Will Labour’s Radical Home Building Plan Solve the Housing Crisis?

Is it a good idea to build 1.5 million new homes in the UK? Do we need it? How will it affect prices and rents?

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[kinglemon]

All well and good, so long as they intend to invest and build more GP's (and actually get doctors seeing patients), hospitals, schools and roads. In my area, which is heavily Labour controlled, they amount of new estates, houses and apartments have skyrocketed and as a result there aren't enough school places, GP's and the hospital waiting times are insane. The roads are also in a tragic state with potholes!

[MSecYT]

New builds have to be exclusively for non-buy to let's. A ban on using the property for BTL for at least 20 years from the first sale would be great.

[ridesonthewind]

Yes, the UK needs more European-style apartment blocks. It is not the type of buildings that cause social issues, it's the fact that in the UK there is a huge proportion of unemployed and demoralised people housed there.

[nothereandthereanywhere]

What about banning buy to let? That would solve few issues and reduce the prices a lot. Also, sell estate only to those that need it, not those that will use it for 'weekend'. Rich may not be happy about it, but should we care, if the poorer can't afford living in the first place and hold back from having families?

[Finderskeepers.]

In Ireland any planning application for 5 houses or more requires 20% to be handed over to the council for affordable and social housing. The council pay a fixed price per sq.ft for the build cost.

[sevecc]

Excellent graph at 0:48. Really demonstrates the issue and neglect of our government.

We do have a population decline issue which will get worse as the large boomer generation dies out, and we can only reverse that with decent quality affordable housing. Living with mum and dad is not conducive to making babies or starting families. The Tories have been incredibly short sighted.

[josephwatson]

Interesting! How would banning overseas buyers from buying or owning Uk property increase housing affordability? What would be the economics cost?

[AM_o]

It's a start, but a report by Shelter (January 2019) said that the UK would need 300, 000 new houses built every year _for_ _20_ _years_ to fix the UK's housing crisis, and that figure assumes that all 300, 000 will be purchased by prospective owner-occupiers. Successive governments have been deliberately restricting supply over the years to enrich themselves and their cronies and pander to the property-owning segment of the electorate, using nominal house price increases as a surrogate for economic prosperity. But that approach is now coming back to haunt them because not enough properties also impacts on affordability in the rental sector, which in turn has pushed up homelessness and the cost to local authorities of putting people in emergency accommodation. Only yesterday we had on the BBC a news item about a council that is now spending 25% of its budget on housing people. We need radical change. Labour's pledge only seems radical in comparison to the Tories' lack of a vision beyond perpetually pumping up house prices and handing out the contents of the public purse to ferry companies that don't have any ferries.

[AA-hgfk]

I love how even if labour completely deliver on 1.5m houses in 5 years (which i highly doubt), it still won't make much of a difference to house prices or rents, this is how dire the housing situation is here!

[lokesh]

You get with Vertical Spaces in Cities. But Community Living Spaces in Towns meant for reduced investments in necessary infrastructure. It's the Shared Living Spaces in Village for affordable costs and Boost of Public Finances.

[felixbishton]

Another amazingly insightful and well balanced video!

[Talkathon]

About ten years ago, Lord Adonis urged councils to demolish and rebuild council estates in the aim to not just increase the amount of social housing but obviously to improve the housing stock as some of it is very unfit for purpose in the 21st century. So they're not necessarily talking about building on the greenbelt.

[BuilditUK]

1.5 million houses over 5 years, Labour. houses every year, torys. Sounds the same to me. Pledges are easy to make and very difficult to keep. Local planning departments and local resident objections always put a stop to things. And as for building 3 new towns.... Where! Olde Sir Kier maybe a Yimby but he will soon find out that everyone else isn't...

[jontalbot]

For such a large and complex subject this is a very good video. I thought you might get sucked into discussing this as a purely quantitative issue ( number of new houses, economic effects) and not also qualitative (what kind of housing, where etc). The issue is the number of small households which have to be accommodated, as you rightly say in London and the South East- which also happens to have the most constraints in the form of Green Belt, AONB, National Parks etc. We really do have to build up but with adequate green/play space, allotments and room for wildlife too. Personally l would like to see schemes where tenants are also responsible for managing green space as happens on some industrial estates and places like New Ash Green

[andrewsorrell]

money supply / interest rates are important factors that drive pricing.

[slothsarecool]

Nice, say goodbye to the only nice part of England (green belt). London doesn't need to be so massive. High density is fine as long as it's tastefully done, ugly block towers aren't good for anyone.

[jamessmith]

Tejvan has done a lot of interesting articles/videos on housing in UK. Be good if he would do one on comparative housing set ups in representative EU countries.

[DP-coro]

I had over 50 applicants in 1 week for my flat I just rented out. Only 7 were British. Most were from Africa and were not of a ‘young’ working demographic. We simply can’t keep up with a demand like that.

[yellowgreen]

We need HIGH DENSITY HOUSING (up to 6 floors not high rise) not more sprawl. RailTransit StopClimateArmageddon

[zamnodorszk]

Ban buy-to-lets on new development properties.
A new set of properties were recently released on the housing estate where I live, mostly 2 and 3 bedroom houses, perfect first time purchases. A chinese investor came in and bought TWENTY of them and turned them into air-bnb properties (close to Oxford).
It's an absolute crime.