Labour wants to build huge amounts of new houses

[RudsyFarmer]

I’ve just been listening to it being discussed in the radio. The conservatives are not building enough to support the growing population.

i completely understand the need for millions of new homes but man I feel so sad for the loss of green space. Is it just me being ridiculous? Make me feel better about it as in my local area there is just continuous new housing every here. I can’t imagine that quadrupling year on. 900 houses in the next village alone. 5,000 homes have created a new town a few miles away. I want my kids to be able to live in a house but also want them to see the odd field.

Needing planning permission for holiday lets would help in lots of areas, I believe it’s a massive issue in Edinburgh and Bath etc.
I agree some tourism is needed, so a planning process could help reset the balance, and free up flats and cottages for sale or long term rental.

This.

There is are two brown field sites near me that flats or some houses can be built on. One was a former religious building and the other was just a industrial yard.

About 15-20 miles away there are one/two larger sites used for a sport, that the owners were looking at getting planning permission to build housing on it. The sites either have their own existing train station or are near one.

Also at the moment near me every low rise office block that has been empty for about 10 years is being changed into a block of flats. They all have their own parking.

Point is there are brown field sites that can be changed into homes.

Yes - and also all the sites where developers have planning permissions but are not bothering to build. The sites themselves are traded as assets.

One idea floated is to start charging council tax for the houses as soon as they get planning permission. This is a great idea as it would incentivise the developers to actually build, and put money back into local authorities who need to deliver the infrastructure and services that new settlements require

The government needs to force developers to build on brownfield sites. Planning permission should automatically be refused for greenfield sites if there’s another suitable brownfield site within 5 miles. Because at the moment the brownfield sites are being left derelict while the greenfield sites get built on. Usually in opposition to the wishes of local people, who want the eyesores redeveloped, not the fields.

The problem is the “presumption in favour of development” in the government planning laws. If a council isn’t meeting its house building targets (which most aren’t) they have to permit anything and everything to be built, even if it’s entirely unsuitable and unwanted by locals.

I’m all in favour of building the right thing in the right place. But at the moment it’s a free for all. Developers are just building whatever is most profitable with no concern for what is best for local people and the long term future of the town.

Have you driven through the uk much? There are thousands upon thousands of fields everywhere. My town is surrounded by them.
we’ve had immigration every year that amounts to a population increase bigger then the population of Newcastle and it’s increasing every year. We absolutely have to build more homes as we’re bursting at the seams.

The claim we are low density is silly - I live in a very low density area of Scotland - and the reason there is low density is that there are no jobs.
The UK population has risen by roughly 20 million over the last 50 years - the Scottish population hasn't moved from 5 million.
Nichola S used to go on about being welcoming to immigration but of course once in they will gravitate to where they can actually find work - mostly the London area or anywhere with jobs (not Scotland and no longer Aberdeen thanks to new policy).

The problem is the “presumption in favour of development” in the government planning laws. If a council isn’t meeting its house building targets (which most aren’t) they have to permit anything and everything to be built, even if it’s entirely unsuitable and unwanted by locals.

Actually, there is a presumption in favour of sustainable development. New development should be sustainable in economic, environmental and social terms - including things like a location which doesn't require everyone to use a car to get anywhere or access services. The only time it can possibly be overlooked is if a Council has out-of-date policies and)or cannot meet it's 5year demand for housing land. This seems to get continually overlooked for bigger developments, but for one-off houses is constantly used for refusals.

The current system relying on private developers building council housing is broken. They have huge teams paid to prove it is not economically feasible time and time again. The government needs to start again and buy land and build proper council housing for social rent tenants without a right to buy and maximum stay of five years. This will give families a period of stability for a limited time to turn their lives around but not be a long term burden on the state.

And when pictures appear on the front of the Daily Mail of a poor family being turfed onto the street after 5 years ---- I don't think that wil work.

Who needs fields? Who needs food and clean air?

Build the fuckers over.

Alternatively we can let the NHS collapse. Leave the old people to fend for themselves. After all who needs nurses and care workers?
Immigration isn't going to slow down any time soon. We've a population crisis just rearing its head.

We do need more housing but because building the infrastructure needed for all these new houses is so expensive, there is this constant pressure on existing towns and villages to take on larger populations and it causes problems.

Brownfield, empty buildings and infill sites are fine in these places but we need to look properly at our overall town planning and stop just building houses without the infrastructure that needs to go with them.

Sort out the infrastructure first - hospitals, doctors, elderly care, schools, public transport, water management before building new houses/flats. I don’t agree with building on the green belt because we need trees and fields for the environment to function.

start with council housing and the rest will follow.

We need a massive planning reform, not just to build more but to make it beneficial economically and environmentally for an area.
there needs to be workshops and shops for people to rent and have jobs. There needs to be rainwater storage and harvesting
green roofs
solar panels (and batteries)
heat pumps and insulation.
there needs large plots with gardens and hedges, not tarmac and fences.
fake grass needs banning.
there needs charging points and driveways.
all properties should have inbuilt wildlife homes, bat boxes, bird boxes, bee bricks etc.
trees and decent landscaping like the Beth chattos estate.
wildlife ponds and water sources.

it needs to be better for wildlife than whatever they are replacing.
none of that is that hard, or that expensive to build in. It just requires thought

Shopping online has made a lot of High Street shops obsolete, which should be converted into homes. This would bring life into the High Streets and support the remaining businesses.

I agree about the lack of infrastructure to support all the new estates springing up on green sites, plus the idea that there should be affordable housing within developments is a joke and generally ignored.
And it doesn't address the loss of so many council houses that were not replaced.

