The housing crisis in the UK is one of the major topics for the upcoming general election. The curious inability to house people satisfactorily is not just a British problem but one that seemingly affects all major Western nations.
It has long been recognized that underdeveloped countries are unable to fulfil the basic requirement for decent homes for their populations, but this has seldom been explicitly described as a characteristic problem for the developed world. But it is now becoming a very real dilemma in the West where, in the last five years, the three largest economies in Europe—France, Germany and the UK—have managed to undersupply a combined total of over 1.5 million homes.
Currently, France has its lowest house-building figures since 2010, which was itself a poor year for building as a consequence of the sub-prime housing crash in America a few years earlier. In 2001, the German government said it would build 400,000 new homes every year, but has just managed half of that total. At the moment it has a shortfall of around 600,000 much-needed apartments. This shortfall is predicted to rise to 830,000 by 2027. In the UK, property specialists Jones Lang LaSalle predict that there will only be 150,000 construction starts in 2024, leading to a cumulative shortfall of 720,000 homes between 2024 and 2028, plunging the UK towards an ever-worsening supply crisis.
Germany has a shortfall of around 600,000 much-needed apartments. In the UK, Jones Lang LaSalle predict a cumulative shortfall of 720,000 homes between 2024 and 2028.
Of course, the housing crisis is more widespread than just these three countries. In Spain, over the last three years, there has been a shortfall of around 25% in housing provision compared to housing need. Poland records 35% of its population living in overcrowded conditions. In Ireland (with a population of just above 5 million) 75,000 people are homeless. In Italy, the number of people engaged in the construction sector has declined by 25% in the last 15 years. And in Belgium, the housing sector is reported to be on the brink of collapse. Everywhere, the shortage has been aggravated by the huge burden of immigration. But this doesn’t excuse the low levels of actual building.
I will explore some of the issues specific to the UK, where there is reputedly a backlog of around 4.3 million homes required in order to meet the country’s basic housing need. The Conservative government was elected on a manifesto commitment dating from 1951 to build 300,000 homes a year. Their most recent manifesto promised exactly the same thing. They didn’t manage to hit the targets 75 years ago, and they haven’t now.
The disastrous under-provision of housing in the UK has variously been put down to exorbitant land value, materials inflation, lack of investment, the refugee crisis, unrealistic targets, planning bureaucracy, interest rates, the bond market, the pandemic, land-banking, or bank lending caution. Undoubtedly these all play a role, but there are several other issues that have impacted on the way that we have neglected the residential housing sector and constrained our faith in our ability to improve matters.
Environmental restraint
The high point of British construction productivity occurred in the late-1960s, the decade of President Kennedy’s “urgent national needs” speech. The progressive rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic centered on scientific revolution and the potential for rapid, social development through the power of risk-taking innovation. In 1963, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson laid out his vision to modernize UK industry and drive economic progress via “the white heat of technology”. This was a decade of change with the backdrop of the space age. By 1968, booming Britain was building 426,000 houses in a year.
Unfortunately, the houses were of mediocre quality, built at speed and with poor knowledge of the new technologies being used. The dream of new lives in concrete tower blocks soon faded as the leaky, damp, badly insulated reality began to hit home. These material problems culminated in the Ronan Point disaster of 1968, which killed 4 people when a high-rise block of flats in East London, built out of factory-made, panelized components, collapsed after a domestic gas explosion. The housing market went into free fall. Architects—seen to be among the main culprits for pushing new-fangled factory prefabrication—were vilified.
It was not until 50 years later that architects finally felt confident enough to come out of the shadows of the Sixties and portray themselves as saviours once again. This time, though, they ditched high-tech engineering solutions for low-tech social engineering interventions. In this way the industry moved from a criticism of under-provision to a critique of over-consumption: it has been decreed that houses are too big, too sprawling, too energy-intensive, and have too many unused rooms. Don’t buy a new house: convert your loft. Don’t build more: take in a lodger, a refugee, or downsize and free up space.
The construction industry moved from a criticism of under-provision to a critique of over-consumption: it has been decreed that houses are too big, too sprawling, too energy-intensive, and have too many unused rooms.
“Switching to a post-growth mindset… could spell the end of the type of grand statement, iconic architecture that perpetuates material and energy growth in favour of more modest buildings with minimal environmental impact, attuned to the needs of a smaller economic system”, says the RIBA Journal, the in-house magazine of the architectural profession. Instead of building our way out of problems, the answer in many cases is to not build and to live with less.
Realizing that the construction industry is seemingly responsible for around 40% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, architects—as the social conscience of the construction industry—put themselves at the forefront of climate solutions. If the construction of houses is one of the main causes of environmental problems, so, the argument goes, construction activity should be restricted.
Realizing that the construction industry is seemingly responsible for around 40% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, architects—as the social conscience of the construction industry—put themselves at the forefront of climate solutions.
