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.

They should go after landlords first making their pensions on buy to let first time buyer homes.

If they build on the green belt next to me, houses would start at about 800k.

The total number of people who moved to the UK were t.2 million with illegal and legal immigration that’s more than the population of Birmingham.
There’s a lot of doubt about the high immigration model that you are advocating for -

The Dutch study shows that:
The annual net costs of non-Western immigration amount to €17 billion and the annual net benefits of Western immigration total one billion euros. Distinguishing between Western and non-Western migration patterns, the study comes to a startling conclusion: if immigration remains at 2015-2019 levels, the annual budget burden will increase from €17 billion in 2016 to about €50 billion. This is an increase that the welfare state would most likely not survive.

https://unherd.com/newsroom/dutch-study-immigration-costs-state-e17-billion-per-year/

There is a company called Mears they are working for the government they are renting all the flats in our city for immigrants all the landlords have released that this is a cash cow if you rented you flat or house for let’s say £1000 to a British family ,you can let it out to Mears for say £1500 a month for three years for immigrants so this is what’s happening so the rent are going through the roof. Greedy landlords are obviously going to Mears and saying you can have all my flats and Mears are paying stupid money for them. So I’m sorry just another example of if the immigrants weren’t here then the rents would be lower and we would not have to house them and there would be move accommodation for locals.

@GreenTeaLikesMe they will, I suppose they are banking on wealthy areas and pretty villages not throwing up too much civil disobedience but the group against the pylons in Norfolk have already hired a KC so the likelihood is they will have a fight on their hands

I agree that immigration numbers are unsustainable. Immigration has probably peaked and will fall - the last couple of years were exceptional due to Ukraine and Hong Kong. But even if immigration were reduced to zero, there's a backlog due to years of chronic underbuilding. It kind of has to be done anyway.

Probably the best way to reduce illegal immigration is to mend relations with the EU (allowing better policing of the seas) and having an ID card system that is required to get a job, housing or healthcare.

Reducing legal migration (which is where most immigration will come from) will involve tough trade offs, and will require the UK to do better on growth in order to fund the higher wages that will be essential if we want to fill hard-to-fill roles like care work with locals rather than immigrants. It would also help if we could get more EU people to fill roles rather than people from poorer, further-away countries who are a lot more likely to want to bring dependents with them; another reason why doing better deals with the EU is really important and why we should start laying the groundwork for re-entry to the EU in the future.

It's important for people to grasp the tradeoffs involved; if we want less immigration, everyone will have to be prepared to retire later in line with rising life expectencies. To be fair, it's not only in the UK that people find this hard to swallow. The Radical Right in France is currently promising to slash immigration while letting everyone retire at 62...

The planet is so screwed if it isn't already but just this thread alone shows how utterly selfish humans are, let's just get rid of green spaces to accommodate more people. I mean wtf whays the point of living on this planet if we build over everything it'll be some giant concreted world.

Make it cheaper to downsize and incentivise.

There are so many empty bedrooms I suspect, certainly where we live.

Family member is in construction. To build all these homes we will need to use immigrants because we're short of people in the industry.

So, the net migration for the last year was equivalent to the population of Liverpool.
Where do you suggest they live? What impact will this have on housing?

Fly over the UK. There is plenty of land that can be built on.
We need the right homes though- social housing so people can have a secure tenancy and councils aren't paying for poor b and b accommodation and, where possible, not paying expensive rents in the private sector.
We need the right size homes - so they should be built by the public sector as private sector build to profit and don't necessarily build the best sizes for need.
My concern is RR saying she's not in the housebuilding industry - does she think just saying they should build and it will happen? They've stalled building to naximise profit - if they see government incentives coming, watch them double down and not build until the government payments are making it worth their while putting more profit into the private sector.

Darren Jones MP was discussing building new homes on the grey belt on R4 yesterday morning.

I'm sure there is a need for new homes to be made available, I just wish the following:
‐strict rent-caps to be imposed to ensure standardisation and affordability and prevent excessive profiteering
-no buy-to-let investment portfolio buyers
-no second home ownership
‐a large quantity of social housing to replace sold off council properties
‐a tapering off of the possibility of buying a council house to prevent further depletion of the housing stock
‐properly affordable homes to be built

I'd bloody love it if we had a system by which private landlords did not profit so well from housing benefit payments (a haemorrhaging of public funds into private pockets), either through rent caps or such an abundance of decent social housing that renters in receipt of financial help with housing costs could actively choose social housing over renting privately.

