Labour’s plans to build thousands of new homes

[dnac]

Anyone else feeling dismayed at the plans announced today to build huge numbers of new homes on the “grey” belt? Why not just concrete over the UK? It’s not just the homes, it’s the infrastructure that will need to go with it that will almost certainly involve cutting down trees, spoiling natural habitats and losing more green space. Plus the boundary between grey and geeen belt will blur over time. Why can’t we put more effort into refurbishing existing properties (or just rebuilding on the same sites?). So much for refreshing, positive ideas from the new administration. Just more of the same ill thought out sound bites that make me despair for the future of the planet.

It may be a small part of it, but with the rise of landlordism more people are purchasing second third fourth properties and charging excessive rates. Its a crisis because people are being priced out. That's a greed issue. Then you've got social housing which hasn't been properly maintained. You have a historically inadequate benefits system which means many people find themselves in arrears making it harder for social housing to repair and some areas they've been blocked from building for a long time. If immigrants are coming here because they're working and able to pay rent and contribute to the economy then that's fine. If they're coming here due to seeking asylum then they're completely within their rights to do so but they will be listed as homeless as well. Noone is offering free houses to immigrants who don't qualify for them at the expense of uk born people. The housing crisis is much much bigger than that. You've also got the chronic underfunding of community service (thanks for that tories) which has caused significant bed blocking so people can't access services because so many services have closed.

Sounds like a pyramid scheme.

We know how those end.

And this- all day long. People cannot afford to have children any more. Meaning our entire economy and population are getting significantly older. We will DEPEND on immigration unless measures are taken to help people boost the birth rate. It also means more women unable to sustain work (and therfore afford privately rented or bought properties).

@Lavender14

"Its a crisis because people are being priced out"

I totally agree that the crisis is people being priced out. The solution is to either reduce demand by reducing the number of people in the UK or increasing supply by building more houses.

They're building hundreds of homes in my area. Semi rural market town that hasn't the infrastructure to support these thousands of extra people. No jobs either so the majority have to commute into the surrounding cities. V little public transport, so cars are needed. A lot of households have 2 cars so how is this better for the environment exactly?

But if reducing the immigration rates will destabilise an ageing population then surely you can see that's not the answer. Perhaps a cap on rental prices? Perhaps a cap on the number of homes people can own in high demand areas? Perhaps providing the necessary resources to community services and social housing so they can repair what they have? Perhaps a more user friendly benefits system so vulnerable people don't end up in arrears and social housing don't have huge amounts of their money tied up in arrears? Maybe cracking down on the number of unused social housing properties? At the end of the day people have a right to asylum. If people can pay there way to live here then why shouldn't they? I have no interest living in a country that denies peoples human rights - do you?

Apartment blocks suitable for families would be better than houses. Like the kind of high quality housing you have in Denmark where apartment blocks have good sized rooms and a lovely communal playground in the middle.

i agree that brownfield sites should be repurposed . I live in a seaside town with lots of unused hotels that could be converted to housing if the council allowed change of use. We need farming land to be protected to help us achieve food security

I let my imagination run riot a bit and thought how nice, refreshing and overall uplifting it would have been if Labour had proudly proclaimed that its mission was to protect the green belt and green spaces at all costs. Oh well, one can dream. Momentarily takes the edge off the sense of impending doom I have about overcrowding, stretched natural resources and decimation of wildlife when political parties trot out the sort of short sighted rubbish that’s been spouted today by Labour (and the Tories before them - remember Sunak’s about turn on the timing for the introduction of electric vehicles ). We easily overlook that it’s humankind’s insatiable appetite for more of everything that’s got the planet in the mess it is in now. I just find it baffling that no-one has the courage to say stop this rampaging of the environment in the name of “growth”.

OK, so you think it's all about immigration.

Let's pretend that we could solve the housing crisis overnight by sending the 800,000 immigrants back to wherever they came from.

Once they have gone, how is the NHS going to function without all the overseas doctors and nurses that it currently employs? Or even if you want to privatise healthcare, how are the private hospitals going to function without staff?

