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.

I do agree, they are building new homes on green belt here, once it is gone it is gone. They can put on tree preservation orders but the contractors just cut them down anyway and pay the puny fines that are no deterrent. The homes are not even affordable housing but mac mansions. Its all a big racket. Keir Starmer is very much in the pocket of big business and the corporates perhaps he felt is was the deal he needed to do to get into power but he will find his hands tied in making any real change. Would be leaders who cannot be bought, who are not in hock to those with wealth and power simply don't get in they get lied about and destroyed by the press.

I don't think it will ever change, so best to just make your own life as decent as possible but saving the planet or actually making life better and fairer for everyone via parliamentary politics? Forget about it!

Children do stand a chance of owning their own homes. There are houses to be bought at the lower end of the market. What’s stopping them getting on the housing ladder atm are the large interest rates and low salaries preventing them being able to afford to buy.

We need house building. There are not enough houses for sale which inflates house prices.
The only other alternative is to ban air bnbs and holiday homes.

And every patch of land in my City has been used for housebuilding. They are now building groups of houses in the middle of industrial estates. It looks an awful place to live.

I think we need massive development in urban development in the towns that already exist. The towns near me have almost no family homes, there are tiny flats which people don’t want because of the lease and service charges and they have hardly any storage so they tend to get bought by investors and let to young people, rows of poor quality Victorian 2 bed terraces, huge numbers of which are owned by landlords who don’t maintain them well so the streets look shabby and then fewer people aspire to live there, and the big old family houses are almost all HMOs. The cities are dying in their arses. They need to be a place where people want to own homes and raise families in them. We have a series of shit, run down, half derelict towns, and then a few miles away, endless new build estates with no infrastructure.

Well I suppose I look forward to my house increasing in price as having any garden or green space will become more valuable so thanks Kier 😊

Please don't all pile onto me for not knowing what I'm talking about, and I am sure there's loads of good reasons which you're all going to tell me about, but...

When you look at the state of so many high streets now, is there a reason why former retail spaces cannot be converted into homes?

I live in Birmingham. There are several examples of where small parades of shops (say four or five in a row) have long been made into flats on the ground floor level (usually there were purpose-built flats above already), so clearly it can be done. The difference here is that the parades of shops were much more the "local" sort, found at the end of an ordinary residential road, or else in the middle of an estate - that type of thing.

Looking at the state of one of a very popular and "thriving" high street in the south-west part of Sutton Coldfield, which I visit regularly, there are never the less a great many boarded up shops, and I really don't see retailers ever coming back to it - this high street has lost some massive names, including Greggs, Boots, and all the banks of course, not to mention one after the other independent retailers.

The town center of Sutton Coldfield is even worse - great big spaces where BHS, M&S, Anne Summers, Laura Ashley, Argos, and many more used to be...the indoor market is all but empty now, due to rent rises...can these spaces not be converted? Ironically, I've heard several people say the reason they give the town centre a wide-berth is because it all looks so grey, vacant, and depressing, thus compounding the problem.

Retail as we knew it is never coming back - is it not time to use this space for housing?

@Thedayb4youcame they have done this in my city, but not right in the city centre. They are really hard to get tenants for as the main pedestrians walking by are people going to pubs or clubs, and they tend to be loud late at night.

@Lavender14
In my area every single landlord (every one! ) has split former three bed family homes into HMOs to house migrants, asylum seekers or those with chronic homelessness issues (mental health, drugs, crime).
I don't know why in your world view "lanlordism" has nothing to do with immigration statistics and stops sharp somewhere between holiday homes and expensive rentals.
Actually, I do know why. Same reason why some other posters only encounter migrants as doctors. Must be naice where you live guys.

Awful. With the state of the UK right now, we can't afford to destroy more nature to build houses.

Well yes, I did wonder about the social aspect of it all and how that could work...I'd not fancy living on the ground floor flat on a high street, but then there's many a place I would live that others wouldn't.

A relative of mine used to live in Wood Green, north London. I stayed with them after I left school, summer of 1994. I had a part time job in what is now known as "The Mall" (used to be called Shopping City). Said job took me to the top of the building on one occasion, to take something to a customers home. It turns out that when this huge 2-storey retail outlet was built (1981), they also built an entire housing estate above it - flats, even houses, and community buildings. I've never heard or seen anything like it since. It was ever so strange to see.

My point is, in reality residential and business units have long been in close proximity - maybe the concept needs to be embraced more and the idea 'normalised'?

@Inlaw

"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?"

There's also huge numbers of apartments in my town, but they are totally unaffordable to first time buyers.

