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.

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

All your points could be called ridiculous too. What do you propose ? Kill the elderly? Stop medicine advancing?

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

Do immigrants stay magically young? Don’t they bring their families here? Don’t they use the NHS and other public services? What are we going to do what they get old? Impost more people and build more?

What we are doing is relying on a pyramid scheme, importing more and more low paid workers and this will all blow in our faces in a few years.

The issue where I am is any major development on brownfield land (I am in an inner London borough) ends up getting massive local opposition as people want family homes, but what is proposed is yet more high intensity, poor quality housing with small flats so the developer can turn as much profit as possible.

There's plenty of highly paid immigrants.

The low paid workers you talk about often do jobs that British people refuse to do.

Excellent point. There is a surplus of housing in many regions, particularly run down, ex industrial towns, ex-seaside towns, where there is street upon street of empty/derelict properties, lots of derelict industrial buildings, etc.

Trouble is the developers aren't interested because the demand isn't there, due to low local population, unskilled locals, high unemployment rates, few decent employers, etc. They're not going to go to the cost of demolition, costs of dealing with contaminated land, etc., only to build very low cost housing that may well not get sold at a high enough price.

Developers concentrate on the "attractive" towns and cities where there's high demand, so high prices!

The London-Centric nature of employment, due to the obsession with a service industry relying on financial services rather than actually making stuff, has caused a "brain drain" of people having to move to London (and a handful of other big cities) after University to get the decent jobs, leaving behind a vacuum in their home towns where the only jobs are NMW retail, hospitality, care work, etc.

As an alternative to "build more homes", perhaps the government should reverse the brain drain into London (and a handful of other big cities), and encourage employment into the regions, encourage manufacturing firms to start up in the regions, etc. So as to spread our population more evenly over the entire country instead of concentrated into small pockets. After all, the infrastructure in the regions, smaller cities, towns, etc is already in place and often under-used, and could easily cope with more people living in those areas. After all, there are schools, GP surgeries, etc closing down in run down towns because they have too few pupils/patients, likewise bus routes etc being scrapped because of too few passengers.

So how about it? How about spreading people out more across the country? Far cheaper and more sustainable than just lazily allowing the existing few big cities to spread more and more, putting ever more strain on the infrastructure?

Well perhaps those who refuse to do low paid jobs need a kick up their arse by reducing their benefits? How on Earth have we let it become possible to simply "refuse to do work" when people are physically fit and able to work? The mind boggles.

It depends on the immigrants.

Immigrants from Europe tend to be younger and return to their home country over time. It's easier to maintain close family links and a link to their previous lives because of the proximity, and they are more likely to have been coming for a short term period for economic reasons. NB: this was the case before Brexit so it may not hold true in the face of higher barriers and visa costs. EU immigrants tended to be net economic contributors.

Immigrants from the rest of the world are more likely to settle longer-term and, as you say, bring families with them and stay here into old age. A range of factors contribute to this, including distance, visa barriers, economic opportunity in their home countries, the works.

In recent years, we have chosen to dial down immigration from the former and dial it up from the latter; you're right that it's likely to have impacts.

Good. We need a government that is finally going to stand up to the NIMBYs.

Some yes, but not the many.

Are the boat arrivals highly paid? Just how highly paid is your Polish cleaner or your Romanian delivery driver? Or the Bulgarian factory worker?

And that’s exactly what I’m
talking about, we should not be relying on them to do jobs British can’t be arsed with.

Housing is needed, but there's very little agreement over where it should be put.

High streets and town centres are struggling, logically it would be sensible to put more housing into town centres to create a demand for town centre businesses and services. But, there's currently a vocal minority backlash against any housing without parking for at least two SUVs - the whole deliberate misunderstanding of 15 minute communties, being within walking distance of local services and facilities, and whatever they have against active and public transport.

Greenfield is cheap. Both to the developers and to local authorities. We've a major out-of-town greenfield development (thousands of homes) about to start near us. It will cost the local authority (subsidised by develope contributions) a new link road, a local bypass, and two junction modifications. But all of this is still cheaper than the changes to the congested road layout constrained by existing buildings and additional public/active transport infrastructure that would be required to put the same number of families into the town (because of the 2x SUV thing). Despite there being adequate brownfield sites within the town development area for a significant proportion of those homes.

Greenfield also allows for commuter box detached properties. Because that's what everyone supposedly aspires to - a square box 2 metres from the neighbours with a postage stamp sized garden. Or it's what's most profitable vs. flats, terraces and semis.

Infrastructure is suffering because there are too many loopholes in the requirement for developers to consider and invest in these as part of development schemes. Combined with central government consistently underfunding local government, this is only going to get worse.

No, they don’t go back.

They settle here because it’s better then where they came from
and because they want a better life and education for their children.

And yes, they might be younger to start with, but they get older, they way we all do.

But you can't keep doing it. It's just a pyramid scheme. Yes, in the short term we need more housing due to the massive demand and low supply, so we really havn't a choice but to build more homes to cope with today's demands.

