There is nothing except political will stopping us fixing our housing crisis. And doing so is free.

All we need to do is get a planning system that allows people, all other things being equal, to build houses on land those people own.

There are several sorts of barriers to resolving the housing crisis - people who think there isn’t a problem, people who think there’s a problem but it isn’t about supply, and people who see there’s a problem but don’t think the problem can be solved. A great deal is written about the opponents of building houses including both the classic NIMBYs or the Iain Mulheirn and Danny Dorling tendency who tell us there are enough rooms if people stopped hoarding them. We hear less about the people who don’t think we can solve the crisis (because reasons which we will come to). Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see the UK sorting the problem out anytime soon but that isn’t because we can’t fix housing supply but because politicians aren’t prepared to do the right thing. But there are people who think we can’t fix it by building new housing. And their reasons:

Too many NIMBYs

Too much immigration

Not enough bricks

Too few brickies

Building costs are too high

Not enough land

Not enough water

Too much water

No energy supply

Other than the plague of NIMBYs all these issues are problems with the real estate economy and remind us that, faced with a challenge, many people’s thinking is entirely static. But first let’s deal with the NIMBYs by buying them off. If we accept that the development of new housing and new infrastructure represents a loss of amenity that can be valued, we offer NIMBYs a cash payment (instead of trying to do it in a roundabout way through s106 and Community Infrastructure Levy). Planning gain systems are intended to compensate the ‘community’ for additional costs such as school places and social infrastructure including parks, playgrounds and other community facilities. In the main the UK system (s106 and CIL) does this very badly with most of the money rolling into council reserves where it may or may not get spent to ameliorate the impact of the development that generated the payments. The Home Builders Federation estimated in September 2023 that local councils in England are sitting on £2.8bn in unspent planning gain contributions from HBF members. Paying affected homeowners a lump sum might be a better way to get planning applications over the line than a system that, as it stands, is often seen by objectors as the developer ‘bribing’ the council.

NIMBYs, in the main, are acting in their self-interest not for some sort of noble environmental or social cause because almost all of these ‘causes’ can be mitigated, only the changed view and the impact on house prices can’t be mitigated. A cash payment does that and, to make qualification clearer, we need to alter the basis on which objections can be made by applying the same rules to planning as we apply to licensing - only those directly impacted by the application can object and their representatives (councillors, MPs) cannot make representations on their own behalf, only as representative of people directly affected. And by directly affected we mean those overlooking the site or affected by site access, not someone at the other end of the village who doesn’t want more cars driving on the public highway where he lives.

Of course, our naysayer, having had his hackles raised by the idea that we could compensate people for loss of amenity, moves swiftly on to the currently most popular argument as to why the housing crisis can’t be fixed: immigration.

Now it’s true that the UK has something of an issue with immigration, something it shares with every other European country as well as the USA, Canada and Australia. The latest net migration figures at 700,000 or so represent an enormous influx of people in the UK who, of course, all need housing. So our housing naysayer tells us that building houses isn’t the solution, controlling immigration is the solution. Now there’s a wider debate to be had about how much immigration a place can absorb and an observation that migration seems only to be an issue if we speak of migration across international boundaries, especially where the migrant is a different skin colour to the majority in the recipient nation. But immigration is not the main cause of our housing crisis but is more akin to lifting some floorboards and finding dry rot, the rot was already there but you didn’t know until you lifted the floor. For decades we’d been able to push aside any concern about housing supply because for most people, most of the time it wasn’t a problem.

More to the point if we had a responsive and flexible market for housing then the numbers of new residents would not have been the problem. France has similar levels of immigration to the UK with foreign-born people making up about 11% of the population compared to 14% in the UK. You can argue that these numbers are too high, too low or just about right but it is hard to argue that immigration causes unaffordable housing when France has, outside a few hotspots, much more affordable housing than the UK. Over the last decade France has built around six new houses for every 1000 population compared to just two per 1000 for the UK. Britain, by choking off housing development through an overly restrictive planning system, has seen rents and house prices soar. The problem (as France is beginning to discover as local authorities clamp down on development permits) is not building enough houses, not having too many migrants.

Realising that the ‘too many immigrants’ argument doesn’t stand close scrutiny, our naysayer turns to the construction industry itself. There aren’t, we are told, enough bricks or brickies to build all those houses so we are fooling ourselves if we think we can build the houses.

It is true that, as we look at the construction industry today, there has been a contraction in supply and a reduction in the labour force. It isn’t so much that builders are unable to buy bricks but that less building meant that making bricks became less profitable so fewer bricks got made. After all, brick manufacture (I appreciate bricks are only one part of the building materials industry) is a pretty straightforward process that people have been doing for about 10,000 years and the raw materials - mud and fire - are readily available. We can say the same for other building materials like wood, concrete and tiles. The idea that Britain will run out of the materials needed to build the homes we require is the worst sort of static thinking where people imagine that markets don’t respond to new demand by making more stuff (which is pretty much the basis of this whole debate). Markets respond to demand and bricks aren’t an exception to this rule.

