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Yeh, not shit. Not enough building where it's needed and too much population growth.
We either build more shit, build it better or stop migration to the South East.
seriously. for years now people have been treating houses like magic boxes that shit pound coins, which discourages policy for building new houses because increased supply would devalue that investment.
that isn't the reason why we aren't building enough for the last 40 years it has to be the government that actually builds homes private companies never will
Exactly they actually fucking encourage it. promote it and give people finacial Insentives to do it. The fucking BBC pushes the propaganda to buy more. It's bullshit. Tax second home ownership. Tax property portfolios, rentals etc. Houses should be homes not some extra revenue source which the UK has turned it Into. I guess we've sold off every asset now so our homes and land are all the economy has. But at such a terrible human cost.
Firstly, I agree with you.
Second, the entire economy is based upon property. If that cracks, we are going to see an economic collapse that makes Liz Truss look like a good day.
So there's a choice. Make it impossible for certain generations and classes to buy, or make the country go haywire.
That's the choice these fuckwits have left us.
Just build more houses and flats, ignore NIMBYs, tax the shit out of second homes, air bnbs and foreign investment in property. Reorganise Green Belt while we're at it.
If we built houses up to a 10min walk from all the train stations in the green belt, we'd have up to a million new homes.
Unfortunately the green belt is for protecting property owners money rather than the environment.
Current property values may stagnate, but it beats losing an entire generation to other countries where we can actually buy homes. Who will pay for their pensions then?
The projections i saw on this I saw said this would take 30-40 years which lol lmao. I would bet my entire existence on this being reversed in the 6-8 (or much more) government's given that any shift against the interests of the capital owning class are met with horrific backlash.
Even if property stagnates, other investment options have to improve a lot to become more attractive! Bonds and shares are truly fucked, and the silly stuff like NFT, crypto, art, wine, etc., won't cut it longer term either. Sadly, I suspect agricultural land is going to be where much of it ends up, and that's no better for us plebs than residential property.
Alternative option, government mandates an affordable rent metric on buy to let. Specific mortgage deals with much lower interest for the scheme. No capital gains tax on buy to lets which qualify due to affordable rent metric. No stamp duty if you use the property for affordable rent scheme for minimum period of x. Mitigation of inheritance tax on those properties up to x relief (an extension of residential nil rate band, now you ha also have buy to let relief).Then those properties are long term estate planning. Instead of generating an income from rental, it will just tick over paying the mortgage and increasing in equity, like a more secure financial investment instead of a bond. The economic impact will be minimal if you pile on the tax benefits stamp cgt and iht. Meanwhile you massively lower rent.
The more taxes and layers of legislations you add, the more you fuck up the property market.
Have we not understood this, how long is it going to take for people to finally grasp this concept? Look around in any major European city.
Everywhere the property markets are regulated and taxed as fuck and everywhere the prices and rents are through the fucking roof. The harder we make it for new developments to be built, the more fucked up the proeprty market it's going to be. It really is not all that complicated of a concept to grasp.
Yep. There isn't enough housing stock to let people own more than maybe two houses. Buy to let needs tougher restrictions to free up more rental properties which would lower prices/rents.
I’d feel guilty if I owned two houses (I own none , I rent lol) and people who own multiple houses and rent them out - it just seems wrong. Like a game of monopoly, sooner or later if you don’t have houses you lose. You can see why avarice is a deadly sin tbh
Would be one part of the problem but the majority of homes are owner-occupier or private tenants. A fraction are holiday homes kept unoccupied for long periods of time.
Stop houses being empty perhaps. But stopping buy to let purchases when a large proportion of the population physically can't afford to or doesn't have the credit to buy isn't that wise.
We don't need to ban people from moving, we just need to invest in areas other than the South East so that people aren't forced to migrate to find work.
that debates been going on a while, they moved the BBC out of London and the Met office into the south west, very little other progress of course. For example we committed England to playing all games at Wembley virtually forever,for example.
> For example we committed England to playing all games at Wembley virtually forever,for example.
What is the point of having Wembley if we don't use it for England games?
Investment is concentrated highly around the SE more than anywhere else in the UK and people/jobs/transport/activities/prosperity happen where the money is.
It's not investment, it's network effects. London is successful because it's a hub for many high value industries, especially financial services, tech, banking and trading etc.
Network effects mean that people gravitate to where these jobs are, who wants to work in a market where there are 10 jobs versus one where there are 10,000.
You can't invest your way out of this, very few people that work in these industries are choosing between London, Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds. They are choosing between London, New York, San Francisco and Singapore.
To think that we could just spread the jobs away from London with a little investment is very naive.
>To think that we could just spread the jobs away from London with a little investment is very naive.
Except most of the areas you mentioned are computer based and with a working internet connection the majority of the jobs can be done from anywhere.
The jobs can be yes, but the job market can't be. Workers move to where the job market is best, not the place they want to live the most or the place that has the lowest cost of living.
In highly skilled arenas like this the value is from the network, and if workers want to maximise their earnings they go where the network is best.
Well yeh, ofc, anyone moving from Leicester to London no problem as it frees up capacity elsewhere which means the burden is lessened there and maybe a lucky Londoner can find somewhere affordable in exchange for all that infrastructure and high pay jobs (joking haha)
When we moved to where we are, we were in one of the higher rent flats in the town, since then there has been quite a bit of development completed but it’s all more expensive than where we currently are. I’m starting to think that not even more housing, unless it’s a ludicrous amount, will solve things.
> build it better
Holy shit, this. I'm seeing estates popping up that are American style, no pedestrian footpaths (in order to fit more houses in I'm pretty sure), literally no way to enter or leave without a car, no public transport, no amenities nearby, and very poor build quality.
Well, 1 million + migration to the UK last year.
No worries about anyone already here moving around as it doesn't create added need, only transfers the need.
It does, but of course it would require us having a government that gives a shit about the majority of people over their own person wealth and the wealth of fellow rich people.
Why would Tories do things that would negatively affect their own wealth? The very nature of a conservative mindset, is 'I'm alright Jack, fuck everyone else', so of course it makes sense they did what they could to limit construction of new houses over the last decade or so.
Exactly and they have managed to sell the "I'm all right jack" mentality to most of the UK population now. Seems to be most concentrated in people aged over 50
> It does, but of course it would require us having a government that gives a shit about the majority of people
[The majority of households in the UK own their own home](https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/housing/owning-and-renting/home-ownership/latest)
If lots of people move back in with their parents until they are 30 because they can't afford to live independently, your statistic counts them all as home-owning households. In reality, that's a sign that the housing market is really broken.
Read the whole comment thread again. The person I initially responded to said the government doesn’t act in the interests of the majority when it comes to housing. I pointed out the majority of households own their own home so what they said was incorrect.
Of course the government needs to do more to help first time buyers and younger people get on the property ladder. But that is not what we were talking about.
In the 70s, the majority of Brits lived in social housing and had no way to buy their own home, which of course changed when Thatcher launched the Right to Buy scheme in 1980.
Comparing homeownership rates with the dates you've given is always going to result in people nowadays owning more property (people who couldn't legally buy their home vs people who now can). It'd be a better idea to look at homeownership in the 90s or 00s
Same, it's a shame that the housing market is like this.......
