where only 4,522 social and affordable homes were started in 2024-25, down sharply from the 26,386 starts in 2022-23, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
And Barrat Redrow is reducing the amount of land it buys to build upon, as Berkeley recently also did.
Summat’s wrong with housebuilding, eh?
My best guess – and it is only a guess – is that there’s no profit in it. For the planning system demands all the potential profit and more in Sec 106 bennies. So, no one builds as there’s no profit in it.
Yeah, I know of one near me. The council demanded so much antisocial housing that it made the development unprofitable. So the developer pulled out.
According to the company: added that it would stop buying new land because of “unprecedented” increases in costs and regulation, and weak demand from buyers.
So yes. And the other kicker as a London focused company my guess is the remote work effect. Some people leave, house prices fall. Not worth it. You don’t need much of a shift in demand for it to not work.
I meant to add: London house prices are up 12% since 2018. Inflation has risen over 31% in the same period. Wales house prices are up 34%.
Yup. My flat has lost getting on for a third of its purchasing power value since 2015.
There’s a lot of “back to the office” talk but house prices show it isn’t happening. If you have to be in Holborn 5 days a week you want to be within 45 minutes. If it’s weekly you’ll put up with 90. So instead of inside the M25, Newbury does the job
I sold my flat in London and moved to the SW in 2016, the difference in prices was at its peak,
You can also see that season ticket sales peaked around that time. 2013.
Section 106 has been around since 1990. It’s more likely to be the burden of environmental regulations and the increasing requirements for energy efficiency – e.g., in insulation, heat pumps, and now solar panels.
Coincidentally, I have been looking at S106 for another projectette.
It is a huge scam and entrenched corruption. Under the pretence of mitigating environmental damage, the council can ask for literally anything. They then negotiate a package with the developer.
One local development help finance some heritage restoration work nearby, but they had nothing to do with each other.
Environmental regs have a *lot* to do with it.
Clogland and the UK differ in their Madness, of course, but over here in Clogland there’s plenty building projects *planned*, even though acreage to do it on is at an all-time high, as there’s precious little of it.
But most of it is stuck on Modern Madness: Nitrogen and CO2 certificates around Ecobollocks. Can’t get them, can’t start without them.
And don’t even try without… The local Econutters are watching you like a hawk, ready to file suit through one of their miriad NGO’s and Local Protection “Foundations” (
awaiting approval) and shut you down.Doubly so because municipalities cottoned on to their usual method of Eternal Complaint Filing during the planning process and have *severely* limited their options there, so they’re using this new “approach” and are actively promoting it amongst each other.
So almost everything has ground to a halt, and the projects that *can* proceed have incurred massive overhead costs because of all this, which of course gets passed on to the buyers, who can’t get a mortgage that high… etc…
And meanwhile the Ecoterrorists are slapping themselves on the back for a “job well done” ….
While being the same people that demand infinity immigration
Surprisingly….At grassroots level they aren’t……
They’re *against* mass immigratrion, but not because of Enrichment, but because of Mother Gaia…
They’re more “right-wing” than classic Xenophobes in that way.
The problem comes from the Foundation Funding Managers who actually finance them, and who are *perfectly* capable of supporting several mutually exclusive Causes.
They don’t do something icky like actual Procedures and Protests… Might get their shoes dirty…
Like good little Progressive Socialists with an Education they Armchair Manage… Causes… so they can do their Social Virtue Signalling while very much not getting mud on their coats, or their hairdo in a mess…
And those funding tiers go up all the way to EU level…. Like turtles going down…
Summat’s wrong with housebuilding, eh?
No, with the ‘customers’ for it, perhaps.
Would you want to buy a shit new Barratt house?
My pal now living in Wells, who has flipped a few houses in her time, lives in a nice 60s bungalow on a nice mature 60s estate. She reckons this is the best era: space and relatively low housing density; reasonable design; well-built; parking; not too old; easy to modernise. She has a point.
I heard that the flipping gig was under strain due to stamp duty. A transaction tax reducing the number of transactios, whoda guessed?
Yup, she’s quit the flipping. Not well now, and needing some bunce, she’s planning a final downsize into a small flat in a converted mansion. Sounds like a good move to me.
Does your London flat have the purchacing power for a nice 60s bungalow on a nice mature 60s estate in nice Wells? You’ve mentioned the place a few times so maybe there’s an arrangement to suit all.
Perhaps, but the timing’s wrong and my missus doesn’t like the bungalow. “Too small”. Ah well. I rather fancy it myself.
