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.

You don’t seem to realise how much green land we actually require to be able to produce even a small amount of our own food. It isn’t all for hiking.

Build houses on all the golf courses. Problem solved :)

Another of the Labour party's ill thought out fantasies hoped to lure voters.

The increase in being able to work from home should be a great opportunity to develop brownfield sites.
Some of my family still live in an area that has good rail links and is full of empty industrial buildings that could be renovated or demolished to build homes. I have been visiting relatives there for the last 30 years and nothing has been done with those buildings.
Where I live, several empty office buildings have been turned into flats, but they are expensive.
Surely there must be some way of building affordable housing in these areas? They are near town centres bus routes, amenities and services.

I can't understand why government after government relies on private companies to fulfil our housing needs rather than setting up not for profit companies administered by local government? Private companies are always going to prefer building on green field sites as its cheaper meaning more profit for them. I also think we don't use the buildings we have sensibly- in so many towns the high streets are half empty, and the flats above the shops also. We've driven residents out of our town centres, meaning more and more suburbs need to be built to accommodate them. 100 years ago places like central London used to be full of people living locally as well as businesses. If we incentivised property owners to rent out or sell the flats above the shops it would provide housing and reinvigorate our high streets in one fell swoop. There's talk of John Lewis in Oxford Street being reduced in size because people tend to do their shopping online now. Why can't that space be turned into bright, spacious affordable apartments that would allow people to live walking distance from work, rather than another bland corporate office? I lived in a flat about a shop in my twenties and absolutely loved it- so quiet in the evenings and the space was ginormous compared to most over flats. Also if you drive through some very expensive parts of West London at night you drive past row after row of mansion blocks with virtually every light switched off- I'm guessing owned by very wealthy overseas buyers who use them just a fraction of the year. I think there should be a large tax burden on people who do this to encourage people to sell property that is barely used that could make a good home for a local family. I feel like government after government doesn't think creatively about this because they're beholden to the big house building companies. I think also they like the huge tax amounts rolling in from stamp duty, whereas some of the more creative solutions to our housing problems will need investment.

Yes, my daughter lives in a flat above a shop in a busy street. There are restaurants nearby. She feels very safe there as it is well lit, lots of people about and it is near public transport.

One of these days, some of you might argue Labour vs Tory, Red, vs Blue, Left vs Right for long enough to realise that it doesn't really matter that much.

Whichever one is "in charge", the influential big companies, billionaires and MPs/civil servants get richer and the services etc provided to us plebs shrinks.

It is almost as though the 2 party thing is theatre to give people something pointless to focus on and argue about.

I imagine the cost for the government to buy the land and build the houses would be huge if it was on a scale to make a difference probably up there with the cost of providing a solution to the social care problem. I think we are going to have to go back to multigenerational homes.

And what do we actually produce? I can’t remember the last time I didn’t buy a South African Apple or a blueberry that have been flown in from Indonesia

Yes i think land could be found that isnt agricultural. Obviously food security is very important. I remember a much quoted article saying there was more land to golf courses in surrey than housing. That might have changed now as I know at least one golf course being turned into housing.

We do produce about half of whats on our plates. We export some as well.

Can you show the evidence fir this statement that we produce in U.K. half of our food?

It was from a government report called uk food security 2021

It’s a case of people in nice secure housing not wanting other people ( younger) to experience the same thing. Usually older people in houses to big for them as well who are the worst nimbys. However I do think we need to protect green spaces. If it was me in charge I would build a lot of good quality and spacious flats and rent them cheaply to key workers.

How many houses do we need?
And how many do we need tomorrow?

Building flats would be fine if it wasn’t for two things. First of all the property management industry is unregulated. I work for a company who, whenever any work was required on behalf of the leaseholders would go out to their mates Property Maintainence company who would phone people out of the yellow pages to come and do the work at 50% profit and present that bill to the leaseholders. The only time it didn’t work was when the work was over a certain amount, which triggered a section 20. But ultimately that just delayed things.
The second issue is with the fire safety regs, at the moment, they just aren’t enough companies to keep up with the workload. Building more would just take away resources from the older buildings been brought up to compliance and potentially put lives at risk.

That should say I worked as in the past tense. I don’t work there any more.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d0b8bd36-1d98-11ee-a1d2-5f915afc01a5?shareToken=7cf7cd3d2242365aa0626f9aa67166d4

This one is interesting. You have to expand where you can also increase jobs. Cambridge traffic is terrible and real estate already too expensive. They will have to make it a car free type place, but it could work. They should be planning similar across lots of hubs, like Bristol, Manchester etc etc. Careful planning and beauty is definitely important.

In parallel, farming was meant to be booming post Brexit but then pandemic/labour shortages happened. Again, the sector needs help but it can be done.

Conservative ideology.

You have to remember that at the time Conservatives dominated national government, but large parts of the country were under the control of Labour local authorities. Right-to-buy was a policy to create new Conservative voters from council tenants. In much the same way that privatisation of utilities was to get the middle-class investing in the stock market.

I get the right to buy mostly but not allowing new homes to be built just sounds nuts to me. If they could have from the sales funds

Did Blair allow it?

It just seems so odd

The flawed concept of RTB was that social housing wouldn't be needed once everyone was a property owner. It was a form of gerrymandering.

The Conservative government didn't want Labour local authoruties building new social housing. Ultimately it's ended up with the povision and management of social housing being removed almost entirely from the control of local authorities. Probably a good thing as some Labour councils weren't always very good at handling the investments, and some Conservative councils abused the allocation of social housing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homes_for_votes_scandal).

Yes and no. Yes, there's a hell of a lot of "green", in fact isn't something like 90% of the UK not built upon, but a lot of that is land you can't build on, such as marshland, moors, bogs, mountain sides, steep valleys, etc. And in most of it, there isn't the basic infrastructure to support major development, i.e. water supply, sewerage, gas, electric, telecoms, roads, public transport, schools, GP surgeries, shops, etc. It'd be a major task to build, say, a new town with thousands of homes in the Yorkshire Moors, or the Lake District, probably akin to the costs and timescales of HS2! Lots, if not, most of the houses in the more rural/remote areas are powered by calor gas (no mains gas), and have septic tanks (no sewerage systems), some even get their electric from generators. What infrastructure there is in sparsely populated rural areas simply isn't adequate to cope with hundreds of new houses.

In reality, new homes are built on "greenfield" just outside existing major towns and cities so it can "tap into" the existing infrastructure.

And the UK isn't short of just "a couple of thousand" new houses - estimates vary, but it's often said to be hundreds of thousands if not 2-3 million new homes we need! We don't even have the workforce to build what we need!

We need a national plan to increase the number of homes for people to live in. Only PART of that is building new homes, other aspects need to be disincentives for holiday lets, repurposing/rebuilding of city centre retail/industrial areas into housing, incentives for older people to downsize from big houses, forcing local councils to compulsory purchase empty homes, encouraging students to live at home and go to local universities. There is no single answer to the problem.

No, as far as I remember, Blair made no attempt to change the rules etc re the sale of council housing and the ban on using proceeds to build new council homes.

There are so many better ways to increase housing rather than building on greenfield sites. It is just the easy option.

They need to change the planning laws to free up change of use and alterations to existing properties. Our town centres are dying because of all the out of town suburbs and drive in shopping areas. Rejuvenating towns and re-purposing old buildings should be our top priority. Leave the countryside alone.

The Conservatives don't like state involvement in anything if they can help it, getting rid of state subsidised housing would be a natural thing to do from their pov.

The mystery is why Blair didn't reverse this, instead going for a privatised HA option instead.