No of course the midlands is not beneath them.

But the reality is we need affordable housing where people live and work, be that Birmingham, Reading (where I live), London, Cambridge, Southampton. Newcastle, Manchester or wherever.

Where on earth do you think the low paid folks that work in cities live?

The low paid that work in shops and cafes and retail, the cashiers and shelf stackers, the cleaners and porters, the care workers, the folks on zero-hours contracts, and the myriad of jobs that make a city and our civic services, infrastructure and economy work.

They need to live in these cities.

Unless you're thinking that a care worker in London commutes home to Birmingham to her affordable house.

There absolutely is a housing crisis it’s just that if you don’t need it you can’t see it. If there wasn’t a housing crisis why is the average age of first time buyers much higher, why are we delaying having children and decreasing our window of fertility, why are adult children staying with parents longer, well into their late 20’s early 30’s, why are tenants having to bid on rents, why have rents and mortgages increased at an alarming rate over the last few decades way ahead of wages or inflation, why are Chinese millionaires buying up flats in London that haven’t even been built yet and will only stay empty until they cash in their investments later, why are the most picturesque towns becoming ghost towns of empty Airbnbs while local schools shut down and working people have to commute into the towns generations of their families have lived in? There is a housing crisis and there is a population crisis in the post thanks to that. In years to come when there won’t be enough working people to cover the pensions, nhs and care bills all thanks to the housing crisis.
Where I am they build offices and warehouses, that stay empty for 5 years or so, only to be torn down to build new offices and warehouses or they get converted into studio flats, with floor to ceiling windows that don’t open and act as mini greenhouses in the summer renting at just under a grand a month. Or maybe a pub gets demolished to make way for a couple of 4 bed detached houses with a shared driveway. Nothing affordable and certainly no social housing. And before someone blames immigrants the housing waiting list was over 50,000 back in the mid 90’s. As for infrastructure, these people are already registered to local gps and schools, they are just living with their parents/grandparents or renting overcrowded overpriced homes. I’d love to see homes being built near us, instead of pointless empty offices or seeing whole parades of shops demolished then the space left to become overgrown wastelands. The percentage of the country currently built on is minimal.

They'll need to get the interest rate down first.

Only one house has been built in our village in the last year, a single in someone's garden. Four bed, nice location, view over fields, but it hasn't sold.

Planning permission was granted more than a year ago for 42 new homes, and another 4 homes. The building companies haven't even broken ground on either of them yet. The mortgage rates are too high, so the companies will sit on the land and watch the value go up without doing anything.

@Livelovebehappy

"Children do stand a chance of owning their own homes. There are houses to be bought at the lower end of the market. What’s stopping them getting on the housing ladder atm are the large interest rates and low salaries preventing them being able to afford to buy."

It depends where you live.

35 years ago we bought our 1st house for £58K. 3 times our joint salary. The cheapest house in the town.

Today the same house is £350K. You need a joint salary of £70K just to make it 5 times joint salary.

The majority of folks earn nothing like that.

It is not interest rates, it is house prices, and they are too high because there is an artificial lack of properties. We need to build.

The UK needs to forget the idea of "green belt" and think "grey fingers" instead (or "transport corridors" if you want the more technical term).

Basically, the idea is, you create a rule that says "You can build housing fairly easily AS LONG AS IT IS WITHIN XX MINUTES WALK OF A RAILWAY STATION. (Anything else is hard to do)."

Hence, "grey fingers." Housing gets concentrated along railway lines, branching out from cities in a formation that looks like a hand with spread-out fingers.

This is roughly the way building is handled in a lot of other densely populated countries where public transport is an awful lot more functional than it is in the UK.

This way, you

a) make sure that housing is near public transport, which makes it far easier to keep tight controls on car use.
b) create an incentive for actually building public transport.

You can also create systems where companies building public transport can use land immediately around train stations to build shops and services, and profit from these. Again, it ensures that any new developments are public transport-oriented, and avoids these ridiculous housing estates stuck out in the middle of nowhere.

The UK is a densely populated country and needs to start acting like one. There needs to be proper action on requiring all new developments to be oriented around rail, and then cracking on and building proper (electrified) rail to make this possible.

It would also help to improve leasehold laws and liberalize the rules around apartment building to allow generously sized apartments with nice big balconies and shared green spaces, offering a great standard of living. The UK houses a very low % of its population in apartments and this needs to change. You are a densely populated country. Densely populated countries either need to accept taller buildings and more apartment living, OR your houses will increasingly resemble rabbit hutches with tiny weird gardens jammed in at peculiar angles and too small for children to usefully play in, and cars jammed into every inch of the development because there is no way to do anything whatsoever without using a car.

