Arrested Development – are we building houses in the right place?

The Centre for Cities report launched this week has been warmly welcomed by everyone here at UK Land Agent. For a very long time now we have been discussing the problems with the planning system and the lack of land available for development and this report brings these concerns to the forefront. The report calls for a new supply of land (greenbelt land) to be made available and the system for allocating new housing developments to be overhauled.

The report contains some very interesting facts;

1. Did you know that since 1959 the average house price has grown by 273% in real terms? If the price of eggs had risen at the same rate a dozen would now cost over£18!!!
2. Just 1.1% of England, and 1.3% of the South East is covered by domestic buildings – less than you thought isn’t it!!
3. Converting just 1.6% of England’s undeveloped land could provide homes, gardens and community infrastructure for 7 million people.
4. The UK population is set to grow by 4million people over the next 10 years to 65.8million.

As we’re the UK Land Agent we’re going to focus on the land aspect of the report rather than concentrating on the property side of things.

The report says –

“Insufficient land has been provided for housing”

The reason that new housing is small, expensive and often in the wrong places is that insufficient land is provided for development in the areas where it is needed most. This is not because of a shortage of land or because building new houses is intrinsically unprofitable, but because of a policy cocktail that combines over-regulation of land at the national level with a local government finance system that fails to reward local authorities for promoting development.  

Hear Hear!!

There are 24m hectares of land in the UK and 13m hectares in England. In an average year, around 8,000 ha of undeveloped English land is converted into new development of all forms (with housing accounting for 40 percent of this total).  Internationally-comparable land use data is hard to come by, but is available for Germany, a country with a similar population density to the UK. There, around 42,000 ha is used for new settlements every year – around twice as much as a proportion of total land area. This could go some way to explaining why real house prices in Germany are 10 percent lower now than 30 years ago.

You can read the full report here plus we’ll be taking extracts from the report and sharing them with you over the next few weeks.

But just to finish….Are we building houses in the right place – No!  Is anyone going to change this? With the imminent election coming up hopefully we’ll see change soon!