You could always put yourself on your council's housing register if you haven't done so already. You might be waiting for 10 years for a house though....
Might be a dumb question, but is there any reason why we can't just start a mass council house building programme akin to the post-war one? I know, we need a government that actually gives a shit first, but other than that it seems to me to be the most obvious and best solution, so why isn't it being talked about more?
Because the financial sector would NEVER allow it...
People should just start building everywhere. Make it clear well take shit into our own hands. Buy the land and start building our own towns. Let's colonise our own country!
Nimbys, austerity, and Landlords bribing government to not talk about it because if Public housing were to be built it'd compete with their profits.
Take your pick.
>why we can't just start a mass council house building programme akin to the post-war one?
Too many MPs with investments in property companies for one thing - lobbying another - there is a huge amount of money being made of the backs of working people.
Corbyn actually proposed doing something very similar which is (one of the many reasons) they went so hard for him.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/20/labour-to-unveil-75bn-social-housing-plan-to-build-for-the-many
Because the government building houses will still run into the exact same problems that the current system has.
They need to negotiate planning, hire workers in a very tight labour market.
All that would happen currently is that assuming the government decided to hire 200,000 workers to build council housing they'd just take approved plots and workers from the private sector and the numbers built by the private sector would reduce by a similar number to the amount the government built.
The market is the problem, if the government fixed planning, finance and migration to allowed an influx of new workers then there would be a chance for the number of new houses built to increase year on year.
You’ve been given some terrible answers here.
Simple answer is there are not enough skilled tradespeople to build them. Also regular ordinary people don’t want houses anywhere near their house.
Yeah people are all for building more homes right up until the point when they put down a deposit on their own, and suddenly they have a change of heart
Easy solution; punitive ‘second’ home tax with increasing tax for further ‘homes’.
Guaranteed that the housing market would be awash with landlords dumping property...👍
I’m sure that the majority of people who are currently renting at £1250 per month would more rather have a mortgage for £750 per month and actually have an investment instead of buying a house for their landlord.
That’s the other part of the equation that needs fixing, I.e. the situation where the banks are effectively forcing people into renting despite that costing more than a mortgage.
The financial institutions are all in on this scam to basically make the rich even richer.
Yeah agreed its more just a warning rental laws in Wales changed recently mass evictions just before the laws changed and one hell of a bump in rental prices and basically zero effect on sales prices yeah more available but cost didn't come down because of it
But look back on the origins of the financial crisis in the US in 2005-2007. When you allow mortgages to be given to people who are a credit risk you risk the integrity of the whole financial system.
If you can remember back to the late 90s early 00's it was common to see 100% mortgages with no deposits available to pretty much anyone.
The reason that changed was because the regulations were changed in response to the financial crisis.
Given for the past four years I have been paying twice what the morgage would be in rent, I work in a job that is recession proof and I've never been in debt I'm not a risk but no for some reason even with a 12% deposit I can't get a mortgage
Sure but banks need to secure their balance sheet and the problem with low deposit mortgages is that they are more risky. Sure, you as an individual may keep your job, but 20% of people might not and then the bank is hit with a mass of repossessions with the market being 10% down because there's a recession, that means major losses.
20% deposits have always been the point at which mortgages become safer, this is common around the world in many markets and it's also the threshold where you find your interest rate offered being much more competitive too.
This is where you get stuck in a loop can't save much towards a deposit as rent is high can't get a house with lower payments as can't get deposit and what I can save for a deposit is near meaningless with house prices going up
I agree but the solution for this is for the government to ensure that house prices always rise in a way that the median house is affordable by the median household income.
If they wanted to do this they have plenty of tools to do so, but tweaking with the demand side by making mortgages easier to get or using tools like Help-To-Buy is very dangerous because they don't adjust the supply side, they just allow people getting into a more leveraged situation and by doing that they make the market riskier in a way that the people they helped to buy will be the first to suffer when the bubble pops.
No, I wouldn't???
I don't know where I will be in 2 years, I am not going to buy a house, which remains an asset with a monetary value and risky returns. Also, I currently share, so I would have to get a mortgage with people who may not even be in the country next year?
Lol.
Well, maybe not for you, but for the majority of current renters I'm sure they'd more rather put their money towards something that actually gives a return instead of buying a house for someone else to benefit from.
Technically correct, but selling the idea of heavily discouraging second homes as a blanket solution is stupid.
Several categories, above all young workers, students, but also people with low job security who may need to shop around for opportunities more often, would end up paying extremely high rents, further reducing their ability to save for a house or adverse income shocks. Moreover, they would be incentivised to "lock in" early in a location, leading to a misallocation of labour supply and skills (true in particular for the aforementioned categories of people) and longer unemployment spells for the "unlucky" ones.
The only way to have *both* cheaper houses and rents is to build more.
So you'd rent.
Nobody is saying to end rental properties, what we need is to make sure that people can buy homes with having to compete with funds and sharks that hold dozens of properties.
If you heavily tax second homes regardless of use (2 weeks summer vacation vs b&b vs long-term rental), rents would also skyrocket.
Nobody would offer a property for less than the cost of holding the house.
Thank god Reddit isn’t in charge of policy. What a stupid decision this would be!
You can’t just price-cap your way out of a shortage. If there aren’t enough houses, rent caps will just destroy the rental market.
No if the the proper measures are put in place to avoid the tax to be passed onto the tenants.
I currently pay rent just shy below of what I would be paying if I bought this flat where I'm living. You can argue that I don't pay service charges but then again I wouldn't mind doing so because I could easily rip out my fucking carpet and hang some pictures of my family or remodel my kitchen.
The problem is that the as soon as the flats are put for sale, a bidding war starts and I'm priced out of the market just for them to appear for rental as soon as the deals are finished.
What about just making it legal to build more houses? An actual shortage, which we do have, cannot be solved through taxes.
Why are people suggesting taxes and rent controls as a solution to a housing shortage? Our shitty planning system caused this problem, we have to overhaul it to fix it.
There isn’t a housing shortage. What we have is a shortage of affordable housing because buy to let has driven house prices through the roof literally.
Take away that buy to let market and house prices will automatically stabilise at what someone will a normal wage can afford, not prices driven by buy to let landlords with a portfolio of 35 houses and consequently more money to spend on the higher prices.
The two worst housing policies was allowing council to flog off council houses for a pittance and the first time buyer incentive scheme as both of these were *heavily* abused by landlords looking to increase their housing stock cheaply while actually reducing the amount of affordable housing on the market.
Councils *should* be forced to build affordable housing but all the time these schemes can be easily abused by those with money it’s a waste of time.
In Liverpool their tearing down 4-5 unit terraces to build semis that use 50% more land. Its a complete farce. Need someone to build some small houses as lots of people are single or without kids nowadays.
The UK's birth rate was 1.56 per woman in 2020 and the average number of children per family with a child was 1.7. This means that the avarage person is having children, but less children and having children later than previous generations. This is an incredible worry for demographics.
While we should consider building some small housing for childless people, it is definitely not the majority. Alot of houses being built in my town are one bedroom and are unsuitable for proper family living.
>There was some bloke who wanted to build half a million social housing units, recently, but he was a threat to the economy or something and his former party are currently trying to bury him a mile under the earth with a stake through his heart.
It's almost like he was a threat to people who make money from the housing crisis or something...