I knew a couple in a “bohemian” flat in Notting Hill (a good bit) who were looking to move out of London. Everywhere was not quite right in some way for wifey, and eventually hubby realised that it was he who wanted out whereas she was happy with theatres, galleries, restaurants, social circle, etc. He liked those things too, and since what he was hankering after were unknown dreams (big pile, big garden, tinkering workshops, country idyll, etc) he decided he could happily stick with what he knew. Still in the smoke, last I heard.
In my experience: late Victorian for flexibility, 1930s for space and layout. My 1895 terraced house has a huge amount of space, and by adding one wall I turned it into two well-sized flats.
Somewhere inside my much-extended house is the original 1920s ‘home fit for heroes’. It must have been tiny when built, but the plot would be enough for five houses at the current density.
I grew up (mostly) in an Edwardian house, built when people were still getting richer after nearly a century without a *major* war so they felt they could spend a bit more money to get it right. Better than anything I lived in since (apart from my Barbican flat which was comparable).
She’s probably right. There isn’t really that much new in houses since the 1960s. Electricity, cars, central heating. My mother’s house is early 1970s and great. And after about 1980, the construction started turning to shit. Cheap materials, corners cut.
We’re in a late 1930s house which is very good. Absolutely solid, but it does have a few small problems that 60s houses don’t.
Also Wells is a nice place. And they seem to have sorted out the very irritating living statue, for the greater good.
It is a nice place. Here’s hoping. We’ll take another look at Devizes, mind. What was the living statue?
Feral mime?
So 80% drop in 24/25, compared to 22/23.
What happened in 23/24?
The answer to “what’s causing this” is “everything”. Inflated cost of materials and labour, Net Zero bollocks, non-environmental planning bollocks, Section 106 demands all combine to make it more difficult to build homes profitably. It doesn’t help that your customers have suffered two decades of stagnant wages and the more solvent they are, the more likely they’ll be thinking about emigrating/packing it all in to live in a small cottage in Northumberland.
There is a struggle to deliver ‘affordable’ housing worldwide but it is particularly tricky in the overpopulated and economically-moribund UK. Ironically, the organisations best-placed to develop affordable housing for sale or rent are local councils. They control the planning system and they can borrow cheaply from central government. However, they have used these powers to instead develop commercial property (badly) while bleating about Thatcher.
There are four categories of householder.
Illegal immigrants, housed for free
Council tenants paying below market rate worth £8 – £12,000 p.a. for life
“Essential workers” subsidised to buy at discount rate
And the rest of us pay to support this tottering pile of shit.
Anecdata: I know blokes who made their money in building houses. They tell me it’s a mug’s game now, no money in it anymore.
So instead of still working, still paying loads of tax (well, y’know…), and still building new houses, they’re retired early and paying as little tax as possible. So Hector gets less dosh, the British government gets fewer houses built, and these blokes – grafters and entrepreneurs, all – are sunning themselves in the garden instead of creating wealth and jobs.
Many such cases!
Atlas is a builder, and he’s shrugging.
Norman says Would you want to buy a shit new Barratt house?
No, nay, never. New builds in this country are tiny shoeboxes with no storage space, they’re made of gyprock and rice crispies, built by the cheapest, shittiest, most incompetent foreign cowboy labour they can find, and they’re forcing heat pumps on you to make sure you’re cold AND poor.
And you pay through the nose for the privilege for one of these rabbit hutches.
Speak to anyone who bought a new build in recent years and you’re very likely to hear a litany of complaints about flooding (arsehole developers are deliberately building downstream from natural watersheds these days), damp, mold, parts of their brand new house falling off because they were secured with glue and masking tape, incompetently installed bathrooms leaking water through the floor, etc. etc.
I wouldn’t buy anything built more recently than the 90’s. At least with an older house, you’ll probably only need to replace the roof, and you’ll have saved enough money to afford that by not giving it all to Bharat Homes.
You’ll bee pleased to learn that cheap foreign cowboys have not been able to drive our own cowboys out of the business.
A friend of ours had a new-build in Southsea. She wondered where the smell was coming from. Turned out her drains were not connected to the sewer.
The genius of the left shown twice.
1) Hobble private housebuilding so much that it becomes uneconomic to do then say the market can’t deliver.
2) Once you have stopped private provision then discover that you can’t actually build the houses you stopped the private sector from building.
Oh yeah, and an udder thing… forcing independent tradesmen and to do quarterly online tax returns is accelerating the competency crisis.
Most of theses guys are in their 50’s and older. They’re not computer literate. They don’t have the time to report to HMRFuckingC four times a year. And most of them are in building and associated trades. They’re not earning enough profit to cover the cost and hassle of this.
