If care about plans to build thousands of houses on the Green Belt read THIS...

[fortyplus]

The Government Office for the East of England is holding a 'Public Consultation' re: the proposed East of England Plan.

I'm not sure how it affects other parts of the South East, but as an example - my nearest town, Hemel Hemsptaed, currently consists of 68,000 homes and it is proposed to build another 12,000 over the next 15 years - necessitating a 'major review of the Green Belt'.

The South East is extremely congested already. Hemel Hempstead Hospital is earmarked for closure, 4 local primary schools are closing (presumably so that the land can be used for housing) and the local NHS Trust (Hertfordshire) has such massive debts that it is predicted that they will never be cleared without massive cuts in services.

THIS IS MADNESS! Why not use Government money to boost the economy in other parts of the country instead of cramming even more people into the South East?

Please use this link to make your comments GoEast Regional Planning Web Page

Please bump the thread from time to time to keep it active.

Thank you.

CloudH - sorry - 1st sentence doesn't make sense - should be 'property going to existing...' etc

fortyplus, you're right that prices spiralling up so much have created a lot of the demand for second homes by giving people the equity to do it. But loosening credit for first time buyers has happened gradually over the years as a response to the fact that they can't otherwise buy (market forces on the building societies).

So yes, credit laxing is one of the causes and the consequences of such rampant house price inflation. I totally agree with you that prices are better lower for more or less everyone.

The other consequence of loose credit is that money supply has dramatically increased and this should in time cause higher inflation. The fact that it hasn't yet is probably a mystery to most economists although they always propose a multitude of reasons why it should be the case.

People who bought homes before the 'boom' (the majority of homeowners) have hugely higher disposable income than those forced to buy now, they are still the majority, and they have a lot of cash by historic standards.

Because prices of goods etc have been held down by globalisation, the extra cash is just pouring into property and other fixed assets.

Hopefully there will soon be a downturn in property prices. After all - just a few years ago property was at its most affordable for years - high prices but very low interest rates.
Last time prices were rocketing I had just bought my first house - paid £56.5K and a year later it was worth £82K - so much worse than the current 10% or so pa - my 25yo brother bought himself a sports car. I lectured him about being mad - told him he'd never be able to buy a house etc. He turned round and said something like... 'I'm a graduate, so I earn more than a lot of people my age. If I can't afford a one bed flat then there is no housing market!'
At that time all the Banks/Building Societies etc were buying up Estate Agents as theyt were forecast to make millions.
Then came the crash... 30% wiped off everyone's property values.
A couiple of years later my bro bought his flat. He foresaw what major financial institutions didn't.
I wonder if the same will happen this time?

I live in the South East and I am always amazed where they manage to cram in a few more new builds. I wouldn't mind except no sooner have you seen a For Sale sign, you see a To Let sign in its place. The same landlords are buying the properties. These new builds aren't being bought by first time buyers. No-one is being helped to get on the property ladder.

Then there's the fact that they cannot find a space to build a playground where I live

Why is it when you see new builds, they always have to be marketed as 'deluxe' or 'executive'? They're never just basic houses at a modest cost. Instead they have to have an added feature which allows the property developer to add an extra £30,000 to the asking price, even though the house occupies the same square footage of land.

I agree. The point was made earlier that young families have the right to aspire to the large detatched properties that are built in our village. But they are priced at £450k compared to £375k for a 1960's 4 bed detached chalet bungalow with a huge garden or £280k for a 1970's 4 bed detached with a small garden (but bigger than the new builds.) How on earth can a young family afford a new build? The last two built in our village sold to a retired couple and a professional couple with children at uni. Neither household participate in village life or contribute by keeping the childrens' groups or school going.

The difference this time around is the huge gap between the numbers of houses being built and the increase in the number of households.

This has been known by policy makers and strategists for years and there are still fewer homes being built than ever before. So aspirations are going to have to change.

They can never catch up now. There is no way any politician is going to own up and say "The reality we have built for ourselves is that young people are going to have to bring families up in flats or spend 70% of their salary on buying a home".

As usual they just skirt around the issue and blether on about shared ownership schemes for key workers and suchlike.

I have a simple, but nasty solution for "key workers".
Pay them more money.
There, I've said it, and thus marked myself as extreme;y right wing.

To me, if you're not paying nurses or teachers enough that they can afford to live near their place of work, then you aren't paying them enough.
Social housing for key workers is stupidly inefficient in this context. A high % of KWs are living with non KWs. Should they be subsidised ? Don't think so. Also those who don't exploit the system get nothing, with the result that some get the benefit, and others do not.
You want nurses to live locally, you pay the tax mate.
It is quite notable that by far the biggest set of people who need help with housing are not victims of capitalism red in tooth and claw, but employees of the government. A decade of Labour rule hasn't changed this one bit.
I waited until I could afford a nice house before having kids. It's called contraception, free on the NHS.