In my city, every last m² is developed into student accommodation. I don't get it; when I was at uni 25 years ago, we had a thriving residential city centre, where families lived and children went to school. The university students of the 90s lived in shared houses or in a few Halls, not in the endless new developments and complexes which are being constructed and developed in every old office space, disused department store or decomissioned municipal building available. These spaces could be developed into new general housing instead, thus preserving our city centre and vibrant community as was.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901297.amp www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901297.amp]]]]

There are not enough houses for the population, should they just accept a lifetime of insecure housing? It’s surprising the low amount of the country that is built on.

No, there's a housing crisis. You can't blame it all on migrants. Households are smaller so even with a stagnant population the number of units needed is greater, and houses aren't where the jobs are.

The green belt policy has been questioned by experts as it simply pushes construction outside the belt and doesn't distinguish between different types of land in the green belt.

@GreenTeaLikesMe Immigration definitely has not peaked if climate science is to be believed. We are going to need to be prepared to accommodate many who find themselves displaced by flood, drought, conflict and famine.
And so we should. We're living in a temperate part of the world by dint of birth and luck and generally no merit of our own.

I couldn't agree more and would add converting redundant city centre shops into flats. This would also immediately free up stock.

I agree with a lot of this, and I'm broadly in favour of Paris/Pimlico style 5 story street-facing apartment blocks for new developments.

But as a resident of an inner city terrace (both now and in other cities in the past) I totally disagree that they're not dense enough to allow fulfilling lives without a car. There's huge numbers of people living in perfectly walkable inner city terraced streets within easy reach of all the amenities they need. Smaller 2/3/4 beds were squeezed in at a decent density in the past as long as they didn't have a big garden, and ubiquitous loft conversions help with the living space per square foot of footprint ratio.

It helps for there to be a fair number of house shares along with the single family houses to improve the average density, I grant you, but there are lots of young people living in perfectly civilised house shares, they don't have to be a bad thing.

Second home owners already pay more council tax and stamp duty and I suspect the amount will only increase.
I'd like to see a clamp down on foreign property investors who leave large amounts of (usually) London housing stock empty.

Yes - I was very surprised to see the old Tory idea of building on brownfield sites being reused once again by Labour.

The immigration numbers are skewed by the fact that we include international students, the majority of whom will stay for a few years paying us loads of money to keep our universities from collapsing, then go home.

Because so many of them went home/didn't arrive in 2020/2021 due to Covid, the normal flow of incoming and outgoing students was completely disrupted. As the 2022 cohort flow through and start to go home, the total net migration numbers will inevitably decrease somewhat.

IME the international students tend to live in specially constructed blocks of flats on brownfield sites, it's the hugely increased number of home students who are living in family homes converted (poorly) into HMOs.

This. Of course we need a massive house building scheme. Why shouldn’t people have somewhere to live. What’s not going to be popular is the fact that building more homes devalues the price of existing houses. That can only be a good thing because the housing market has run away with itself. How are youngsters going to afford to buy? I support housing for everyone whether it’s social, private, affordable etc. It’s imperative we build more houses.

I agree, but bizarrely it doesn't seem to be a popular idea (at least on MN) because it's perceived as helping those already at 'the top of the pile'.

Yes, I'm concerned. I've already seen mass housing developments spring up in countryside about 30 minute drive from a local town. There is no public transport or any new provision made for Doctors, schools etc - you need a car to get anywhere. Currently there seems to be a lack of thought about how to meet need for housing whilst also considering local infrastructure (or lack of it) and the environment. I wait to see how this evolves.

They need to build more council properties and not sell them off. There should also be a cap on how much a household can earn to be allowed to stay in the social housing and those that earn above that are given help to buy (not like the schemes we have now) to buy privately.

8 million a day plus on hotels for immigrants is not a crisis?

I am in a green belt area and so far there have been 4 huge developments built, no new schools, doctors and 2 of our hotels are at capacity with immigrants who can't work and I work to pay tax to support it.

Allowing huge housing developments with no infrastructure or social housing has been entirely down to the Tories, who made life easier for their house-building mates. Farmland has been being built on around us for the last 10 years. And they're shit quality houses. (And 40 years ago, where I live was farmland.)

Labour intend to ensure sufficient infrastructure is included in developments.

We need houses, so our kids have somewhere to live. Limiting immigration is not the solution, whatever Nasty Nigel tells you to think - we need immigration because we do not have enough people filling roles in essential industries.