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GE 2024: Day 28: Home Is Where A House Is

Writer's picture: Tony - The TDL Times EditorTony - The TDL Times Editor



One of the biggest issues for this election that is getting worse and worse is the availability of housing. Houses are a premium, especially for people under the age of 40 where house ownership reduces to around 30-35%, increasing as you go down to age 20. Britain needs to build more houses whether people like it or not and the strains on housing are great. This election will not be won or lost on a bidding war for house-building and the problem of housing shortages is more of a symptom of other problems and the solutions to this might require a bit more than just building more houses.


At the moment, the average house price is very high; the average house cost 9 times more than the average wage in this country. The 600,000 new houses per year target is not met, with house-building averaging at around 200,000 per year. Planning permission is very difficult and there is a reluctance to build on brownfield (land previously built on) sites. Close to 65% of 30 year olds still live with parents. Rents costs are at an all time high and that’s before you get to things like council tax and energy prices. Having a house is expensive, but the barriers to getting a house in the first place are so high that house-ownership is a genuine pipe dream. Many houses built today are not even genuinely affordable for first-time-buyers.


The various parties have mentioned their targets but there really isn’t much that is radically different. Both the major parties have mentioned their targets that they would renew, though Labour have said that they would remove barriers to house building including the streamlining of planning permission effectively making it easier to build new houses in areas like ‘grey sites’. Labour would centralise more building planning taking power away from local authorities. The Tories would change nothing, and many Tory MPs have had a long history of blocking planning permission to build new houses. The ‘Not In My Back Yard’ sentiment is great within the Tory party, though they would argue that they are standing up for their constituents.


There is also the big elephant in the room. The population of this country has exploded, increasing by 6 million since 1997. 1 in 30 people in the country today arrived in this country in the last 2 years. The UK has to build a new house every 2 minutes just to cope with net immigration per year. This is obvious; you increase the demand then the supply becomes more expensive. This is further made worse by the fact that 48% of social housing in London is given to people not from the UK, symbolisng the strain Britain is under from the influx of unskilled mass migration. The strain on many public services is obvious but on home-ownership this becomes even more difficult. More competition for housing, higher prices due to demand, the causes and effect is very important to note in this discussion.


There are lots of problems around building houses; there are so many envrionmental demands on house-building. This does slow down the building of houses and though insulation is important and energy-efficiency is a good long term quality for houses but there are far more environmental red-tape that slows things down including haulage, materials, surveying and so on. The speed at which houses are being built are amongst the slowest in Europe, though there is no real genuine public appetite to speed this up with regards to environmental standards.


One of the biggest problems is the reluctance to build houses in places by people who live nearby. There is a genuine pushback by locals for new houses to be built on land near them. A big problem is that houses want to be built in areas where infrastructure can’t support it. There needs to be more roads, bigger roads, new train lines, in order to add to existing towns and cities. You can’t triple the size of a town which is fed by one or two single-lane roads. In the short term you just encourage traffic, in the long term roads crumble far quicker.


There is a real generational imbalance here. In the 1980s home-ownership was at its highest in the country in its history. 30 years later we are hurtling back to a form of serfdom in terms of people having to rent, live with parents and live in leaseholds. For millions of people the four walls that greet us every morning are not our own. The generations in their 50s and on have enjoyed and still enjoy the benefits of homeownership which has spiralled in terms of value. The house as an asset is basically a gold mine for so many people who probably have made so much money in terms of the value of their houses. The ladder has been well and truly raised.


This is a serious problem. If you don’t own a home you cannot really engage in the consumer world. Without a house to put stuff in you can’t really justify buying stuff. You can’t then be ambitious in your job and want to climb the housing ladder. You can’t then want to conserve what you have and you can’t feel at home in your own country. This is a moral problem as well as a practical problem. There are millions of people, disproportionally young people and C2DE people who feel like they are living temporarily in their own country; this can’t keep happening.


The real answer, which Labour seem to be supportive of, is probably building new towns. Building a few more Milton Keynes might be the only way to really solve this problem quickly. New towns in the east of England, North of England and perhaps in Wales might be the only way to solve the housing shortage crisis. This is incredibly difficult because wherever you will build is going to annoy people, is going to really harm the environment and new towns are speculative in terms of wealth-creation. The problem might however be so big that the costs might be far outweighed by the benefits.


This election will not really see a revolution in house building though it might be one of the Labour party’s most popular records in the next parliament; there is hope that this might actually get sorted. But, it’s expensive. There’s vested interests to not build so many houses to keep house prices high. The squeeze in take-home pay due to Labour taxes rises might simply keep the length between the donkey and the carrot. Labour’s desire to see a continuation of mass immigration might make housebuilding increases pointless anyway. We will have to see what happens as the symptom of housing shortages is affected by the exacerbation of problems elsewhere. Not owning a home, however, is really bad and a country not able to house its own populace is in the minds of some a dereliction of duty in the same light as law, order and security. This might be one of the scandals of the decades when we look back at this time years from now.


Home is where the heart is, but a home you own is what your country should offer if you work hard enough. Right now owning a house is not up to you, it’s up to interest rates, mortgage rates and the state. Serfdom, it feels wrong.


This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.


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