According to the Guardian - and I am sure the sources are impeccable - Ed Miliband will suggest Labour will build 200,000 houses a year from 2015 onwards.
This is an ambitious plan. If true, I welcome it.
If it's linked to decent standards (with minimum space requirements and strong renewable components as a matter of policy from the outset) I will welcome it even more.
If the price is kept sustainable by ensuring land prices do not surge to match the demand for housing - which can of course be fixed by planning legislation - then I will welcome it even more.
And I'd like a fair proportion to be brown field sites.
But good though 200,000 houses a year is I want to hear more.
I want to hear that the infrastructure - not just service roads are being built. And that public transport is planned. And schools will be built. And health care and day care services. And the hospitals needed to service new towns. With combined heat and power supplies - which are highly energy efficient. Plus all the other infrastructure these houses will require.
And of course I want to know how the social element of all this will be funded. Is green quantitative easing on the cards?
Housing is good: it's the catalyst for a great deal of change. But let's be clear: boxes in the middle of nowhere drove the Irish economy to the wall. Integrated thinking is required on this issue: the sort of thinking only the state can deliver to ensure everyone benefits from policies for reform.
I hope Ed Miliband makes this promise. But I'll be more impressed if it's part of a package that works as a whole. The devil is always in the detail.
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Not a chance.
It will take a decade of planning.
Then there are all the regulations, both UK and EU to get through. NIMBYism will hold planning up for ages, let alone the inevitable “green” protests. The housing market is strangled by high prices, and present owners will not be happy at the glut of new housing driving prices down.
Mind you, with the importation of labour from abroad to build them, we will need more to house the builders !
If only they’d advocate LVT! The price of housing is far too high for most people and is, essentially, all unaffordable in many areas. perhaps house prices should collapse first and the whole housing as investment nonsense turned on its head.
@Simon. Would end you propose be worth all the misery created by negative equity, the repossessions that would ensue and the resulting banking crisis?
If they build 200k a year and do nothing about the planning process / land allocation restrictions (see Local Authority “Local Planning” process) then there will be no land to build houses on in years 4 and 5 of a 5 year term. That’s simple arthmetic.
At present capacity is heavily restricted by LA land zoning practices, and the 400k supply is barely adequate even at today’s build levels even if were it all in the right places and viable (which is not the case).
In my own Council, landowners have offered land which is perhaps 250% of the amount the council have decided to take up.
And that’s leaving aside all the historic problems of local authorities building housing and the conflicts of interest involved.
So I way that this is just populist posturing from Ed Mili.
I suspect it will be moot because the market will have recovered to a 200k level or therabouts, but the restricted supply is still a problem needing reform.