Rejecting modern materials for wood, brick, rammed earth, bamboo, thatch, lambs’ wool and hemp, many architects have retreated to the zero-carbon world of yesteryear. Using the language of ecological limits, their eco-austerity programme of environmental restraint exists to determine good and bad behaviour. Anyone who proposes using immoral quantities of concrete, for example, is to be reprimanded and shamed.
The number of homes being built today has slumped as house-building only becomes acceptable if it meets strict ecological and environmental targets. The Housebuilders Federation claims that housing supply has halved to around 120,000 homes a year, due to a barrage of draconian climate-related regulations.
A reduction in the supply of homes is then explained away by appeals to the contemporary ideology of “degrowth”, which advocates that we should reduce housing need rather than increasing housing provision. This can be done by marginalizing demolition in favour of conversion, refurbishing instead of building from scratch, promoting communal housing/shared living, and penalizing second homes, all in order to eke out more use from the existing stock of buildings. This has been called “frugal innovation” and a “focus away from housing”; both euphemisms for building less.
Housing designers are now much more comfortable arguing that homeowners should give up their car, downsize, recycle, or install a heat pump, than they are about proposing mass housing schemes for the mass housing need. Indeed, mass solutions are now seen to be part of the problem. For too many in the construction industry, even though homelessness is a blight, solving the problem is potentially worse. For them, not meeting housing targets is less morally consequential than being found complicit in climate change potentially caused by building more carbon-intensive housing units.
For many in the construction industry, not meeting housing targets is less morally consequential than being found complicit in climate change potentially caused by building more carbon-intensive housing units.
The more we build, the more we exacerbate the problem, the argument goes. So we are living in an Alice in Wonderland world where much-needed solutions to urgent problems cannot be implemented because we fear what might happen if we succeed. No wonder we don’t build enough.
Risk aversion
Fast forward 50 years from Ronan Point, and we are now in the shadow of another housing tragedy. On 14th June 2017, a fire broke out at Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey block of flats in North Kensington, West London. Within minutes, it had turned into a blazing inferno in which 72 people died. The independent Inquiry led by Dame Judith Hackitt speedily proposed a new regulatory framework “to drive culture change and the right behaviours“. No-one really knew what this meant, except that caution had to become a watchword.
The second stage of the review took evidence for a further five years and is yet to conclude its report. Over the course of the Phase 2 inquiry, it became clear that practically everyone involved in the procurement and refurbishment of Grenfell Tower had to bear some level of culpability.
The inquiry’s forensic examination of every individual party involved in the project produced a “web of blame”. The contractor, the architect, the client, the fire brigade, the manufacturer, the fire testing organisations, the certifiers, the local authority, the regulatory authorities, the maintenance team, the suppliers, the government, you name it, all must share the guilt of “incompetence”, “malpractice” and “dishonesty”. The lesson for the wider construction industry—those who have been watching events unfold—is simply that everyone should try to avoid culpability, play by the book, and pass the liability on to someone else where possible. A mixture of risk avoidance, finger-pointing, and the threat of criminal sanction led to a frenzy of paranoia.
Insurance premiums rocketed. Industry-wide uncertainty and confusion led to major developers going bankrupt, leaseholders faced with unaffordable remediation debts, landlords handing out extortionate service charges, and no-one was clear about what they ought to do. Was buying a house a sensible investment or a financial millstone? While the Guardian reported that “thousands of homeowners in the UK (faced) ‘bankruptcy and homelessness’” due to the costs of removing and replacing combustible cladding, there were no articles explaining that the majority of apartments didn’t need recladding. The unintended consequences of the Grenfell Inquiry have had significant negative impacts on the residential construction market.
Statistically, fires in high-rise buildings are extremely rare, and catastrophic fires are so remote that when they occur, they become national scandals. But after the tragedy of Grenfell, there were reports of residents in tower blocks demanding to know why their block’s cladding wasn’t being dismantled when they could see that this was happening to neighbouring blocks. Contractors happily obliged, and subsequently billed the leaseholders tens of thousands of pounds. In Salford, the mayor advocated the removal of cladding as the “right and moral thing to do” on a building that hadn’t been found to be faulty. Four years later, the flats are still shrouded in scaffold and uninsulated. “It’s very cold here and it’s making me depressed”, said 78-year-old resident, Hazel Lees.
It seems that the combination of existential fears engendered by climate catastrophism and the regulatory risk aversion created by governmental overreach have combined into a disaster for the construction industry. A justifiable desire to improve competence has led merely to industry-wide uncertainty and inertia. In place of collaboration, there is fractiousness. Instead of innovation, everyone is playing safe. Instead of expertise, we have bureaucrats. Instead of building urgently needed houses, we wonder who is going to sign off on the liability. Instead of creating a variety of essential living spaces, we are spending our time discussing whether we should build anything at all. Instead of more, we will continue to have less.
