Building in the UK: Why It Feels Like Mission Impossible?

In the #UK, trying to build anything new automatically becomes a huge headache. Most projects end up being abandoned or sit for years waiting for the green light. And, of course, that has serious economic and social consequences. In this video we tell you about one of the major causes that are punishing the British #economy.

[bhunterk]

The issue boils down to, as with many other issues, that most active voters are older citizens with property, who are incentivised to prevent the construction of new property at all costs. Those without property are usually younger and vote much less, resulting in the government having no incentive to build new properties, as that would only anger people with properties who are actually bothered to vote. Simply, if younger generations do not become more active in local and national politics, NOTHING WILL CHANGE.

[bencaton]

99% of what gets built in Britain is total dogshit, both aesthetically and in terms of quality. It’s totally dominated by a few massive companies (Taylor Wimpey, Persimon, Baratt) that have no interest in architecture, urban planning, or what it’s actually like to live in or near one of these developments, so it’s no wonder people don’t want this crap built near them. Empower architects and smaller developers to build better stuff (of which there are numerous examples), and there’d be less resistance IMO.

[nicksurface]

British attitude is anything more than 50 years old needs to be preserved and protected forever. Soon every building in London will be Grade 1 or 2 listed.

[bigjohn]

My friend who had promised his dad that he would build a house on a plot of land he left him in the 80's that had planning permission nearly went to the wall with the County Council refusing to allow him to connect water, gas, electric etc.. After many solicitors fee's and back and forth in court he won his case but it nearly bankrupted him

[jonjohnson]

3:06 The population hasn't "grown steadily", a 10 million increase is absolutely huge in 20 years, before that it was about 2 million per two decades.

[Binzdogger]

As a UK bricklayer, I can tell you exactly what the issues are and they can be broken down to 3 secs:

1. Profit. Building conglomerates are aiming for 30-45% of price as a baseline. Site managers are pushing beyond regulation to secure their unnecessary top down target bonuses.

2. Unsustainable building practices. For example. The site I'm currently on has 95 houses on it. Every house has a chimney, now you see these chimneys are solid from the ground up and are literally fully aesthetic, they aren't even retro fitable. Add that to unnecessary decorative bs like chamfered plinth bricks. They hold no benefit whatsoever and cost around £11 per brick.

3. Red tape. Too many country bumkins are refusing to see their fields turn into houses as if they only have a right to live there, compile that with a 750000 net migration last year and you will have nothing constructed.
Then take into account the unjustified and almost unreachable regulations from the NHBC as well and you have a concoction of failure.

UK construction is an embarrassment at the moment and it's purely because of walking clipboards who try to stand out instead of just following the pale.
No parties plan to change any red tape that actually gets us building faster so arguing along party lines will change nothing whatsoever.

[davidlegrice]

One problem in the south East is that we dont build very much high density housing in useful locations and instead like to chuck loads of expansive low density developments out into the countryside away from larger towns/cities and public transport stops.

Greenbelting (often done unofficially) is part of the problem, its actually more harmful to the environment to build further out from a city than right next to it, but there are more people living on the outskirts of cities to make objections than there are in the countryside.

[FrontLinePub]

It's called over regulation and environmental protections that make it too costly and time consuming to build.

If permits and inspections get dragged out for months or years. Why would anyone think it wouldn't cause a problem in building new homes and buildings?

Anytime you let the government over regulate an industry, it chokes that industry from competitiveness.

[prettypuff]

UK doesn’t want to recognize that the tides have turned and need to modernize.

[MrMGN]

I think a large part of the problem is that councils only seem interested in taking short cuts to meet quotas. There's no construction because the only way you can get permission to build is to be rich enough to build 300 houses on a wildflower meadow.

For example: my mother has a triple fronted ugly concrete garage. She wants to replace it with an annexe that she could rent out. First it was declined for being too similar to the buildings around it and it might distort the perception of history. The second planned was declined for not being in keeping enough. The third plan was declined because they would have to cut down trees. They didn't have to cut any trees down. The council had obviously declined without even reading the application.

Next door, they can't help Barretts homes enough to dump a souless housing estate of identical houses on a beautiful bit of farmland.

So, I'm going to save Britain. Increase the red tape for a company wanting to build more than 50 houses in one location. SLASH it for people wanting to build their own houses. Give incentives to banks to buy to offer mortgages to people wanting to buy land and build a home. Rather than one firm employing a small handful of subpar builders we now have thousands of smaller firms competing, higher employment and more variety of architecture.

This doesn't help the cities but more people will want to leave the cities as working remotely becomes more popular. This will help encourage them which also brings down the demand and therefore prices of urban housing.

[HarryWessex]

My town has been continously building houses since WW2....

[mrfish]

I live in a Labour controlled council. I tried for years to knock down a horrible exlocal authority house in London and build 3 flats. In the end I gave up. I bought my house in 1996 it is now worth 10 times what I paid for it.

[AnotherPointOfView]

Basingstoke has been building new estates continuously for the last 15 years. But they haven't improved the amenities and road infrastructure for them. There are several estates with absolutely no local shops.

[mat]

Canada has the same problem....over regulations with endless hurdles multiplied by hordes of nimbys compounded by decades of the industry abandoning many types of projects to avoid low profit endeavors.
Zoning laws, low level corruption ( or lobbying if you want )in municipalities, government afraid of bad press by environmental issues....we really really really did everything we could to culminate.

[miriamzajfman]

It is not only U.K. Canada is facing this problem as well .This is Global problem ! - We are living in Unstable Times ; politically, economically etc.

[AE-yhhu]

I've been a property developer for 20 years now.
This was an excellent video and very accurate to the problems we face.
The problem is and always has been the local authorities.
Since PD rights were established and their powers removed, building work has flourished, if those PD rights are extended to home building then I can only assume the same result will be produced. This has alot to do with speed and certainty that a house will be approved and built.
Secondly, the planning departments are adversarial to the developer. Thirdly they are extremely inefficient. If they reformed it and spread their workload out to private town and country planners (just like the current set up with building regulations for example) they would get through applications faster and in turn more homes would be built.

[markgrehan]

A lot of the problem is the old Estate Agents adage "Location, location, location" there are whole towns and cities with streets of empty buildings as everyone wants to live in the South East because of the availability of well paying jobs. We don't need to wreck the countryside by building over it we need the Government to do more to encourage companies to set up in these other places, people need to live in areas where there are jobs and maybe more importantly careers. And yes the building industry and the regulations need looking at but honestly having worked at a few so called luxury developments the regulations need tightening as the build quality takes a nose dive of a cliff fairly quickly.

[jameslewis]

One big problem seems to be that most of the land that had been available pre-covid for people to buy and build on has since been snapped up by investment groups along with a lot of the countries lower cost houses.

[warrenbooth]

What they really need are a lot more sewage treatment plants .

[Monkey-udbw]

I don’t even know where to start. There is one thing that I do know and I’ll be honest about it, and let you make your own conclusion. I moved to a nice village in the country from a postwar new town, I don’t worry about congestion, being attacked, being burgled, I speak to my neighbours and get involved in community events.

Bar the neighbours bit I didn’t get involved and had to deal with all the crap that comes with living in a town. That town can’t really develop anymore, so they are now going upwards with flats everywhere.

They want to build new homes and green belt land is in their sights, this would be a massive problem as there would be no infrastructure to support all these people, of which X amount will be social housing. Green belt land needs to be protected or otherwise we just turn into a concrete jungle.

We are a small island, people are living longer, people have more kids than they can afford and we have been too lax on immigration. All of these issues are what is causing the housing crises.

I won’t start on the shoddy build quality of new builds and the greedy developers.