How are we going to manage social care for our ageing population without all of the overseas staff? Who is going to look after all of the people who need care?

How are we going to fund our universities once the international student fees can no longer be used to subsidise home students?

How are our businesses going to compete globally without being able to hire the talent that they need to deliver on their objectives?

How are we going to replace the lost tax take when all of the immigrants leave? Are we going to whack up taxes on those who are left or drastically cut public services?

I'm really curious as to how things would work in your utopian vision of a world without immigrants. If your response is that we would train more British workers to take up skilled jobs in medicine, business etc, how do you propose we manage in the interim while we are getting all this into place? How will we afford to pay the wages that are high enough to tempt people into these positions? And how are the universities going to train more medics etc if they're on their knees because of the loss of international student income?

And this ^ better infrastructure so people can use public transport to commute from more rural areas easier. Where I live there are some areas that get a bus twice a day. Our main train service between cities runs 2 hrly. That needs upgraded if you want people to use more environmentally friendly measures and to take the pressure off popular areas. There's SO many things we can do to tackle this, but isn't it easier to just blame the immigrants? Made it much easier for the tories to absolve themselves of their responsibility for the matter.

There are plenty of houses if people want to buy - look on Rightmove. The shortage is social housing, which isn’t going to be resolved by releasing second homes. The second homes are generally in nice areas, and if released will just be sold on. This won’t help those on housing waiting lists.

Yes, European rental practices especially in places like Germany /Denmark, where renting is normal and properties are maintained to a good standard and rents are not paying a mortgage on another posher property for an individual landlord, but go back into maintaining the property and infrastructure.... Right to Buy, without the push to replace stock sold, really wrecked the supply of decent affordable homes on the UK.

Shocked at the folks that don't want Labour to build housing to:-

Provide affordable housing that our children might have a chance of buying

Provide rented council housing that the low paid might be able to afford

Get families living in temporary accommodation into decent housing

Stop the ridiculous rise in house prices due to lack of supply

Stop landlords charging ridiculous rent due to lack of supply

... didn't vote Labour.

Shocked I tell ya!

They need to stop right to buy at least in prime areas, because social housing soon becomes private rental stock and then we’re back to square one. What a terrible idea it was to sell off London council houses, and not ensure they were all replaced. It’s absolutely wild - but I don’t blame the residents who took advantage of right to buy and made an absolute fortune.

cheers, Thatcher 😣

They also need to do something about the buying up of masses of apartments in London by foreign investors, because with so many of the flats remaining empty it looks like money laundering to me.

Maybe a crackdown on Airbnb too.

And lastly, they need to make sure Tories never get into power again because what a circus the past 14 years has been. Literally everything is worse! Incompetent corrupt Conservative clowns 🤡 I hope every fraudulent act they committed or ignored is uncovered and repayments are made to the public purse.

When I say second homes I'm referring to landlord properties/airbnb style properties who are charging way above the worth of those properties. That puts pressure on social housing because firstly social housing providers can't purchase those properties (some of which would originally have been social housing stock lost to the private market via rent to buy scheme) and it means people are forced into being social housing tenants because they can't afford to be private tenants even in house share set ups. It also means first time buyers or even people wanting to move up the housing ladder are priced out as the demand is bigger. I live in an area which has lots of social housing stock. All houses in our area lately have been purchased by landlords and not even filled with tenants. Some houses are going for over £1000pcm for a 2 bed in a rough area. 5 years ago they'd have been £400pcm for the same house. We can't get into a bigger house in a nicer area due to the cost (driven by demand) and the interest rates as well as the childcare crisis. This house could be used for social housing stock but we can't get out of it even with two good paying jobs. It may not be the main driver but its absolutely a factor.

No housing crisis? Absolute rubbish. Whoever said that has no idea what they're talking about.

Many of the posts on this thread are jolly good examples of why the UK has failed to build enough homes for decades.

Much of it is selfish, short-termist, small-minded nonsense.

The green belt is not some kind of sacred cow. It was government policy that created it and government policy can choose to designate some of it for housebuilding, for the good of the whole country.

