Housing: where will we all live?

Ahead of an online panel debate on Tuesday evening, Austin Williams lays out the reasons why Britain can't seem to build enough homes.

People need housing; housebuilders build houses. In a capitalist market, you’d think that this straightforward equation was fairly easy to resolve, and yet working out the maths has become incredibly complicated at every level.

The homelessness charity Shelter has claimed that, by the end of 2023, there were 309,000 people without a home and living in temporary accommodation. That same year, net migration reached 672,000, making the government’s pledge to build 300,000 homes seem like a drop in the ocean. (As an aside, the construction industry only managed to finish 75 per cent of the 300,000 target homes anyway.) If we assume three people per home, that’s a cumulative shortfall of 150,000 homes.

But unfeasible targets are not the only thing driving the crisis in the housing sector. Uncertainty and confusion across the construction industry, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster, has led to major developers going bankrupt, leaseholders faced with untenable cladding debts, fewer apartments being built to avoid draconian regulations, homeowners threatened with extortionate insurance and service charges, and creeping doubt about whether buying a home is a good investment or a financial millstone. 

Added to this, the Home Builders Federation has warned that heavy-handed environmental regulations could see 'housing supply halve to around 120,000 homes a year'. As a final blow to the industry, during lockdown, around 30,000 foreign national construction workers went home, many never to return.

These are just some of the external policy and regulatory impacts affecting homebuilding today. But the construction industry has homegrown problems that need to be addressed if it is to provide enough homes for those in need, as well as serving those who simply want to upsize, relocate or rent out.

Housing requires infrastructure, like roads, parks, sewers, schools and services. A planning application for 5,000 homes in Cambridge has been delayed because the Environment Agency claimed there was insufficient water to supply them, so plans by Michael Gove, the secretary of state for housing, for 150,000 homes in the same area are undoubtedly a non-starter. And yet, over 65 per cent of the £4.2 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund remains unspent after 6 years.

No wonder that we see painfully slow progress in housebuilding and the decline in the construction industry in general. It is ironic that the so-called Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) programme, which envisaged modular housing units prefabricated on factory production lines, has produced very little in an industry that still builds by putting one brick on top of another. Actually, most of these innovative MMC production facilities have gone into liquidation and local councils have gone to the brink of bankruptcy on the back of financing off-site production companies. We will all have to pick up the £2.6 million tab on so-called 'specialist' companies like Modulous, who promised global solutions to the housing crisis, but managed only to construct six houses in Bristol, funded by the UK Research and Innovation arm of the government.

While the construction industry tries to deal with its economic problems by redundancies and bankruptcies, the big new idea in architecture schools is 'degrowth', which is a fancy way of avoiding the problem and pretending its everyone else’s fault. Degrowth takes as read that we cannot hit our headline targets… and it celebrates the fact. It advocates reducing housing need rather than increasing housing provision by seizing unoccupied housing stock, abolishing demolition to avoid building new, promoting communal housing and shared living to eke more out the lack of facilities, smaller homes, 'frugal innovation' and a 'focus away from housing'.

A recent academic book, Housing for Degrowth, advocated developing 'low level, low impact, small scale, decentralised, compact settlements'. Such degrowth advocates want us to de-urbanise, not suburbanise. The argument is that, if we cannot build our way out of the housing crisis – and, as far as degrowth activists are concerned, it would be ecologically unreasonable and unethical to build our way out of problems – then we have to live with less and learn to live with the pain. By this logic, we are being told to move from a criticism of under-provision to a critique of over-consumption.

So that’s the housing situation in a nutshell. Maybe it’s not such a simple equation after all, but that doesn’t mean that finding the solution is any less crucial. To that end, Future Cities Project has convened an online panel debate on the issue on Tuesday 30 April from 7:00pm - 8:30pm. The event is free and everyone is welcome.

At Housing: where will we all live?, the panel will explore a range of housing issues – planning, policy, principles and politics - to try to make sense of it all. Hopefully, even with construction in the doldrums, we can start to build some ideas to tackle the criminal lack of progress on this issue by successive governments.    

Speakers include:

• Shaun Bailey, Lord Bailey of Paddington
  chair, House of Lords' Housing Committee; member of the Cost of Living Working Group

• Simon Cooke
  author, In Defence of a New Suburbia; ex-member, Local Government Association Housing, Transport and Environment Board

• Helen MacNeil
  principal, HA! Honest Architecture; consulting architect, Shedkm

• Calvin Po
  Strategic Design, Dark Matter Labs, architecture critic, The Spectator

Chair:
Austin Williams
director, Future Cities Project; author, China's Urban Revolution

To reserve a place, please register at Eventbrite.

Read on

In Defence of a New Suburbia
Simon Cooke

In this recently published pamphlet in our Letters on Liberty series, retired councillor and housing expert Simon Cooke writes a defence of suburbia, challenging the sneering elitism of NIMBYs and city dwellers alike. Suburbia represented the triumph of the middle-class – a place built in their image, containing the things that made their lives good, he argues. A good suburb has soft edges – it provides for community and allows space for football, dog walks and throwing frisbees. If we are to sort out our housing crisis and provide the homes people want, he argues, we need to win the argument for why suburbia isn’t simply second best to city living, but the sought-after ideal for most families in search of freedom.

Buy a copy or read the PDF free of charge.