EVER since Rishi Sunak stood in the rain and effectively announced he’d soon be moving house, Labour have been saying the same thing about its approach to the property crisis.
Build, build, build.
Now, this should be applauded.
I’ve spent enough time in this column arguing the need for us to turbocharge building.
So nobody would be happier than me to see spades in the ground. The early signs look positive. Before Parliament departed for their Summer Holidays, Angela Rayner, the minister tasked with overseeing the job, was at it again. “Increasing supply is essential to improving affordability,” Ms Rayner said in the Commons adding: “There are simply not enough homes.”
She’s right. But she’d also be wrong to think house building will solve all of the problems we currently face - because it really won’t. It seems the mainstream media is now catching up with this theme.
This week one headline stated that Labour’s building blitz won’t end the housing crisis. It caught my eye, and I suspect there will be more like it to come . Look, building homes is a good start. A very good start.
We’re always told its supply and demand that checks prices, so adding 370,000 new homes to the supply side will help of course. But with such a serious backlog, not to mention population growth, I suspect this will do little more than keep up with current demand.
What’s more, as larger amounts of property becomes available and, in theory it becomes cheaper, surely more people currently living with mum and dad will decide they want to move, earlier than the current FTB age of around 35.
The biggest problem is that a huge house building programme must overcome hurdles of finance, planning, labour shortages (the Polish population alone is down 200,000 since Brexit) only to then potentially be a victim of its own success as demand surges.
It will, I’m afraid take a decade to find out for sure if Labour’s plans will work. What really riles me are empty homes, which don’t take a decade to sort out. Right now 700,000 are empty and unfurnished with 260,000 being empty ‘long term’.
This can be for a variety of reasons with the most obvious but probably least common being the ‘buy and leave’ popular in London and major cities – overseas investors parking huge sums of money in the safety of the UK.
A far more common reason is homegrown. Our very own councils leave property empty thanks to a mixture of incompetence and a lack of investment to bring tatty homes back to use. 34,000 empty at last count.
What other landlord would be mad enough to leave a home empty? Think about that when you next pay your council tax. These need to be brought back to use immediately. And what of the 22,000 empty garages owned by councils – not throughout the UK, that number is in London alone.
Many of these disused and unwanted blocks could build multi-storey homes on free of cost land. We also need a culture of more collaboration with private developers and investors to expand the range of housing options available, including affordable and social housing developments.
I’d like to see a summit in September where developers are invited into Number Ten and asked why many are currently not committing to larger projects. By listening and engaging the Government might find the answers to a problem that affects us all.
https://jonathanrolande.co.uk/