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.

Until employment is spread more evenly over the UK, then it's inevitable more homes are built in the SE because that's where most Uni students go to in order to find decent employment once they graduate. We've been a London-Centric country for a few decades, and the flaws of that policy are started to show. Lots of empty homes and building land in run down towns in the regions, but no one wants to live there because there's no decent employment opportunities.

It's basic economics of supply and demand. When demand is more than supply, prices rises, when supply is more than demand, prices fall. More properties would inevitably mean lower prices, whether owned or rented. That is as long as they were all homes and not holiday lets etc

Simply not true with housing, as i said earlier, there are fixed (actually rising) and very expenses costs involved, which means properties simply cannot be reduced very much, all that happens with over supply is people stop selling and developers stop building.
Same with private rent, over supply, rents fall slightly but the LL has to make a certain profit, so rents do not fall significantly, in fact in some european cities, despite over supply, rents have risen.

The only way round this is for the state to subsidise and provide mass affordable rental properties, as was the norm for many decades until the 80s.

Britains largest house builder announces it will scale back new developments next year.

So much for over supply!

Oh, I totally agree with you. It's a shame because I have so many friends who can't afford housing local and all the new houses popping up everywhere are just so high in price it's insane. My friend lives in a town that's getting bigger and bigger but there's no dentists taking on new patients and no GPs for miles either. It's getting scary. My friend has looked into relocating somewhere cheaper but there's little work available. Awful

That's the chicken and egg situation, houses are cheaper in such areas because there's little decent employment, so workers can't relocate as they can't get equivalent jobs in cheaper areas. So we're left with huge numbers of empty/derelict houses in run down areas, often sold/rented cheaply for "problem" families, especially in run down seaside resorts, as no one else wants to live there due to no prospects, which just exacerbates the problems with crime and deprivation etc.

No point building houses that people can’t purchase due to not affordable mortgage due to low wages

£2143 would be my mortgage repayments if I borrowed £337k at 5.87% and put down £50k

For that amount I could purchase a 3 bed semi

but in the same area I can rent a3 bed semi for £1300 - £1500 a month

£1300 to 1500 is way beyond an essential workers ability to pay (TA, Care worker, HCA, even nurses and teachers in their first few years of earning)

Even if the rent dropped to £600, it would still be approx 50% of a care worker take home pay on NMW (which most are) but of course it never will.

Thats before we get onto council tax etc etc.

If we want a functioning society, then we need a return to council housing.

Surprisedbysummer · Yesterday 15:29
Nobody has yet acknowledged my point about the impact of the increasing divorce rate on the need for extra housing
https://www.propertytribes.com/impact-of-divorce-on-housing-demand-t-127633698.html
Nearly half of the couples in the uk now divorce and both of them need to be housed (separately)

A good point. And, it's not just divorce.

There are other factors, encouraging the increase in 'household formation', as its termed; E.G. single households receive a 25% Council Tax discount (wasn't the case with the pre C.T. 'rates' system). Not saying there shouldn't be a a discount - but any such discount will clearly have a marginal effect on 'household formation', by making single occupancy households more economically viable.

We need - inter alia - to look at ways of reducing the rate of 'household formation' - which means affording/encouraging people to live together, whether they be 'couples' or other arrangements.

And that’s why council properties need to be built and the right to buy stopped, so people have affordable rentals and supply increases brings rental prices down

There is no evidence increased supply brings rental prices down, as many will simply sell up, reducing supply again.

As we both agree, needs the rental market to be predominately state sector, otherwise, we have what we 've got now, increased rents dues to costs and more LL leaving the market, reducing supply.

This seems like stating the blxxxxxg obvious but for some reason neither Labour nor Cons govs will do this - I can only assume that building and maintaining homes at reduced rents is not financially viable.
if it was a profitable business loads of private companies would do it.

It's not profitable but it can be run at break-even balancing of the books by a not-for-profit social enterprise or by councils.

The "profit" comes from reduced spending on social services, health and unemployment benefits and even the prison services because when people have stable and affordable homes and aren't constantly dealing with the stresses that come from living in crap accommodation with no security of tenure and a profit-seeking landlord, their lives generally on average need less of these services. So it makes a lot more sense for councils to do it because they will reap the benefits eventually.

Yep, the benefits of stable, safe and secure housing is for all of us.

Labour, as Mick Lynch said today, are looking more and more like the Tory party every day, which is why i wont vote for them.

I'm amazed by some of the selfish responses in this thread.

If you've got a house, then at one point it was natural green land. All the people moving into new homes want is to have the same thing you have - a home for their families.

All this talk of developers obscures that simple fact - new houses will be lived in by people and turned into much loved homes. Not only do we have fewer homes per capita than comparable counties but UK homes are usually small too. That means people are competing for too little housing, pushing rental and sold prices up and leading to cramped conditions for families. It also hurts the economy, with people unable to find suitable accomodation near productive jobs.

It's a huge problem.

And, on a national level, building houses doesn't create the need for more water, doctors or anything else. It just means the government needs to move around resources a bit if one area gets developed more than another.
Blocking housing and forcing people into bedsits doesn't stop them from using the toilet or getting sick!

