The Centre for Cities think tank has released a report, The Housebuilding Crisis. It contains interesting, in fact thought provoking numbers. First up, saying that if the UK had built houses at same rate of the average West European country in the period 1955-2015 we would now have an additional 4.3 million homes, a 15% difference is notable. This means, so it seems, that at 300,000 units a year it will take 50 years to bridge the shortfall. Or the job could be done in 10 years, at a rate of 654,000 a year.
Rightly the report says solving the problem requires big reform. But blaming the 1947 Act, as it does, shows an incomplete understanding of the how post WW2 housing market has functioned in different economic regions. All the same, the sixty year diagnosis for the consequences of the 1947 Act feel about right in my experience. In my 1964 tutorial housing estates were not automatically designed on the premise that every household would own a car. By 1968/70 in the popular parts of the south east as a buyer of housing I could see the first land shortfalls were emerging, say twenty years after the Act.
All the same the report’s solutions are worth thought. Snag is they do not seem to be built on tomorrows foundations: spatial policy; community land control policy; local political consensus; and generational local plans timescales.
Understanding and bringing on board the divergent interests of those who call the market, will resolve the collapse in affordability; clear the deck for sustainable delivery in climatic and aesthetics terms and channel big dividends into the host communities. This report is a serious contribution, but like others the authors need to be inside the engine room to solve a problem 60 years in the making, which will take two generations to deliver. A long time, but massive wins locally and nationally are the prizes.
Ian Campbell
3 March 2023
