build council houses.

None of these are mutually exclusive and done well and thoughtfully they would all be beneficial.

What’s the common thread? Politics. Legislation. Local power. A government that wants to govern for people, not for private finance.

I have always avoided new build estates. The towns and villages of the UK were built in the obvious places. They grew up logically. The places that didn’t flood or were well connected via rivers and infrastructure.

These days they are shoehorned in to places next to existing populations. Less desirable sites and further away from amenities.
I do live in a new build but one that was built on the site of a closed railway station in the heart of the town. I don’t want to live on some marshy old field three miles from the centre.

I don’t know anything about town planning so may be completely illogical!

Sounds like my town. Becoming encircled by new developments, the most recent being another 1600 houses on farmland. Our local hospital is ten miles away and struggling to cope, our two GP practices have closed waiting lists, our schools both primary and secondary are full and it only takes one accident on our nearest trunk road to gridlock the roads in our town as drivers circumnavigate the A road problem.

Oh, and we’re in a flood risk area surrounded by rivers and canals.

This is an interesting read
Statistics- Land use in the UK 2022

Apparently only 8.7% of the UK is of developed use

edit - apologies I've just seen it's been shared already

We need more housing. We have an increasing population and not enough homes. Pretty views might be lovely, but they don’t put a roof over anyone’s head. 😗

But it's about profit and short sightedness, then hiding behind 'we need more houses' to get them through.

There's so much space in towns and cities to build more housing. There's plenty of towns in the UK that are ghost towns, build there before concreting over the countryside. But of course they can charge a lot more for houses in the countryside than in a post-industrial town or city.

We don't have too many people. More people create more wealth.

What we have is a dreadful planning system, dreadful housing policies, regional inequalities and no political will to tackle them. We need to build more homes, more densely to stop the sprawl into greenfield building.

The problems of London, the towns of northern England and rural Scotland are masively different and require massively different approaches.

More people means GDP going up. What's important is GDP per capita. The amount of money people get paid never changes. GDP per capita has been stagnant for years despite immigration.

We have a lot of building work going on. And offices converting into flats.

Road infrastructure isnt suitable. 3 bedroom house with 1 allocated car park space, same with 2 bedroom flats 0.5 car park space - as apparently that’s all they need. The train service is 1 an hour and constantly cancelled. Bus service is a twenty min walk All the primary’s in the small town are all over subscribed. The others all not on a public transport route so cars needed.

One local primary school asked to increase to 60 intake council denied it.

The one doctor and dentist are hard to get apt.

The road is now dangerous as all the cars from flats and development need to park somewhere , due to lack of parking. Causing blockages and frustration. If the M25 has an accident our little town is used as a cut through - it can take over hour to get to the other side of town (usually a 45 min walk)

I understand that the need for homes - but why don’t they make sure the town’s infrastructure can take it. We already a at flood risk town - one development built and homes which has never been flooded in 50+ years suffered flooding following heavy rains - turned out developer had blocked the flow - it’s been fixed but the new homes now have complaints as their gardens all boggy.

People are forgetting that cities are overpopulated but that does not extend to many other towns. I live in a large town and overpopulation is not an issue within schools here.

Also, other countries are suffering too.

People are living longer and holding on to their houses longer (although I do not think the solution is to tax them for it or strip them of their homes).

Foreign investors do hold on to property as assets, especially in large cities where they are sought after. There are whole buildings I know of that are owned and not lived in and that is so wrong. These people are not immigrants, they do not live here full time apart from a few months a year. They have no intention of living here

It is so easy to blame immigration but we've run out of land in cities. It was inevitable. I lived in a city in the UK where they built on every strip of land available until there was no phone signal and little sunlight in my apartment.

Maybe it is time for people to move out of major cities and see them as the trap they are.

We haven't run out of land in cities. Which cities have run out of land? Our cities are lacking the density very common in other cities around the world. Build up!

The Tories use distraction techniques like Rwanda, small boats and Brexit but still oversee record legal immigration every year.

Labour will merely do the same.

The government has the power to stop all immigration, both into and out of the country. There is just no will and probably never will be.

Britain has the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, the British Army and the Royal Marines.

Also MI5, MI6, the SAS, Special Boat Service, SRR, UK Signals and the Parachute Regiment.

All the King's horses and all the King's men, yet it WILL NOT stop people smugglers operating 27 miles away.

Just saying.

What are you recommending?

What would you want to see happen

Not all cities are overpopulated. Many are short of people, particularly of working age and it's more common in towns. The problem is everyone pisses off to university from these places at 18 and then they won't go back and will live in or commute to London (or another big city like Manchester/Birmingham/Leeds).

It's not just house planning that's been fucked up in this country, it's centralising investment and jobs around the big cities, mostly London and other regional capitals. To then continue to ignore these places while concreting over the countryside is just bloody stupid. They go on about levelling up - rather than a soundbite we should actually do it properly.

Immigration is just another resource for capitalists. But they never bother to think about the infrastructure to keep up with the endless population increase it brings.

Totally agree with this. Especially about brownfield sites. Building on the few green spaces within towns and cities makes air quality even poorer, and once sports and recreation land is lost, it's very hard to get it back elsewhere.

@Panicmode1 "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"

I haven't RTFT so don't know if anyone has commented on this.

I agree with you. But also, we need to think about what jobs we need people to fill.

I have just left a very outer burb of North London. I was in that particular spot for 20 years in total. One really striking thing in the last few years was the proliferation of people getting things like MacDonalds and Starbucks delivered. Both 3 - 7 mins walk away (i give that range because I got slow due an injury, for most people, it's 3 mins max). And it was a big high rise block with mostly one and two beds.

You were lucky to get in the lift at certain times because it was constantly in use by someone delivering one fecking cup of coffee. Yes, people have the right to want what they want. But there's bound to be an overpopulation crisis when it's considered important to have this service.

(I appreciate that the people ordering one coffee to save them a 2 min walk - or heaven forbid, making their own coffee - are probably not the same ones complaining about overpopulation though).

So it's not just about paying more. It's asking how much business we can do on this small island, because the price of that is not just about GDP. It's about quality of life.

Meanwhile, half of that high street was either empty shops or units occupied by someone selling tat they got from a drop shipper. More sensible to build flats there than on green space.