I agree, DC. And from what I've heard it's virtually impossible to ensure that key worker housing is sold on to key workers.

What no-one is adressing is the environmental impact of this. We are at breaking point for water in the SE and esp. in East Anglia. There is talk of each person being given an allowance - a ration. Build more houses and the ration for each person goes down. Or no rationing and we have stand pipes every summer, and the rivers dry up permanently - no wildlife. It's not sustainable.

That's without the mad regulations that encourage the use of uPVC glazing, for example. And more volume house building equals more emissions equals more global warming.

There are plans to flood half of Oxfordshire to make a huge reservoir for London and SE water needs.

The unfortunate fact about key workers is that it is the unions that have refused to give up national pay bargaining.

THeir members in cheaper areas can live like kings while their members in places like London cannot afford even a rabbit hutch.

We are nowhere near breaking point with water.
Sadly the dead cold hand of government is here too. The water companies have both protection from their lack of investment to "balance" the de facto ban on new reservoirs.
The cheapest way of dealing with climate variation is a few big buckets. Note I say "variation", not change. Because few people in the media have any scientific education they get away with the line that that weather conditions are changing. Maybe they are, but they are well within climate we know happens in Britain historically.

Another solution is pumps and water treatment.
Water in London is admirably recycled, if the leaks were fixed, it would barely need any water input at all.
As it happens modern urban water managment is a British invention, and the technology is on the shelf now.
It would hurt the water companies badly, and bills would go up, but there is no shortage of water than cannot be cured by appropriate moderate investment.

One of the reasons that more homes are needed is that people are living longer ang more people are choosing to live alone. Hence the justification for building rabbit hutches instead of family homes.

True fortyplus, but the problem is that older people own all the bigger houses, not the rabbit hutches. And why should they move unless they want to or need to raise the equity. In addition hanging onto your house is one of the best ways to pass wealth down the generations, despite what people think about Inheritance tax.

So it is the young families living in the rabbit hutches instead, and the change in the housing stock is making bigger properties ever more expensive, because they are not being replaced!

You're right - my mum lives in a road of 4 & 5 bed houses. There are 21 houses in the road - 3 are occupied by one old person (like her!) and at least another 5 that I can think of by retired couples - most of whom have been there about 30 years. Until a few years ago there were almost no children in the road, though there are about 5 families with children now.
I suppose it's like cars... most sports cars are driven by old gits because they're the only ones who can afford it!

True, and don't get me wrong - although I might be slightly envious, I don't begrudge the older people their bigger homes - what right have I?

But I do get so frustrated with policy makers who say that because single households are on the up, we need lots of tiny flats. Many of the single households are sat on huge amounts of equity and will live wherever they jolly well please.

Young families have arguably the lowest purchasing power because of childcare costs and career breaks/part time working etc. So they are the ones who will end up in the flats!

Most old people would like a house more suited to their needs, but that requires new builds.
Typically they need to be relatively near to the original because they don't want to move away from friends and family.
We see this happening, since the market is partially allowed to fix this problem all by themselves. But the phobia of new development is in this case slowing it down and making the overall problem worse.

Is it just older people who own the larger houses? DINKies seem to aspire to large home ownership too.

I think the issue is clouded by the fact that there are increasing numbers of wealthy young people now as well as older people who have equity in their homes.

Just because a priveleged minority of DINKYs and young families can still buy into the market, this masks how wealthy you would really need to be to do this. Not many people tell you what family inheritance or sizeable bonus they had to get into that new build home.

A family on a combined income of less than about 80k, or saddled with high childcare costs could not afford to buy a family sized home in a lot of places. That is new and would not have been the case in the days that most older people hark back to when they say that it has always been hard to buy a house.

I agree. My Mum & Dad bought a brand new detached 4 bed house in 1966 - paid about £7K for it. I don't know what Dad was earning at the time but he was a Sales Manager - probab;ly the sort of job that would pay £30-40K today. I can remember we went out to celebrate when he was made a Director of his firm in 1970 and had a pay rise to £5K!!!
So the house was worth about one and a half time his salary. Same house today - about £360K - not many people earn two thirds of that.

The DINKYs do affect the market, indeed we would never have considered having kids until the finances were stable.
There is a shortage of homes within reach of where people work, and unless you build more homes, people are going to continue living in shitty places.
Although of course I know little of where MNers live, the people in meet in the flesh who whinge about the building of new homes, seem pretty much always to live in nice ones.