I used to live on the edge of West London and two minutes drive from my home going towards Buckinghamshire and Berkshire there was reams and reams of open grey belt land. It was far from lush and green, it was ugly and scrubby and exactly where future generations need to live.

Lack of housing is strangling economic growth and stunting personal opportunities and denying decent life chances to younger people.

I welcome the idea of new towns and seriously hope Keir's government succeeds in building hundreds of thousands of new homes - because people need them desperately.

You have never been to the greenbelt have you

Besides surely what we really need is a crack down on the huge companies which are going major damage to our planet and climate? The same companies supported by tory government. The impact of individuals is always going to be minor in comparison to major businesses with destructive practices.

You don't understand how society works?

Let me make it simpler for you: 10 men and women aged 20 go to live in a village. They build houses and distribute the tasks needed to survive amongst themselves. Ten years later, 5 children are born. Now 9 of them have to work extra hard to feed the extra mouths and 1 becomes a babysitter/teacher.

After a hard 10-20 years, the population has doubled and things are good: they're all working adults contributing to the prosperity of the village. But add another 10 years and 2 of the originals have died, while the remaining 8 want to retire and live at the expense of their children.

The 10 children now have to support 18 adults and if they start having children themselves, even more people. It's impossible unless the older ones go back to working, die off quickly, or they recruit another 5 adults from a neighbouring village to perform the tests needed to support so many people.

Retirement at age 60ish would have to completely stop if you want to stop immigration and the building of more houses. Are you happy to work into your 80s?

I think theyre making a huge mistake saying they will build on green belt, but there are 1.4m fewer households in social housing since 1980. So we def need more social housing. And it's not an immigration issue! It's a margaret thatcher legacy issue.

Social housing brings a better more stable housing situation for all and we've not only lost that balance but we have whole generations of people who cannot afford to buy a house.

Houses to be built will not be traditional construction homes because there's an order of magnitude gap between how many houses are built per annum today and the number needed.

Everywhere has changed from our parents generation to our generation and everything will change from our generation to that of our children including new houses, roads etc.

I think YABU @dnac

I dont want green space lost, but biodiversity should not decline because biodiversity net gain will be required by planning soon. (I hope they don't dismantle that.)

Why shouldn't there be opportunities for people to live in rural areas, not everyone wants to live in London. There is a huge amount of housing development where we are and that's great, but the countryside needs to take a chunk. The grey field will involve very few trees being cut down, it's largely things like carparks and petrol filling stations. I do hope that there are better rules and enforcement about the services needed to add hundreds of homes though. I also hope that a good chunk of the new homes are created through new towns so that it's not all either cities or villages. But YABVU to not think that rural areas should be protected to this extent.

I agree that, in addition to building on the grey belt plus building whole new towns in open countryside, we need to maximise the use of brownfield sites (despite the higher costs involved in those), and we need to relax change of use planning laws to allow empty high street buildings to be converted into homes.

We need a panoply of imaginative solutions.

Those of you who disagree with increased housebuilding: do you have a secure and affordable home right now? I am willing to bet that you do.

Ask yourselves why you want to deny that comfort and privilege to others, and why you think your rights trump theirs?

If your concern is protecting the environment, why aren't you wondering how to protect it whilst expanding our housing stock?

If your concern is infrastructure, why aren't you wondering how to provide it whilst increasing the number of homes available?

Why is your solution always simply "No, we must not build"?

@Inlaw

"You have never been to the greenbelt have you"

Sorry but that is a ridiculous statement to make.

This country hasn't had a house building plan since the 70s.

And we haven't built house on the scale Labour is planning since the 50s.

We've built nothing. And sold off council houses.

There is a massive shortage.

No of course it's not all going to be built on green belt. No one says it is.

Our children haven't a chance of owning their own homes.

What do you suggest? They rent forever?

Regardless of how many homes they build in the greenbelt I guarantee it won’t be your children buying them. Or maybe they will. Who knows how things can turn out. But if they can afford to buy them then they could afford to buy anywhere so I’m not really understanding your argument.

Im not against building. I’m in a midlands town at the moment and they are building all over. Your kids could probably afford one of these houses. But is that beneath them?