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Missing the X-factor
Published 14 January 2024
The housing industry, by failing to meet the demand for family homes, has a lot to answer for, says Wayne Hemingway
I’m chair of Building for Life and about three years ago we did a survey of new housing in Britain. We spoke to housing professionals, planners and – most importantly – the people who lived in newly built homes.
It emerged that 80 per cent of new housing was classed as poor or mediocre, and 29 per cent shouldn’t have got planning permission at all. How house-builders have gone about their job has run counter to what they should have done to build great developments.
In the past couple of years, I’ve been involved in the eco-towns judging panel. Government brochures have included brilliant examples of European housing developments such as Freiberg in Germany and Hammarby Sjöstad in Sweden. They are exciting, but we are a long way from having similar examples here.
The reason is a lack of competition – it’s been completely ironed out in the UK. In Europe a site of say 800 homes would be split between six to 10 developers, so you end up with a ‘high street’ of different types of homes, in the way our high streets have a number of different supermarkets.
You may not like the supermarket concept, but most people welcome the choice which has grown in the past 20 years. So why can’t we do the same for housing?
Here, most developments are between 500 and 1,200 homes. Designers put in tenders with the house builder, but only one is chosen as the winner and awarded the contract.
The entire site is put in the hands of a single developer, who often kicks the design team off site and goes cheaper. The result is 1,000 homes delivered by an inferior design team, led by a house builder who has little commitment to sticking with the project long-term.
And newly built homes make poor investments. If you bought a new home from a developer in 1970 and sold it at the top of the market in 2006, you would have earned less than the interest you’d have got from putting the money in a bank.
The flaws in the business model of house building and home ownership have blighted a generation. Buy a new-build flat in the centre of Liverpool, for example, with a 125 per cent mortgage or buy a place to rent out with a 100 per cent mortgage and you’re in trouble.
Keep 5 per cent for Ikea, spend a lot more on a gap year to Australia and you may think by the time you’re back you’ll be rolling in money. I know a lot of young people who did that.
But they’ve come back to face negative equity for at least a decade. It is only here and in America where this has occurred, and we can’t blame the builders and planners alone. It’s our fault for thinking bricks and mortar is the passport to success.
A house should be a home – a place to relax, bring up your children, and grow old. But we are living in a broken society. We have the most deprived, unhappy young people in the world – and the housing industry, by failing to meet the demand for proper family homes, has a lot to answer for.
