English housing; facts, figures and scattershot blame

I’m in the completely enviable position of writing my undergraduate dissertation right now. I know, I know, you’re all really jealous, I’m sure. I’ve chosen to tackle a simple subject: housing, and why England is completely, almost laughably, unable to build anything close to a sufficient amount of it.

Here are some fun (read: pretty bleak) figures on the subject;

• The number of homes completed in the year up to September 2014 was a little over 117,000 (source: DCLG).
• England has a projected annual household growth rate of 221,000 for the period 2011 to 2021 (source: DCLG), of which 67% will be households without dependent children.
• But despite this, 50% of the homes built between 2002 and 2012 had 3+ bedrooms (source: uh, DCLG), and in each year since 2008 we’ve built more houses than flats (source: DCLG, again).

That last part feels a little contentious, but it seem fair to make the assumption that the majority of houses are generally going to be larger than flats. I think the message is the same either way. We’re not building anything close to a sufficient number of new homes, and the new supply we are building is not comprehensively responding to what demographic projections say we need.

So what’s causing this? Largely, your view on this depends on your political persuasion and organisational aims. Things I’ve read so far place the blame onto insufficient land allocations, unsuitable land allocations, the overall dominance of a few firms and a coterminous decline in the number of smaller builders, a poor quality governance culture that creates an adversarial planning system, politically-motivated and arbitrary borrowing caps stopping councils from building, the complete inability to have a sensible and adult national discussion about the role of the Green Belt, magical wizards, and, of course, immigration. So something tells me it’s quite the complex issue, and that the next few months are going to be quite challenging for me.