The British Government has announced an intention to build more homes.
But we need to make sure they’re the right homes to help build families and communities. And the incentives and suggest they won’t be. We have to fix this.
Between 2000 and 2010, the majority of homes built were small homes, not fit for families to live in. This created a vast backlog of people in overcrowded homes, contributing to an affordability crisis for families, and making it harder for people to own homes that suit their needs.
Some of this trend was reversed , but not on a consistent basis. Many councils near London – such as Watford, Luton, and Reading – have prioritised the building of one beds: transforming those towns into adjuncts of London and making them far less family-friendly. In each of those towns, 60% of homes built in the last decade have been one-beds or studios.
But this isn’t just a problem for London and home counties. One-beds also make up over 60% of new homes in Bournemouth and Leicester, and over 50% in Sheffield, Cardiff, Nottingham, York, Portsmouth, and Southampton.
This has huge consequences:
- Schools are closing across London and the South East, due to lack of pupils.
- Communities lose their community ties and character, as people don’t stay locally when they have children.
- Families don’t have space for older relatives, even if they want to: reducing family bonding and pushing costs onto taxpayers.
This is all because those councils had incentives to build smaller and smaller shoeboxes – and we have to level the playing field, so they stop gaming the system by only building small houses.