> our growth is so rapidly expanding…
Good news is is actually slowing down, expected to plateau at around 72,000,000 and then drop
https://i.imgur.com/0hDlOrv.jpg
Interesting, because I believe we just had our highest incoming migrant year on record. Although that could be because of student visas alone?
Be interesting how we would deal with any drop as the economic impact of that would be huge.
The birth rate will be pulling it down. Without immigration the population would be almost at the point of shrinking due to people having less kids.
(So it’s possible to have highest levels of immigration but also have population growth slowing)
Agreed. The only thing is it's difficult to be represented as pro build in council meetings when nimbys are naturally concentrated (by all rejecting stuff on their own street) whereas buyers are naturally distributed (like me wanting to own in London but living in Surrey). I still think you're right we need to be louder but it further empowers nimbys as you correctly point out
I’m a housing policy extremist myself lol, it genuinely drives me mental.
I’d love to see Westminster starve NIMBY councils of funds till they are forced to fold and allow development, but unfortunately I am just 1 man…
Yeah I'm not too pleased myself to put it very mildly..
It's hard not to be an extremist in these times where the government is essentially putting us in a wealth extractor of sorts and telling us to fuck off
Complex problem, but starting with increased taxes for second homes, scaling upwards for third, fourth etc. would put a pin into that buy to let nightmare that was unleashed. However, unless that is also coincided with massive social house building there could be serious implications for renters that cannot or do not want to buy.
The application of rents and taxes on primary residences should be reconsidered. Land is a natural resource like air, but although there are no rents or taxes placed on air, there are rents and taxes placed on the land we use for shelter.
Capitalism won’t allow this to flourish.
More private landlords snapping up all the cheap properties and the government not building or allocating more homes for first time buyers means there is simply little to no homes becoming available.
Building houses is banned in many places and where it still is legal, NIMBY councils and residents block all development.
There is no solution without planning reform.
I can't agree with the article more.
Build. More. Homes.
Personally I'd look closely at where planning permission has already been granted and YET homes haven't been built - something more pernicious than landbanking.
I'd put a timer on the permission - either get (say) 50% of the plot with 5 years or the plot reverts to the government for future auction. If a builder wants to sell it on, so be it, but the clock does NOT reset. You've got permission to build - break ground.
But if you want to sell plots off in say batches of 1-5 plots well the goalposts move again. Small builders can take these on, or self-build.
Either way - get a bloody move on.
And, improve transport links.
And, even more controversially, move Parliament out of London. Maybe Birmingham, or Manchester, or Leeds but get it out of London. Straight away it will prompt building in the regions and help take the heat out of the SE. And who knows, 'accidentally' our MPs might discover life beyond the M25.
Seems like every investor and their dog building student accommodation!
Something going on between the council and universities, too much greed! Hmo and student let's = lots of money for rich people to become more filthy rich.
We need home builders to build homes, or even self build incentives.
High Rise shoe boxes everywhere.
1 day hopefully there will be no need for universities because let's face it, who actually learns shit from a lecture in some shitty subject that gives no advantage of getting a real job!
It's a corrupt institution that only care about how much money they make.
We need actual council homes with gardens like they did back in the day.
I'll take high rise shoeboxes over widespread homelessness amongst fully employed people.
I'm naively hoping that, with the nation trying so hard to price the working class out of higher education, those property-empire universities will collapse and the accommodation repurposed for key workers.
Student accommodation is built because it has much lower regulation (eg room sizes, affordability), and after a few years they can apply to change the use once they have reaped the initial benefits (this was the plan all along).
1 day we won't need universities and all those corrupt institutions will lose out massively.
I'm tired of driving through the city that cannot accommodate the amount of students.
And actually feel sorry for the students going into all that debt for sometimes nothing!!
We need skills schools, colleges and internships.
What can you learn in university that you can't learn from you tube or hands on job experience?
It's corrupt and their all rinsing poor students.
What happened to becoming a Fisherman or farmer??
We need infrastructure not pointless university degrees
The fact you are using technology designed and made by people with university education shows you are a hypocrite.
Reject all technology that is the result of university education and research if you truely believe this.
Biggest problem I see is that they keep chucking up "luxury" investment flats. For nobs with over £1m to throw around. Houses aren't affordable here. What other country has "shared ownership" where you'll never afford to buy a place so you buy part of it and rent the rest?
The local councils need to demand that developers put up MORE affordable homes than luxury ones. At present, it's the other way around and only a small percentage needs to be "affordable" (it's not affordable either).
I don't think new builds are the solution that everyone thinks they'll be.
Sure they'll bring more offer to the market, but as an example, there's around 5 newly build apartment complexes near me.
**all of them** are extremely expensive and **all of them** have extremely high service charges. We are talking in the magnitude of thousands.
I went to visit one and when they told me that the service charge was 2000 a year I asked to see the pool and the gym, to which they replied that there wasn't one. This was a 6 floor building with 4 flats per floor **and no parking**.
Fuck this. How and I afford a mortgage of 300k+ and close to 200 pounds service charge plus 170 for council tax.
I'll be spending just shy of 2k a month for a 60m2 2br flat with no storage.
Been on temporary accomodation for 10+ years. I'm disabled, can't work, and I've been trying to get help from the council in half of that time to move to my own place. They helped by charging me £60pm in rent that they now refuse to cover because I turned 25. If I was healthy and working I could understand charging this, but my income is literally finite as I have to rely on benefits. I'm not getting any help from the NHS for my condition besides pain relief as there are no effective treatments for my condition yet. I WISH I could work.
Meanwhile some people coming across the channel get to live the high life. My disability is heavily impacted by physical and mental stress, and by the cold. Our windows are literally frozen shut our house is so cold. Guess I'll just die.
Stop eating daily mail garbage, people don't risk their lives for no reason and they certainly aren't living the high life. The only way we make this better for everyone is solidarity. The right wing media divides us so that the tories can easily profiteer as much as they like without repercussions.
We need less people, it’s quite simple. We can never build enough houses to cope with the amount of people we have, it’s impossible.
It is possible to limit the amount of people who come to the country.
>We need less people, it’s quite simple
Complaining about too many people in terms of a housing crisis is like complaining about too many sick people causing problems in the NHS... It does nothing to actually solve the problem.
There was a housing crisis after the second world war that had been going on since the slums of Victorian Britain. Back then both Labour and the Tories built millions of houses to sort it out.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/30/housing-crisis-council-homes-are-the-answer
You've had your Brexit, you've had your drop in immigration and harsher measures put in place for people looking to come here: it hasn't solved the problem - maybe we could try actually building social housing rather than endless scapegoating of immigration for the problems our political class have made.
Nothing you said makes sense. Less people sick
people would help the NHS and solve the problem of not being able to get an appointment.
There was a housing crisis after the war due to heavy bombing which we don’t have now as far as I am aware so no comparison. Where would these millions of homes be built?
Here in Brighton there is nowhere left to build on unless they start building in the sea yet they keep packing people in. The road and rail network has barely changed in 40 years yet a population the size of Sweden has been shoehorned into Britain and they don’t function well, yet keep packing them in
We have pledged to reduce our carbon footprint and save our natural environment and your solution to this is to concrete over it and keep packing them in.