The result is that a lot of these blokes are just quitting. Early retirement, or semi retirement, or just selling up and leaving the country in a lot of cases. So the British government has cleverly engineered a situation where tax receipts fall, people do less work, and big, shitty, Bharat Homes style cowboy companies are the only game in town.
I already “do tax digally” – I compile a spreadsheet every year, the last page has all the numbers laid out to type into the HMRC web page. I’ve done it for over 20 years. Forcing me to give my bank details and HMRC login details to a piece of software for it to invisibly use is overkill and security-ly insane, and forcing me to rush nine months of getting-around-to-it into four quarterly three-week deadlines is not “saving me work”. It’s just encouranging me to remove myself from the employment market as soon as I’ve paid off my mortgage in two years’ time.
System working as intended.
The most important thing I learned messing about at Westminster is that government cunts of all stripes regard themselves a masters of the fucking universe for having landed the cushiest big-org gig of all time, with their rainbow lanyards, pay grades, and mind-blowing pensions. They’re only interested in talking to upper management from large corporations because at heart government people are collectivists and only want to deal with people who speak for and can order about other large collectives.
They regard SMEs and sole traders as the shit on their shoes. The only exceptions are people setting up trendywank startups, whom they regard as sage visionaries and shower with “Catapult” money. Oh, they also like the occasional leftycunt celebrity who unfathomably agrees with them.
We’ve yet another proposed “development” in our small Cotswold town, Miller being the builders. They tell us that around 50 houses out of a proposed total of 130 will be “affordable”. A relative term.
50 will be affordable – so the other 80 will be unaffordable and remain unsold?
Yes, because they don’t want to live next to the “affordable” cunts and their problems, and who can blame them.
Exactly. The intention is to have so-called affordable homes mixed in with the the unaffordable ones. That’ll go down well.
In a couple of new(ish) estates that went up in my town they put the “social” housing at the start near the main road so the scuzzers had no call to go past the nice places further in. Being front and centre also prevents the council “forgetting” the social housing, so they keep it relatively tidy. Works pretty well.
Last scheme I looked at, some years ago, the idea was that the “affordable” houses were just the same as the other houses in their category but were priced lower to benefit certain classes of people (the approved list included schoolteachers, nurses and local government employees inter alia); so the other housebuyers were unaware which houses were “affordable” ones subsidised by the other housebuyers.
That was different from putting “social housing” tenants in the middle of a private estate.
No, it means 50 will go to the families and mates of councillors and bureaucrats at knocked down prices, the rest will be used to mug the buyers to pay for the 50.
There’s much in what you say. A lot of houses on a previous “development” went to several buyers who then did the buy to let thing.
“My best guess – and it is only a guess – is that there’s no profit in it. For the planning system demands all the potential profit and more in Sec 106 bennies. So, no one builds as there’s no profit in it.”
As I’ve been telling you for ages on here. You keep banging on about ‘more planning chitties’ and it has very little to do with that. Developers have sites coming out their ears. Planners will grant them permissions left right and centre, partly because they’ve been told to, and partly because if they refuse them the developer appeals to central government and they grant it instead. Its the costs of doing it all that are stopping it. All the extra regulations on how the houses can be built, and what of, and all the cycle paths that have to be built, and all the S106 money the local authority demands, and the Community Infrastructure Levy, and and and. Add in to the mix that the government keeps making it more expensive to be in any form of business in the UK today with higher employment taxes and higher minimum wages, and you can easily see why housing costs so much, not because no one can get permission to do it, but because it costs an absolute bomb to physically do ANYTHING in the UK these days.
High energy prices are government policy.
High costs associated with building is government policy.
High costs to run a business is government policy.
Could have saved some pixels by writing everything shit..is government policy.
Planners will grant permission IF …
The planners will grant me permission to run a four-minute mile on the old cinder track where Dr Bannister did it when I was in short trousers – so what? The cinder track isn’t even there.
I’m surprised it hasn’t been listed or had a preservation order or some such and is now a crumbling eyesore that nobody will buy.
Yonks ago, before Blair, OUAC replaced it with a (then) state-of-the-art running track. The latest upgrade is used by OUAC (not that I can remember anyone runing on it when I went to the Iffley Road gym a generation after Bannister).
Just leave it to the market. In a free market, if you build 100 unaffordable homes, you’ll be providing 100 homes for the homeless. Not because they move into the unaffordable homes, but because rich people move from cheaper homes into the unaffordable homes, And less rich people move up to the vacated homes. And so on until 100 of the cheapest homes are vacated by people trading up and 100 homeless people can be cheaply housed there.
Alternatively, we can keep doing what we corrently do and fail to house the homeless in the houses that haven’t been built because of the current policies.