We need a massive overhaul of infrastructure in general. There's a housing crisis in this country but there's no point building new homes without the infrastructure to support it. Roads, railways, schools, hospitals, and of course the staff to run them!

Unfortunately, that would require huge long term investment, which means more government spending, borrowing, taxing etc. And we have successive governments only focused on five year aims because they are constantly thinking about re-election and not what is best for the country.

In a way, we would almost benefit from a benign dictatorship, which is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say, but I can't see how these long term issues can be resolved with our current set up.

Second homes, empty houses, too many holiday lets, brownfield sites, not enough bungalows......we don't need need more houses..we need to tackle these issues but they are too difficult so politicians fall back on the "easy" we need more houses.

I found this and it shows what is possible. Also very interesting how much the cultural and social changes followed the structural ones.

The NHS has already collapsed. It is completely broken. Politicians need to start being honest about this. I would much rather have an honest conversation about a semi private semi public model more akin to France and Germany then end up with a US style system that is terrible for all (including the medical negligence issues you have in the US).

We need skilled immigrants in the NHS and apparently in Education too now as well as hospitality. People need to work more again and not retire early in reliance on the NHS. Anyone retiring should be told they have to budget for £500 per month of healthcare costs. Because that may happen in the next 20 years, it is reasonably foreseeable.

It is a shame but what is the alternative? We want our kids to have homes, we want to retire and not keep working, we are living longer - which is a huge reason why the population is growing - and we want care workers to look after the elderly.

The only way to meet these demands is to have immigration and build houses, or to keep working till we drop so we don’t need more workers.

Good, we're desperately short of housing, hence the ridiculous high prices for houses and rentals.

Immigration, rising populations, and expansion of universities all cause more demand for homes, plus in tourist areas, huge numbers of homes have become holiday lets especially due to covid, travel restrictions, rise in air fares, plus increasing numbers of family break ups, one parent families where two homes are now required instead of one for the family, etc. University accommodation and holiday lets are particularly problematic as they're not occupied all year and are lying empty for many weeks of the year. Family homes have been lost to Uni students and holiday lets and new homes aren't being built anywhere near fast enough. Broken families often mean one of the parents "needs" 1 or 2 spare bedrooms just for weekends or holidays for when their kids come to stay, so again, increasing demand for larger housing etc. None of that is going away, so we need to build more homes, and in great quantities.

We can't just sit back and pretend we don't need to do anything. Either the government need to control holiday lets or stop the Uni expansion (or encourage students to live at home and go to their nearest Uni), or try to stop immigration. All of those are problematic, so the obvious answer is to build more homes!

Yes, hopefully more brownfield sites would be used, existing unused city centre buildings redeveloped or demolished for housing etc., but that's already happening in many Uni cities with old buildings being converted to student accommodation, but it's just not happening fast enough. But also, yes, there's lots of green land not built on that could be - trouble is, there's no "big" thinking into making new towns, the new building on green land is usually lazy/cheap "urban sprawl" just making existing towns bigger, without putting in new infrastructure. Whereas carefully planned new towns, with new infrastructure is the real answer, but that costs money and will be unpopular with the voters.

It's a bit like the flagging economy, debt, etc., really. Voters are in denial and are NIMBY's, they want homes built "somewhere else", just like they want "someone else" to pay more tax to improve public services, etc. We need to get real and accept things have to change and that such changes will affect ALL of us, voters can't just constantly expect "other people" to suffer the consequences - when they do that, we end up with politicians too frightened to tell it as it is, and so the can just keeps getting kicked down the road.

Part of the issue is summed up in the sentence 'I want my kids to have a house'.

One of the big issues across the Anglosphere, and it's definitely prevalent in the UK, is that so much of our housing is pretty low density. Culturally people want a house, not a flat. This then leads us to build shitty tiny flats, which entrenches the preference for even a shitty tiny house over a shitty tiny flat. And those houses need a much bigger footprint, more transport infrastructure, more pipes etc.

In urban areas, medium density housing like you see so much of in the Netherlands and Germany would make a huge difference to the footprint we need for housing. There are actually some great examples of the 4-5 storey blocks with big, high quality flats in London, but they stopped building them in the 20s when Metroland took over and after the war the drive was to build as cheaply as possible because of the financial and housing crises.

But it would need a real shift in the culture.

We need immigrants with appropriate skills and preferably with their families.

Ridiculous.

Multiple factors put pressure on housing, such as an aging population, buy to let landlords, not enough houses being built, people living longer.....

Immigration is one of them, but it's not the only factor.

This country was built on immigration and immigrants bring a lot of value to this country.

To single out immigration as the only factor that puts a strain on housing is untrue and quite simply racist.

The new homes won’t be affordable. They’ll be around £300k. Some will be social housing- probably very few, rents will be high. Waiting lists are insane.

So if your homeless- how is this helping exactly? 🙄Where is your deposit coming from, never mind the mortgage!

Face facts- you need high rise, cheap, affordable flats like the they have in China (where rent it fully covered by benefits) to cope with our population growth.

Then there’s the schools, doctors, dentists, NHS services, supermarkets and land to grow the food needed to support our ever growing population.

Jobs - hmm well our department is all about automation and machine learning, so good luck with that. Most of the population will probably end up on universal basic income or whatever it’s called.

We’re hit with global warming warnings constantly. Whilst consuming land, water, food like a plague of cockroaches. There will be a war over resources at some point in the future thankfully not in my lifetime!

What do you expect the future to look like in 100 years?