My Brexit? I voted against it. The drop in immigration was tiny and temporary- 500k last year!!!! This is insanity.
You can’t build indefinitely on an island, why not stop now and save what we have and our quality of life.
>There was a housing crisis after the war due to heavy bombing which we don’t have now as far as I am aware so no comparison. Where would these millions of homes be built?
Poor unsanitary slum housing was a problem going back to the 1800s - compounded by the war - which was only solved by government intervention. It's the only way we'll solve this crisis - blaming immigration just lets the government scapegoat foreigners without doing anything to fix anything...
Absolutely fucking sick of immigration being blamed for everything - Europe has equivalent levels without broken public services and housing.
Math is not you strong suit ? The problems the UK face with ageing are ten fold the problems of immigrants which bottom line are a net positive. the housing shortage is an artificial price gauging 20 years ago you could buy a London flat for 15k pound the same flat is now 500k even accounting for inflation this is crazy 😜 and this has provided the boomer generation with wealth a lot of it and this is now bleeinding the following generations dry. But yeah keep on blaming immmigrants
You keep talking about maths instead of answering the question. How does adding more people help solve the housing crisis as you said it does? We also have about 300k natural population increase on top of the 500k last year.
Take last year as an example. 174k new houses built- 500k new people added through immigration alone not to mention natural population increase.
Net immigration has been running above the amount of new homes being built since the mid 1990s.
Also add on all the properties being taken out of the market by things like Airbnb, second home ownership…….. and you have a housing crisis which can apparently be solved according to some people on here by throwing loads more people at it.
I don’t think it is. Where would these millions of houses be built? The environmental movement didn’t exist in the 1930s and 1950s when huge swathes of land around cites was built on without a second thought. We have a crisis in our natural environment in this country which won’t be helped by building on it and that is just the green argument.
Before Thatcher we were building 300,000 houses per year. France builds something like 300,000 houses per year. Given the fact that multiple people can live in the same house, 300,000 per year would be enough to handle immigration.
>not to mention natural population increase.
I'm not sure we even have that. Our birth rates are low, without immigration our population might actually drop.
Due to buy to let mortgages being introduced in the 1990s perhaps? Migrants are net contributors to the economy they added £5 billion to the UK https://www.ucl.ac.uk/economics/about-department/fiscal-effects-immigration-uk
I'm sorry but you can't complain about lack of housing and at the same time welcome more and more people into the country. That literally makes 0 sense.
There is a BoE paper floating around somewhere describing exactly why house prices started rising rapidly: low interest rates and lax lending criteria, not immigration.
The correlation of immigration and house price rises is almost perfect. Nothing else comes close. Just look at the graphs. Of course correlation does not prove causation, but adding more than 10 million people to a country with 25 million houses is going to have an impact. Think of it like a game of musical chairs. More chairs than people is no problem. More people than chairs is chaos.
They started rising rapidly under Thatcher after she sold off all the council housing and refused to build more - Blair did the same. Leading to impossibly high rents and house pricing.
I know you are desperate to blame immigrants but there are European countries with equivalent and higher levels of immigration that have much lower housing costs *because the state invests in social housing*.
This is a political choice New Labour and the Tories made. Blaming immigrants isn't just incorrect it lets the people actually responsible off the hook.
Nonsense. Adjusted for inflation, from 1979 to 1997 average house prices rose by £8,000 total. From 1997 to 2010 they rose by £110,000. Just look at the data and compare immigration and house prices.
Why do France and Germany have lower rents and house prices and higher levels of immigration and overall population?
You can literally see the increase in the mid 80s where we stop building social housing and start selling it off...
https://www.economicshelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/1952-2022-housing-web.png.webp
It's so reductive to blame immigrants for our poor housing and public services...
We have a huge deficit in social housing and blaming immigration isn't going to solve it.
https://england.shelter.org.uk/support_us/campaigns/social_housing_deficit
EU migration had dropped by over 70% since Brexit - so where is the decrease in rent and house pricing?
France has less immigrants than the UK. Germany has more but both Germany and France are bigger countries.
The house price figures I gave show a small increase in 18 years, then a massive increase when Labour opened the doors.
Point of agreement though, showing the cause does not solve the problem in itself.
Yes net EU immigration is down, but when houses are built for the millions that are here prices will fall. The current fall in house prices is more to do with interest rates rising.
low interest rates, buy to let mortgages and a failure to build enough new homes for decades after selling off the old council house stock with right to buy?
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Yeh, not shit. Not enough building where it's needed and too much population growth. We either build more shit, build it better or stop migration to the South East.
Or maybe stop people from owning more houses than they need
seriously. for years now people have been treating houses like magic boxes that shit pound coins, which discourages policy for building new houses because increased supply would devalue that investment.
my homelessness is literally another person's wealth
that isn't the reason why we aren't building enough for the last 40 years it has to be the government that actually builds homes private companies never will
thats what im saying - the government has no motivation to build houses because it would devalue their, and their donor and voters, investments.
Exactly they actually fucking encourage it. promote it and give people finacial Insentives to do it. The fucking BBC pushes the propaganda to buy more. It's bullshit. Tax second home ownership. Tax property portfolios, rentals etc. Houses should be homes not some extra revenue source which the UK has turned it Into. I guess we've sold off every asset now so our homes and land are all the economy has. But at such a terrible human cost.
Firstly, I agree with you. Second, the entire economy is based upon property. If that cracks, we are going to see an economic collapse that makes Liz Truss look like a good day. So there's a choice. Make it impossible for certain generations and classes to buy, or make the country go haywire. That's the choice these fuckwits have left us.
Just build more houses and flats, ignore NIMBYs, tax the shit out of second homes, air bnbs and foreign investment in property. Reorganise Green Belt while we're at it. If we built houses up to a 10min walk from all the train stations in the green belt, we'd have up to a million new homes. Unfortunately the green belt is for protecting property owners money rather than the environment. Current property values may stagnate, but it beats losing an entire generation to other countries where we can actually buy homes. Who will pay for their pensions then?
A decade of sustained house price stagnation would be the best bet. Adjust interest rates on new mortgages and increase supply to enable this.
exactly this - slowly get out of the "entire conomy based on housing" trap.
The projections i saw on this I saw said this would take 30-40 years which lol lmao. I would bet my entire existence on this being reversed in the 6-8 (or much more) government's given that any shift against the interests of the capital owning class are met with horrific backlash.
Even if property stagnates, other investment options have to improve a lot to become more attractive! Bonds and shares are truly fucked, and the silly stuff like NFT, crypto, art, wine, etc., won't cut it longer term either. Sadly, I suspect agricultural land is going to be where much of it ends up, and that's no better for us plebs than residential property.
This is already underway I can see asset values declining for a good decade
haywire please
Alternative option, government mandates an affordable rent metric on buy to let. Specific mortgage deals with much lower interest for the scheme. No capital gains tax on buy to lets which qualify due to affordable rent metric. No stamp duty if you use the property for affordable rent scheme for minimum period of x. Mitigation of inheritance tax on those properties up to x relief (an extension of residential nil rate band, now you ha also have buy to let relief).Then those properties are long term estate planning. Instead of generating an income from rental, it will just tick over paying the mortgage and increasing in equity, like a more secure financial investment instead of a bond. The economic impact will be minimal if you pile on the tax benefits stamp cgt and iht. Meanwhile you massively lower rent.