Wandsworth labour party actually are doing something. Essentially making all new build on civil land to remain as council housing. Not auctioning off larger houses: https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/comment/wandsworth-is-taking-bold-steps-to-rebalance-years-of-underinvestment-in-our-social-housing-82238

@Beviolinar but there is a balance to be struck and i also disagree on the UK has small homes, we tend to build very wastefully, other countries use flats and higher densities per hectre.

But as many have said, its about affordability, if all we do is build private housing, then purchase costs and rents will stay v high.

How much better to get local economies moving by having far more council housing, lower rents and more money in peoples pockets?

Are you amazed? Really im not

Who will you vote for?

Completely agree with all of this. We were building over 400,000 (in some years) and well over 300,000 homes with circa half being social housing in the late 60s / early 70s. I have no words for the nimbys in my local area who have benefitted from this level of house building and now are up in arms about any small development - I don't think developers have helped themselves with their apparent ability to not deliver the infrastructure such as pedestrian bridges that they were supposed to however. Also the whole 'they're too expensive for local people therefore we don't want to see anything built' completely ignores the laws of supply and demand. The birth rate in our area has plummeted - no one in 30s can afford to have a house and a family.

Labour, as Mick Lynch said today, are looking more and more like the Tory party every day, which is why i wont vote for them.

Its a problem, the Labour Party was set up by the unions. Then during the railway strikes the leader of the Labour Party demands his MPs don't show themselves on picket lines.

I don't want to vote tory and haven't since my twenties, but with a two horse race of literally a handful of votes in my area, I will vote labour to keep the tories out

There are more flats in some other countries, but they also tend to be bigger. One example to put it into context is that the average size of a property in New York City is actually no smaller than the average size of a home in the whole of our country!

Homes aren't expensive just because they're privately built. Remember the advice that's often given out in this forum to sellers "your house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it". People are willing to pay so much for a house because they have so few other options.

If we had built at a comparable rate to other European countries over the past 50 years, we'd have four million extra homes. Those homes would mean fewer children inappropriately sharing rooms or even beds with siblings and parents, more space for people to enjoy their lives and hobbies, and more headway for couples to start families.

I'm all for social housing, but all home building contributes to addressing the shortage! There's no need to pit one against the other.

Even if it's seems like a new home built near you is too expensive, you've got to imagine the counter factual. A couple that moves into a 500,000 pound new home doesn't disappear if the new home isn't built - they instead move into an existing house they think is slightly worse, outbidding the people who would otherwise have moved into that house, who then outbid someone else for another house and so on.

That's how you end up with converted flats in creaking old houses going for half a million+ in areas of high demand. Whoever built the house is long dead, you can't blame developer greed - it's supply and demand.

Even if it's seems like a new home built near you is too expensive, you've got to imagine the counter factual. A couple that moves into a 500,000 pound new home doesn't disappear if the new home isn't built - they instead move into an existing house they think is slightly worse, outbidding the people who would otherwise have moved into that house, who then outbid someone else for another house and so on

Thats all well and good but atm the emphasis is all on private builds and Barretts, UK biggest house builder has announced a 25% cut in new builds next year, other developers will follow.

No one will take up that shortfall, so we will have even less houses built, private developers will never ever build to met demand, thats not how they make multi billion profit.

We need to move to state provided council housing, not social housing provided by private companies, its just very expensive duplication

Social housing is great, let's get it built. No arguments from me.

My argument is simply: where private developers are willing to build, let them! I can't think of one development near me that hasn't had a campaign against it with lots of objections, many of which would apply to any housing anyone could ever build.

As for developers not building to meet demand to protect their profit --- again, there are many other countries with much bigger and more affordable houses that have private development. Realistically, that's because the benefit to any one developer of supply being constrained (pushing up prices) is shared not just with all the other developers but also with all the existing houses being sold too! Whereas the profit of building an extra house goes only to them and isn't shared out.

Many countries also have traditionally, a large rented sector, with protected tenancies and cheaper rents.
I used to live in Sweden, few had a desire to own a home & tenancies, were, if you paid the rent and didn't smash the place up, for life, there also wasn't this profit at all costs motive either, housing builds were tightly regulated, the 50s flat i lived in would have shamed a UK house in terms of energy efficiency.

The reason why folk object to housing here in the UK is because decent design & infrastructure is rarely if ever included and enforced.

So we objected to a 600 house estate, later reduced to 450, why? because of local sewage issues, the 450 were built and the treatment works cannot cope, there are now two lanes wrecked because of the 10 to 20 trucks that go up and down them every day to remove sewage, SWW objected too as did EA but over ruled by the sec of state.

The treatment works can never be upgraded because of its proximity to a flood area & of course no one wants a sewage works next to their £450k house.... so the issues will continue for ever more, this situation is being played up and down the UK.

Until we have infrastructure built alongside new housing, people will object.

It makes me sad yes, but my other half and I would like to own a house at some point in our lives. Becoming an adult months before the 2008 crash wasn't fun but every year since everything seems to get more and more expensive, especially in the last 5 years. We were almost there before the pandemic too, now we're stuck renting until the mortgage sector sorts itself out. Stuck renting this house too, since almost nothing is cheaper and/or available. DH is self employed on top of things so we can't afford to buy a shipping container on a mortgage right now, but can apparently more than afford 1200 pcm in rent, extortionate bills and rip off council tax.