But longer term, we really need to have a long term plan to wean ourselves off relying on immigration and population growth to fund and service "yesterday's" population growth as they get older and need care, healthcare, pensions, etc.

So two distinct issues really. Building more houses today is the quick and simple option of dealing with today's problems. Reducing our "need" for constant immigration and population increase is a much more complicated issue that will need very clever people to plan to sort out, but it won't be a vote winner, so it will never happen (not overtly anyway, no doubt it will happen in the background by stealth). Our politicians and civil servants don't have the vision to come up with a long term plan that would be acceptable to voters.

Building houses for buildings sake wont help anyone, houses have to cost a certain amount, due to the cost of land and their construction in meeting insulation regulations, so prices wont fall to affordable levels nor will rents, wages we are told cannot increase either.

So what is needed is a return to Council Housing and stop this stupid obsession with owning ones home, the privatisation, by the back door of rented housing to the most vulnerable is the real scandal.

We should also stop the migration of 5m Chinese Hongkong to the UK, utter madness, the ones arriving nr me are older, 50 plus, speak little English and don't work either, they tend to be the parents of people already here, remember the law was changed to allow them to claim residency and HK is isn't exactly a war zone.

“And that’s exactly what I’m
talking about, we should not be relying on them to do jobs British can’t be arsed with.”

Well if everyone were paid an actual living wage and be able to live somewhere decent enough, then I am sure most people would actually work. Look at places like Switzerland - high wages for all and mostly high living standards for all.

I find it odd that all of the political parties are in favour of building more housing. Even the greens.

I think we largely have a building distribution problem. i..e big houses with few occupants. Too much rental in the hands of the few. Housing not where work is. Too much housing empty (holiday lets, 2nd homes). Lots of empty buildings (factories, offices, shops). Plus the growing population through immigration.

I'd like to see a party with a different approach.

So in the short term what do we do? Enforced labour? Leaving elderly to fend for themselves?
If we want to move away from the pyramid scheme, we will need to make serious sacrifices with our lifestyles and expectations. And who's going to volunteer for that? Not me.

We do need more AFFORDABLE homes. Lots of development near us but it’s all 4-5 bed ‘executive detached’. Also plenty of brownfield sites to build on, especially near where I live and I’m pleased to say that’s where the majority of building is going on. Agree though some areas are way over developed. Sorry to those living in such areas.

But longer term, we really need to have a long term plan to wean ourselves off relying on immigration and population growth to fund and service "yesterday's" population growth as they get older and need care, healthcare, pensions, etc.

Isn't it a question of population stabilisation rather than growth? The trouble is the rapid decline in the birth rate will (and is) creating a massive medium term economic problem with a huge demographic bubble of economically inactive people. At the other end, we have a school population that will shrink by a million by the end of the decade. We need to be able to get through the coming decades in one piece, with a view on long term stabilisation.

And of course it would be preferable from a purely economic point of view to prioritise immigration from places where immigrants are less likely to settle into retirement (though this has other questions around integration.)

But that requires a long term political view.

I think people who do critical jobs in NHS and Education should qualify for good quality social housing. Why not incentivised the young generation at least to enter those jobs with housing promises? And don’t sell them off in the future - you get the housing/flat as long as you do the key jobs that the country needs.

I don’t think we will need more workers long term, because AI is already taking over many jobs. Redistribution of the the current one, yes.

Quite, I look forward to their plans for addressing the epic issues in education, healthcare, infrastructure and the like to support their house building. I'm all for it, just yet to hear anything decent from Labour when this should be their bread and butter.

The main issue is demographic shift. Our grandparents died in their 70s after a brief retirement. My parents generation are in their mid 80s and 90s and still going strong, which is great. Even without immigration, longer lives means we need more housing and particularly family housing as people are reluctant to give up their houses to move into retirement flats. We also need workers to pay for the triple-locked pensions and healthcare for my parents generation.

There's also a shortage because so many of us are not living as one family unit now. I'm divorced with 3 children - if they weren't young adults, it would mean 2 x 4 bed homes (because children can't share rooms anymore like they used to in the 70s) instead of one so they could have their equal time with Dad and Mum. Add on to that, if Dad and Mum both have new partners with children or have more children, bigger houses needed. In the extreme, where a single 4 bed house would be enough, now we potentially need 6. I'm not casting blame on anyone but its a factor that should be considered before just blaming immigration and suchlike. I strongly believe that people should be banned from buying second homes for holidays - its grossly unfair that a millionaire banker from eg Barnet should own a 4 bed holiday home in eg Salcombe which is left empty for 45 weeks of the year.

They've put up a new town near us, nearly 6000 houses all built on a beautiful green area that was previously farmed land. It's depressing as hell. There's never going to be enough houses because the population is constantly increasing - predicted to be reaching 70 million in 2035. So what's going to happen?

We already have no wilderness in England, I guess we'll just keep going till we have no farmland either.

There are thousands of houses on RM. It would make more sense to buy one of the ones already built. There is not a shortage of homes as such. There is a shortage of affordable homes. Having a deposit and being able to pass the stress test are the barriers not shortage of a house to buy so I don't think it will help unless all social housing.