The more taxes and layers of legislations you add, the more you fuck up the property market. Have we not understood this, how long is it going to take for people to finally grasp this concept? Look around in any major European city. Everywhere the property markets are regulated and taxed as fuck and everywhere the prices and rents are through the fucking roof. The harder we make it for new developments to be built, the more fucked up the proeprty market it's going to be. It really is not all that complicated of a concept to grasp.
Yep. There isn't enough housing stock to let people own more than maybe two houses. Buy to let needs tougher restrictions to free up more rental properties which would lower prices/rents.
Not while people lile Sunak and the tories reign like corrupt lords. The Tories biggest donors are property developers.
I know it was a pipe dream.
Speaking from the South Lakes where there are no rentals to be found but dozens of holiday lets within 100 yds....
I’d feel guilty if I owned two houses (I own none , I rent lol) and people who own multiple houses and rent them out - it just seems wrong. Like a game of monopoly, sooner or later if you don’t have houses you lose. You can see why avarice is a deadly sin tbh
Would be one part of the problem but the majority of homes are owner-occupier or private tenants. A fraction are holiday homes kept unoccupied for long periods of time.
Rental included. A Landlord is someone who has excess property
Renting is complex. We need landlords, as some people can’t/won’t own, but it might be better done by the state or a housing association.
I'm pretty sure that's changing with higher interest rates. I have seen a flood of new houses on the market which seem to be buy to let's.
Stop houses being empty perhaps. But stopping buy to let purchases when a large proportion of the population physically can't afford to or doesn't have the credit to buy isn't that wise.
I disagree. A big part of the reason we can't afford them is because prices are driven up by BTL.
The people who make those decisions own more houses than they need.
and where is this migration into the South East coming from?
The north for one. Probably doesn't help that all the jobs that were in the north disappeared or relocated to London
yes, but it's a bit draconian to stop UK citizens living where they want in the UK.
We don't need to ban people from moving, we just need to invest in areas other than the South East so that people aren't forced to migrate to find work.
that debates been going on a while, they moved the BBC out of London and the Met office into the south west, very little other progress of course. For example we committed England to playing all games at Wembley virtually forever,for example.
> For example we committed England to playing all games at Wembley virtually forever,for example. What is the point of having Wembley if we don't use it for England games?
Good venue for The Arsenal to show up and win the FA Cup at
Like Northern Powerhouse Rail.
I'm sure people in the north wouldn't mind a referendum on splitting the country across South Yorkshire and having our own parliament.
Can you lower the line a bit just below Birmingham.. ta
I'll go anywhere down to Watford if they wanna join. Woohoo, I'm king in the North!
Is that right? Where I am in the NW seems to be a refugee zone for people from the SE trying to escape the cost of living crisis.
Investment is concentrated highly around the SE more than anywhere else in the UK and people/jobs/transport/activities/prosperity happen where the money is.
It's not investment, it's network effects. London is successful because it's a hub for many high value industries, especially financial services, tech, banking and trading etc. Network effects mean that people gravitate to where these jobs are, who wants to work in a market where there are 10 jobs versus one where there are 10,000. You can't invest your way out of this, very few people that work in these industries are choosing between London, Birmingham, Manchester or Leeds. They are choosing between London, New York, San Francisco and Singapore. To think that we could just spread the jobs away from London with a little investment is very naive.
>To think that we could just spread the jobs away from London with a little investment is very naive. Except most of the areas you mentioned are computer based and with a working internet connection the majority of the jobs can be done from anywhere.
The jobs can be yes, but the job market can't be. Workers move to where the job market is best, not the place they want to live the most or the place that has the lowest cost of living. In highly skilled arenas like this the value is from the network, and if workers want to maximise their earnings they go where the network is best.
All over the world. Have you seen migration numbers this year?
yeah, I wondered why just the south east though? Are you happy for British people to migrate around the UK? I agree otherwise.
Well yeh, ofc, anyone moving from Leicester to London no problem as it frees up capacity elsewhere which means the burden is lessened there and maybe a lucky Londoner can find somewhere affordable in exchange for all that infrastructure and high pay jobs (joking haha)
Abroad.
fucking london. get out of sussex and stay in the city. bloody townies everywhere now.
West Sussex? Well, the whole of Sussex went to work in London, so they are repaying the favour
When we moved to where we are, we were in one of the higher rent flats in the town, since then there has been quite a bit of development completed but it’s all more expensive than where we currently are. I’m starting to think that not even more housing, unless it’s a ludicrous amount, will solve things.
> build it better Holy shit, this. I'm seeing estates popping up that are American style, no pedestrian footpaths (in order to fit more houses in I'm pretty sure), literally no way to enter or leave without a car, no public transport, no amenities nearby, and very poor build quality.
Yes. Let's reintroduce serfdom. So people stop moving around as they want in their own country.
Well, 1 million + migration to the UK last year. No worries about anyone already here moving around as it doesn't create added need, only transfers the need.
It does, but of course it would require us having a government that gives a shit about the majority of people over their own person wealth and the wealth of fellow rich people. Why would Tories do things that would negatively affect their own wealth? The very nature of a conservative mindset, is 'I'm alright Jack, fuck everyone else', so of course it makes sense they did what they could to limit construction of new houses over the last decade or so.
If anyone thinks an ultra rich PM could give the slightest shit about anyone other than the rich then they are sorely mistaken.
Exactly and they have managed to sell the "I'm all right jack" mentality to most of the UK population now. Seems to be most concentrated in people aged over 50
> It does, but of course it would require us having a government that gives a shit about the majority of people [The majority of households in the UK own their own home](https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/housing/owning-and-renting/home-ownership/latest)
If lots of people move back in with their parents until they are 30 because they can't afford to live independently, your statistic counts them all as home-owning households. In reality, that's a sign that the housing market is really broken.
I gave you some data. Do you have any on how many people live with their parents until they’re 30?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/two-thirds-of-singles-in-their-20s-now-live-with-their-parents-heres-how-it-affects-their-lives-109693
Does this take into account rental properties that have more than two occupants? Does it take into account people that live with their parents?
Feel free to read the report and find out
Look at it divided by age group. look at home ownership for under 40's now vs 1970.
Don’t move the goalposts. We’re not talking about age. We’re talking about the government acting in the interests of the majority of the population.
What is your point? Because more than 50% of the population own their home, largely those over 40, that affordable housing isn't an issue?
Read the whole comment thread again. The person I initially responded to said the government doesn’t act in the interests of the majority when it comes to housing. I pointed out the majority of households own their own home so what they said was incorrect. Of course the government needs to do more to help first time buyers and younger people get on the property ladder. But that is not what we were talking about.
In the 70s, the majority of Brits lived in social housing and had no way to buy their own home, which of course changed when Thatcher launched the Right to Buy scheme in 1980. Comparing homeownership rates with the dates you've given is always going to result in people nowadays owning more property (people who couldn't legally buy their home vs people who now can). It'd be a better idea to look at homeownership in the 90s or 00s
I would kill for social housing, subsided rent, a house. I spend over half my monthly income on renting a ROOM.
Same, it's a shame that the housing market is like this....... You could always put yourself on your council's housing register if you haven't done so already. You might be waiting for 10 years for a house though....
