Almost everyone agrees that we need more housing in the UK simply because we have - and are going to have - a growing population.
This is a headline in the FT this morning:
The accompanying article says:
The slowdown in construction activity has been driven by interest rate rises, which have increased the cost of borrowing, hitting builders and dampening demand for housing, according to analysts.
So, we have the dependence on monetary policy and the application of it by the Bank of England to thank for yet another social and economic policy failure.
When will we learn?
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True.
Housing Associations have cancelled lots of affordable housing and given Affordable Housing Grant (AHG) back to Homes England – the agency that passes on Treasury money to enable it to be built.
This is because the loans that HAs take out for development have become too expensive. The AHG does not even pay for half of each new unit – more like less than a third from a recent scheme I did.
“Almost everyone agrees that we need more housing in the UK”.
But the housing that exists is unfairly distributed. Most wealthy people already own bigger houses than they need. As more houses are constructed, some of them buy extra properties or even bigger ones. Their housing consumption appears to increase faster than that of poorer people in need.
So first, for social justice, there need to be limits on ownership, or very much higher taxation on wealth.
Second, if present trends continue, human demand on the Earth’s ecosystem is projected to exceed nature’s capacity to regenerate by about 75% by 2020, and by 100% (meaning that we would need two Earth planets to meet human demands) by 2030. https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/foresight/topic/aggravating-resource-scarcity/global-demand-resources-materials_en
To give humans a better chance of survival on this planet, there need to be limits.
The evidence is that we build more than enough houses. The problem is:1) we often build the wrong sort, and 2) too many are used for 2nd homes, holiday lets and investment properties.
Reminds me of the locals near me when there was an application for a drive-thru coffee shop. No Section 106 requirement for these outlets afaik and quite correctly in my view but other views exist.
The locals said that there were too many coffee shops now.
If there was a genuine Living Wage accompanied by a Job Guarantee it should be possible at the least for a great many Shared Ownership homes to be built. Do I hear Keir Starmer saying anything like this??? Never in a million years this immoral man is in the pocket of the rich!