Labour markets do present a problem and the UK construction industry has been hit by a Brexit effect (workers from Europe returning home) and the impact of fifth and a quarter of the workforce being over 55. The UK’s construction methods are, compared to many other countries, extremely labour intensive with builders remaining attached to traditional bricks and mortar. One report tells us that 84% of new Swedish detached homes are built using modular and prefabricated systems compared to just 5% in the UK. But the cultural attachment to traditional methods (plus historic problems with modular construction methods) do mean that any plan to increase housing output needs to include how we increase the workforce and improve productivity from the one we have. More automation might be a start.

But, our naysayer remarks, England is a small place and we are more densely populated than most of Europe. France, which builds more houses, is huge and has lots of land while Britain doesn’t. This is going to make land scarcer and more expensive so we can’t really make houses cheaper through the market.

We get the impression that, because we mostly live in an urban environment, development covers most of England. But the reality is that most of England isn’t developed and even the developed parts are full of gardens, parks and urban open spaces. Worse, the pressure on urban spaces created by policies like the green belt results in this urban openness being reduced through the use of suburban marginalia for development and the use of densification as a substitute for urban extension. So what’s the truth? Here’s what the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) says:

“England has a land area of just over 13,046,000 hectares of which 8.7% is of developed use, with 10.5% being ‘built-up’. When including land designated as Green Belt, just over 37.4% of the area of England (4.9 million hectares) is protected against development by one or more natural designation. The natural designations used within the calculation only include National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs)”

The three biggest land uses in England are agriculture, forestry, open land and water, and residential gardens amounting to 88% of the country’s land. England is not overdeveloped and we are not short of land that we could develop for housing and its associated uses (like gardens, parks and playgrounds). All we have done is stop anyone building houses on about 40% of the available land and, to make matters worse, much of this protected land is in areas where there is the highest demand for housing. Centre for Cities and others have estimated that England is 4-5 million homes short of what would meet current demand. As we speak about 5-6% of England is developed for housing, that’s about 26 million homes. So to meet the need, all we have to do is develop a further 1% of England. Indeed, to return to the immigration question, we could double England’s population and still have 80% of land as open countryside. And this is with gardens, parks and urban open spaces counted within the developed area!

We are nearly there but the naysayer still has one last gambit. There isn’t enough water, we haven’t got enough electricity, the schools can’t cope and you can’t get a doctor's appointment. Well yes. But most of this can be resolved and mitigated. Britain has, since 1990 doubled its water use yet nearly all the time, when we turn on the tap clean, drinkable water comes out and when we flush the loo or unplug the bath all the foul waste is taken away to be treated. And mankind has been building the means to capture and store water for five thousand years. Even with climate change, Britain isn’t going to run out of water any time soon.

Nor, on an island of coal in a sea of oil and gas, should Britain be running out of electricity. If we do, it is because of specific policies of the government designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not because we can’t generate electricity if we need the stuff. I’m writing here about housing policy and, while energy supply is plainly important, one of the ways to reduce climate risk is to have housing that meets modern standards (Britain is almost unique in having such a large part of its housing stock built before 1914). Moreover, not building houses really doesn’t help reduce climate risk either since energy, water and transport use are determined by people, not homes. Spreading people out a bit better so they have more space and a more comfortable (hopefully less expensive) life really doesn’t make a jot of difference to the nation's carbon footprint.

Our housing problems are among the most easily relieved (indeed rectified) social challenges. We don’t have to have rents so high, we can have a society where a twenty-something on a reasonable wage is able to afford to buy a house to live in. Most of the objections to new housing are driven by a combination of selfishness (“what about the value of MY house”) and ignorance (“we too crowded, too small and there are too many foreigners”) plus a sort of faux-bucolic sense of England that bears no resemblance to the actual place called England. Too often these selfish and ignorant objectors latch onto other social issues - “what about the environment”, “climate change”, “Our NHS” - to validate their specious objection to having the homes that current and future generations need. In taking this position those opposing planning reform and new housing are also opposing future growth and prosperity for the people living in our great nation.

There is nothing stopping us ficing our housing crisis and doing so it free. We don’t need huge new government borrowing, we don’t new new laws to let councils seize lands, and we don’t need subsidies, rent controls or new government agencies. All we need to do is get a planning system that allows people, all other things being equal, to build houses on land those people own. Doing this would create an economic boom, would make us happier, healthier and wealthier. Let’s do it.