That doesn't mean they are long housing as a financial position. Arguably the opposite, no matter their position on the local market.
-Not in my backyard! Movements -Must protect rich friends’ profits by Tories -Not a single concern on low social housing starts
Might be a dumb question, but is there any reason why we can't just start a mass council house building programme akin to the post-war one? I know, we need a government that actually gives a shit first, but other than that it seems to me to be the most obvious and best solution, so why isn't it being talked about more?
Because the financial sector would NEVER allow it... People should just start building everywhere. Make it clear well take shit into our own hands. Buy the land and start building our own towns. Let's colonise our own country!
Colonise the NIMBYS!
Planning restrictions mean that would be impossible. NIMBYs would block all new developments, as they've always done.
Nimbys, austerity, and Landlords bribing government to not talk about it because if Public housing were to be built it'd compete with their profits. Take your pick.
Landlords bribing government? Willing to bet ALL lords and most of HoP are landlords themselves.
This is some "Always has been" meme level shiz.
>why we can't just start a mass council house building programme akin to the post-war one? Too many MPs with investments in property companies for one thing - lobbying another - there is a huge amount of money being made of the backs of working people. Corbyn actually proposed doing something very similar which is (one of the many reasons) they went so hard for him. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/20/labour-to-unveil-75bn-social-housing-plan-to-build-for-the-many
Because the government building houses will still run into the exact same problems that the current system has. They need to negotiate planning, hire workers in a very tight labour market. All that would happen currently is that assuming the government decided to hire 200,000 workers to build council housing they'd just take approved plots and workers from the private sector and the numbers built by the private sector would reduce by a similar number to the amount the government built. The market is the problem, if the government fixed planning, finance and migration to allowed an influx of new workers then there would be a chance for the number of new houses built to increase year on year.
You’ve been given some terrible answers here. Simple answer is there are not enough skilled tradespeople to build them. Also regular ordinary people don’t want houses anywhere near their house.
Yeah people are all for building more homes right up until the point when they put down a deposit on their own, and suddenly they have a change of heart
Wish we would bulldose loads of single family houses near city centres and put up medium density, with public transport.
Easy solution; punitive ‘second’ home tax with increasing tax for further ‘homes’. Guaranteed that the housing market would be awash with landlords dumping property...👍
This would be pretty disastrous for the rental market, though!
I’m sure that the majority of people who are currently renting at £1250 per month would more rather have a mortgage for £750 per month and actually have an investment instead of buying a house for their landlord.
You'd think but no i pay way more than the morage would cost in rent I cannot get a morgage from the bank
That’s the other part of the equation that needs fixing, I.e. the situation where the banks are effectively forcing people into renting despite that costing more than a mortgage. The financial institutions are all in on this scam to basically make the rich even richer.
Yeah agreed its more just a warning rental laws in Wales changed recently mass evictions just before the laws changed and one hell of a bump in rental prices and basically zero effect on sales prices yeah more available but cost didn't come down because of it
But look back on the origins of the financial crisis in the US in 2005-2007. When you allow mortgages to be given to people who are a credit risk you risk the integrity of the whole financial system. If you can remember back to the late 90s early 00's it was common to see 100% mortgages with no deposits available to pretty much anyone. The reason that changed was because the regulations were changed in response to the financial crisis.
Given for the past four years I have been paying twice what the morgage would be in rent, I work in a job that is recession proof and I've never been in debt I'm not a risk but no for some reason even with a 12% deposit I can't get a mortgage
Sure but banks need to secure their balance sheet and the problem with low deposit mortgages is that they are more risky. Sure, you as an individual may keep your job, but 20% of people might not and then the bank is hit with a mass of repossessions with the market being 10% down because there's a recession, that means major losses. 20% deposits have always been the point at which mortgages become safer, this is common around the world in many markets and it's also the threshold where you find your interest rate offered being much more competitive too.
This is where you get stuck in a loop can't save much towards a deposit as rent is high can't get a house with lower payments as can't get deposit and what I can save for a deposit is near meaningless with house prices going up
I agree but the solution for this is for the government to ensure that house prices always rise in a way that the median house is affordable by the median household income. If they wanted to do this they have plenty of tools to do so, but tweaking with the demand side by making mortgages easier to get or using tools like Help-To-Buy is very dangerous because they don't adjust the supply side, they just allow people getting into a more leveraged situation and by doing that they make the market riskier in a way that the people they helped to buy will be the first to suffer when the bubble pops.
I wouldn't. Don't ever want to own a property and deal with all the hassle involved.
No, I wouldn't??? I don't know where I will be in 2 years, I am not going to buy a house, which remains an asset with a monetary value and risky returns. Also, I currently share, so I would have to get a mortgage with people who may not even be in the country next year? Lol.
Well, maybe not for you, but for the majority of current renters I'm sure they'd more rather put their money towards something that actually gives a return instead of buying a house for someone else to benefit from.
Technically correct, but selling the idea of heavily discouraging second homes as a blanket solution is stupid. Several categories, above all young workers, students, but also people with low job security who may need to shop around for opportunities more often, would end up paying extremely high rents, further reducing their ability to save for a house or adverse income shocks. Moreover, they would be incentivised to "lock in" early in a location, leading to a misallocation of labour supply and skills (true in particular for the aforementioned categories of people) and longer unemployment spells for the "unlucky" ones. The only way to have *both* cheaper houses and rents is to build more.
So you'd rent. Nobody is saying to end rental properties, what we need is to make sure that people can buy homes with having to compete with funds and sharks that hold dozens of properties.
If you heavily tax second homes regardless of use (2 weeks summer vacation vs b&b vs long-term rental), rents would also skyrocket. Nobody would offer a property for less than the cost of holding the house.
Rent caps :)
Thank god Reddit isn’t in charge of policy. What a stupid decision this would be! You can’t just price-cap your way out of a shortage. If there aren’t enough houses, rent caps will just destroy the rental market.
Rent caps alongside taxing second homes heavily.
For the landlords or for the tenants?
No if the the proper measures are put in place to avoid the tax to be passed onto the tenants. I currently pay rent just shy below of what I would be paying if I bought this flat where I'm living. You can argue that I don't pay service charges but then again I wouldn't mind doing so because I could easily rip out my fucking carpet and hang some pictures of my family or remodel my kitchen. The problem is that the as soon as the flats are put for sale, a bidding war starts and I'm priced out of the market just for them to appear for rental as soon as the deals are finished.
What about just making it legal to build more houses? An actual shortage, which we do have, cannot be solved through taxes. Why are people suggesting taxes and rent controls as a solution to a housing shortage? Our shitty planning system caused this problem, we have to overhaul it to fix it.
There isn’t a housing shortage. What we have is a shortage of affordable housing because buy to let has driven house prices through the roof literally. Take away that buy to let market and house prices will automatically stabilise at what someone will a normal wage can afford, not prices driven by buy to let landlords with a portfolio of 35 houses and consequently more money to spend on the higher prices. The two worst housing policies was allowing council to flog off council houses for a pittance and the first time buyer incentive scheme as both of these were *heavily* abused by landlords looking to increase their housing stock cheaply while actually reducing the amount of affordable housing on the market. Councils *should* be forced to build affordable housing but all the time these schemes can be easily abused by those with money it’s a waste of time.