The UK needs it but it needs to be done properly and with the proper infrastructure. I am also not sure where they are going to get the workforce to build it. There are huge infrastructure upgrades required (think electricity and sewerage) - swathes of new pylons are coming all down the east coast. The problem with all of this is nimbyism - people don’t want their lovely views spoiled or their village life destroyed by new homes. How that will be tackled I don’t know it sounds like Labour is just going to ride roughshod over the Public and environmental organisations but I’m not sure how easy that will be!

Brownfield building is also really important, but it needs to go hand-in-hand with a clear understanding that when you do a lot of brownfield-building, it will actually change the nature of cities, and a lot of other things will need to change.

I live in an apartment in the center of a city (Tokyo). I can live a full life in the center with no need for a vehicle. Having lots of people living in the center of cities often creates very lively cities with well-used shops and services - think of Spanish or Japanese cities. When I go to the UK, I'm struck by how few people live in the center of cities, compared to most other countries, and it's a big reason behind the problems faced by UK city centers.

However, living in a city center is only feasible because (for a number of reasons I won't go into), car usage/driving/ownership/parking in cities tends to be difficult and restricted in Japan. For me to live here, without a car, I need lots of quiet streets/pathways that are safe for me and my kids to walk and ride our bikes. Old people here need buses, so roads need to have bus lanes. Because I don't have a garden, I need nice, walkable public spaces and plazas to wander about in and spend time in.

If the UK starts to do lots of brownfield-building and shifts significantly towards a more Spanish or Japanese model of having loads more people living in built up urban areas, the potential is huge, but you all are going to have to get used to shifting transportation norms, because this will gradually erode your ability to drive into the center of cities and park there. The car parks will gradually get flats built on them. More and more roads will have more and more space given over to bike/bus lanes, and ever-increasing space will get bollarded and closed to cars. It's not a bad thing at all. But it's something everyone will have to get used to.

The irony is that the residents of the village of Royal St. Commutersville who are the loudest in their cries of "No! Brownfield first! Don't build in our lovely village!" are often the same people who have meltdowns every time a parking space in town is taken away or a bike lane is introduced on the roads they want to use to come into the city.

Agree. It's not going to easy at all. And pylons are another issue. They absolutely must go up, there is no choice here. But the villagers of Royal St. Commutersville will throw an absolute tantrum...

We've built nothing

We have built one million homes in the last 5 years.

I live in Royal St. Commutersville and, true, I’d hate it if they built a massive development on my doorstep without the infrastructure upgrade that should go with it. Trains are already crowded and traffic can be horrendous.

However, I can think of 7 or 8 pockets in my village alone where you could easily fit 4 houses in each, maybe a couple of small apartment blocks. Do that first in every village.

All towns benefit from a lively high street. All those empty shops could be apartments for first time buyers. Change planning laws so that that can be easily done.

Housing supply has recovered somewhat in the past few years but is still low by historical standards. Look at the graph. Notice that the downward trend started from the late 40s began when the Town and Country Planning Act was brought in.

Bear in mind that housing has a natural state of attrition; old houses and flats no longer fit for purpose get pulled down and replaced eventually. So "XX homes built" is not in any way the same as "XX new homes added to the total supply"; a lot of housing is just replacing old housing.

The UK has the world's oldest housing stock, and a lot of it will have to be replaced, so we actually need to be building a lot faster.

Obviously, nobody wants to tear down a gorgeous Georgian townhouse in the middle of Oxford.

But the northern town where I come from has acre after acre of Victorian terraces that were thrown together quickly in the 19th century to house the urbanizing population; they are not well-built (big cracks up the sides due to lack of foundations, which also makes it hard to plant trees nearby because the roots will cause issues), they are freezing cold in winter, you can't insulate them properly without covering the outside with clumsy looking cladding and if you do do that, you often get damp issues, which get even worse if you try to add air con, and we face more heat waves in the future.

These terraced housing streets are too dense to allow off-street parking, but not dense enough to create the sort of ecosystem that allows people to live fulfilling lives without a car, so cars clog the streets and block/wreck the pavements.

A lot of this housing needs replacing too. If you replaced a lot of these streets with a mixture of townhouses (three storey, please, give people a bit of space and a couple of extra rooms!) and medium-sized apartment blocks, you could handle a lot of the housing shortage just like that, AND the residents would have warmer/cooler homes and more floorspace per person.

Graph here.

Third time lucky. Graph here.