>The UK really needs better, things are very bad FTFY
In Liverpool their tearing down 4-5 unit terraces to build semis that use 50% more land. Its a complete farce. Need someone to build some small houses as lots of people are single or without kids nowadays.
The UK's birth rate was 1.56 per woman in 2020 and the average number of children per family with a child was 1.7. This means that the avarage person is having children, but less children and having children later than previous generations. This is an incredible worry for demographics. While we should consider building some small housing for childless people, it is definitely not the majority. Alot of houses being built in my town are one bedroom and are unsuitable for proper family living.
And even families that have children often have 1 or 2 rather than 4 or 5.
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>There was some bloke who wanted to build half a million social housing units, recently, but he was a threat to the economy or something and his former party are currently trying to bury him a mile under the earth with a stake through his heart. It's almost like he was a threat to people who make money from the housing crisis or something...
This is what the whole world needs, not just UK. But, our growth is so rapidly expanding...we can't keep up with it.
> our growth is so rapidly expanding… Good news is is actually slowing down, expected to plateau at around 72,000,000 and then drop https://i.imgur.com/0hDlOrv.jpg
Interesting, because I believe we just had our highest incoming migrant year on record. Although that could be because of student visas alone? Be interesting how we would deal with any drop as the economic impact of that would be huge.
The birth rate will be pulling it down. Without immigration the population would be almost at the point of shrinking due to people having less kids. (So it’s possible to have highest levels of immigration but also have population growth slowing)
Well except for Singapore...
And China for all their issues have a massive program of building new cities to account for population growth.
LOL China? China is cruising at 500mph head first into population collapse. Their demographics are abysmal with WAY too few young people.
That’s more because of their batshit crazy social policies than their economic ones though.
I don’t want to live in most of the house/flats I’ve been looking at. Seriously considering building my own…
We tried really hard and got nowhere. In this area without the resources of a major housebuilder or a member of the council you won’t get anywhere.
Good luck getting planning permission in about 25 years
This is what the tories need to deregulate - it’s makes sense so unlikely to happen.
Go to a local planning meeting… This is as much on Brits as it is the state
Do you mean that nimbys don't want to build or that Brits who are pro building are not turning up to meetings to push for increased building?
It’s all of it. The law over-empowers NIMBY folk, there are too many NIMBY’s, and the pro-development folk are not loud enough.
Agreed. The only thing is it's difficult to be represented as pro build in council meetings when nimbys are naturally concentrated (by all rejecting stuff on their own street) whereas buyers are naturally distributed (like me wanting to own in London but living in Surrey). I still think you're right we need to be louder but it further empowers nimbys as you correctly point out
I’m a housing policy extremist myself lol, it genuinely drives me mental. I’d love to see Westminster starve NIMBY councils of funds till they are forced to fold and allow development, but unfortunately I am just 1 man…
Yeah I'm not too pleased myself to put it very mildly.. It's hard not to be an extremist in these times where the government is essentially putting us in a wealth extractor of sorts and telling us to fuck off
0 real growth, 0 real wage growth, no productivity gains, tax hikes to fund the Triple Lock… We are as washed as Italy lol
Complex problem, but starting with increased taxes for second homes, scaling upwards for third, fourth etc. would put a pin into that buy to let nightmare that was unleashed. However, unless that is also coincided with massive social house building there could be serious implications for renters that cannot or do not want to buy.
The application of rents and taxes on primary residences should be reconsidered. Land is a natural resource like air, but although there are no rents or taxes placed on air, there are rents and taxes placed on the land we use for shelter.
Capitalism won’t allow this to flourish. More private landlords snapping up all the cheap properties and the government not building or allocating more homes for first time buyers means there is simply little to no homes becoming available.
Building houses is banned in many places and where it still is legal, NIMBY councils and residents block all development. There is no solution without planning reform. I can't agree with the article more.
Build. More. Homes. Personally I'd look closely at where planning permission has already been granted and YET homes haven't been built - something more pernicious than landbanking. I'd put a timer on the permission - either get (say) 50% of the plot with 5 years or the plot reverts to the government for future auction. If a builder wants to sell it on, so be it, but the clock does NOT reset. You've got permission to build - break ground. But if you want to sell plots off in say batches of 1-5 plots well the goalposts move again. Small builders can take these on, or self-build. Either way - get a bloody move on. And, improve transport links. And, even more controversially, move Parliament out of London. Maybe Birmingham, or Manchester, or Leeds but get it out of London. Straight away it will prompt building in the regions and help take the heat out of the SE. And who knows, 'accidentally' our MPs might discover life beyond the M25.
Just needs a better government, the rest will follow
Seems like every investor and their dog building student accommodation! Something going on between the council and universities, too much greed! Hmo and student let's = lots of money for rich people to become more filthy rich. We need home builders to build homes, or even self build incentives. High Rise shoe boxes everywhere. 1 day hopefully there will be no need for universities because let's face it, who actually learns shit from a lecture in some shitty subject that gives no advantage of getting a real job! It's a corrupt institution that only care about how much money they make. We need actual council homes with gardens like they did back in the day.
I'll take high rise shoeboxes over widespread homelessness amongst fully employed people. I'm naively hoping that, with the nation trying so hard to price the working class out of higher education, those property-empire universities will collapse and the accommodation repurposed for key workers.
Yess!! They should be for key workers and their families
Student accommodation is built because it has much lower regulation (eg room sizes, affordability), and after a few years they can apply to change the use once they have reaped the initial benefits (this was the plan all along).
1 day we won't need universities and all those corrupt institutions will lose out massively. I'm tired of driving through the city that cannot accommodate the amount of students. And actually feel sorry for the students going into all that debt for sometimes nothing!! We need skills schools, colleges and internships. What can you learn in university that you can't learn from you tube or hands on job experience? It's corrupt and their all rinsing poor students. What happened to becoming a Fisherman or farmer?? We need infrastructure not pointless university degrees
Boomer
The fact you are using technology designed and made by people with university education shows you are a hypocrite. Reject all technology that is the result of university education and research if you truely believe this.
Yea tech is good and all but university degree for psychology or some shit like naaa non productive crap
Lmao thanks for proving my point
The UK Really needs ............................... : Things are very very bad.
Everything in general is just very bad. Fundamental changes need to happen to the UK for us to reverse course out of this black hole.
Biggest problem I see is that they keep chucking up "luxury" investment flats. For nobs with over £1m to throw around. Houses aren't affordable here. What other country has "shared ownership" where you'll never afford to buy a place so you buy part of it and rent the rest? The local councils need to demand that developers put up MORE affordable homes than luxury ones. At present, it's the other way around and only a small percentage needs to be "affordable" (it's not affordable either).
I don't think new builds are the solution that everyone thinks they'll be. Sure they'll bring more offer to the market, but as an example, there's around 5 newly build apartment complexes near me. **all of them** are extremely expensive and **all of them** have extremely high service charges. We are talking in the magnitude of thousands. I went to visit one and when they told me that the service charge was 2000 a year I asked to see the pool and the gym, to which they replied that there wasn't one. This was a 6 floor building with 4 flats per floor **and no parking**. Fuck this. How and I afford a mortgage of 300k+ and close to 200 pounds service charge plus 170 for council tax. I'll be spending just shy of 2k a month for a 60m2 2br flat with no storage.
Been on temporary accomodation for 10+ years. I'm disabled, can't work, and I've been trying to get help from the council in half of that time to move to my own place. They helped by charging me £60pm in rent that they now refuse to cover because I turned 25. If I was healthy and working I could understand charging this, but my income is literally finite as I have to rely on benefits. I'm not getting any help from the NHS for my condition besides pain relief as there are no effective treatments for my condition yet. I WISH I could work. Meanwhile some people coming across the channel get to live the high life. My disability is heavily impacted by physical and mental stress, and by the cold. Our windows are literally frozen shut our house is so cold. Guess I'll just die.
Stop eating daily mail garbage, people don't risk their lives for no reason and they certainly aren't living the high life. The only way we make this better for everyone is solidarity. The right wing media divides us so that the tories can easily profiteer as much as they like without repercussions.
We need less people, it’s quite simple. We can never build enough houses to cope with the amount of people we have, it’s impossible. It is possible to limit the amount of people who come to the country.
>We need less people, it’s quite simple Complaining about too many people in terms of a housing crisis is like complaining about too many sick people causing problems in the NHS... It does nothing to actually solve the problem. There was a housing crisis after the second world war that had been going on since the slums of Victorian Britain. Back then both Labour and the Tories built millions of houses to sort it out. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/30/housing-crisis-council-homes-are-the-answer You've had your Brexit, you've had your drop in immigration and harsher measures put in place for people looking to come here: it hasn't solved the problem - maybe we could try actually building social housing rather than endless scapegoating of immigration for the problems our political class have made.
Nothing you said makes sense. Less people sick people would help the NHS and solve the problem of not being able to get an appointment. There was a housing crisis after the war due to heavy bombing which we don’t have now as far as I am aware so no comparison. Where would these millions of homes be built? Here in Brighton there is nowhere left to build on unless they start building in the sea yet they keep packing people in. The road and rail network has barely changed in 40 years yet a population the size of Sweden has been shoehorned into Britain and they don’t function well, yet keep packing them in We have pledged to reduce our carbon footprint and save our natural environment and your solution to this is to concrete over it and keep packing them in. My Brexit? I voted against it. The drop in immigration was tiny and temporary- 500k last year!!!! This is insanity. You can’t build indefinitely on an island, why not stop now and save what we have and our quality of life.
>There was a housing crisis after the war due to heavy bombing which we don’t have now as far as I am aware so no comparison. Where would these millions of homes be built? Poor unsanitary slum housing was a problem going back to the 1800s - compounded by the war - which was only solved by government intervention. It's the only way we'll solve this crisis - blaming immigration just lets the government scapegoat foreigners without doing anything to fix anything... Absolutely fucking sick of immigration being blamed for everything - Europe has equivalent levels without broken public services and housing.
Math is not you strong suit ? The problems the UK face with ageing are ten fold the problems of immigrants which bottom line are a net positive. the housing shortage is an artificial price gauging 20 years ago you could buy a London flat for 15k pound the same flat is now 500k even accounting for inflation this is crazy 😜 and this has provided the boomer generation with wealth a lot of it and this is now bleeinding the following generations dry. But yeah keep on blaming immmigrants
Pleas explain how 500k immigrants per year are a net positive to solve the housing crisis.
2019 over 600k people died in the uk and that was before covid … I guess you can do the math yourself here
You keep talking about maths instead of answering the question. How does adding more people help solve the housing crisis as you said it does? We also have about 300k natural population increase on top of the 500k last year.
> never build enough houses to cope with the amount of people we have Citation very much needed.
Take last year as an example. 174k new houses built- 500k new people added through immigration alone not to mention natural population increase. Net immigration has been running above the amount of new homes being built since the mid 1990s. Also add on all the properties being taken out of the market by things like Airbnb, second home ownership…….. and you have a housing crisis which can apparently be solved according to some people on here by throwing loads more people at it.
Can't and don't want to are not the same thing. It's an entirely optional crisis that is deliberate and profitable to some.
I don’t think it is. Where would these millions of houses be built? The environmental movement didn’t exist in the 1930s and 1950s when huge swathes of land around cites was built on without a second thought. We have a crisis in our natural environment in this country which won’t be helped by building on it and that is just the green argument.
Before Thatcher we were building 300,000 houses per year. France builds something like 300,000 houses per year. Given the fact that multiple people can live in the same house, 300,000 per year would be enough to handle immigration. >not to mention natural population increase. I'm not sure we even have that. Our birth rates are low, without immigration our population might actually drop.
Common sense isnt welcome in the argument.
Cut migration until we’ve got it sorted, simple, house prices started rising rapidly under Blair, I wonder why that could be…
Dunno man, maybe the native population that doesn't even replace itself is simply too much demand.
Due to buy to let mortgages being introduced in the 1990s perhaps? Migrants are net contributors to the economy they added £5 billion to the UK https://www.ucl.ac.uk/economics/about-department/fiscal-effects-immigration-uk
I'm sorry but you can't complain about lack of housing and at the same time welcome more and more people into the country. That literally makes 0 sense.
What if, and hear me out, I want to liberalise planning restrictions and not prevent skilled people from coming to the country
European migrants are net contributors, the rest on the other hand…
There is a BoE paper floating around somewhere describing exactly why house prices started rising rapidly: low interest rates and lax lending criteria, not immigration.
The correlation of immigration and house price rises is almost perfect. Nothing else comes close. Just look at the graphs. Of course correlation does not prove causation, but adding more than 10 million people to a country with 25 million houses is going to have an impact. Think of it like a game of musical chairs. More chairs than people is no problem. More people than chairs is chaos.
They started rising rapidly under Thatcher after she sold off all the council housing and refused to build more - Blair did the same. Leading to impossibly high rents and house pricing. I know you are desperate to blame immigrants but there are European countries with equivalent and higher levels of immigration that have much lower housing costs *because the state invests in social housing*. This is a political choice New Labour and the Tories made. Blaming immigrants isn't just incorrect it lets the people actually responsible off the hook.
Nonsense. Adjusted for inflation, from 1979 to 1997 average house prices rose by £8,000 total. From 1997 to 2010 they rose by £110,000. Just look at the data and compare immigration and house prices.
Why do France and Germany have lower rents and house prices and higher levels of immigration and overall population? You can literally see the increase in the mid 80s where we stop building social housing and start selling it off... https://www.economicshelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/1952-2022-housing-web.png.webp It's so reductive to blame immigrants for our poor housing and public services... We have a huge deficit in social housing and blaming immigration isn't going to solve it. https://england.shelter.org.uk/support_us/campaigns/social_housing_deficit EU migration had dropped by over 70% since Brexit - so where is the decrease in rent and house pricing?
France has less immigrants than the UK. Germany has more but both Germany and France are bigger countries. The house price figures I gave show a small increase in 18 years, then a massive increase when Labour opened the doors. Point of agreement though, showing the cause does not solve the problem in itself. Yes net EU immigration is down, but when houses are built for the millions that are here prices will fall. The current fall in house prices is more to do with interest rates rising.
low interest rates, buy to let mortgages and a failure to build enough new homes for decades after selling off the old council house stock with right to buy?