UK Housing Crisis Has a Back-to-the-Future Fix
New towns are the forgotten half of a social contract that helped to transform living conditions after the war. Labour’s plan to revive them is overdue.
England’s green and pleasant land needs to go back to the future to fix its housing crisis.
Photographer: Jason Alden/BloombergThe dysfunction in Britain’s housing market is plain to see. The country has a deficit of perhaps 4 million homes, yet development is often resisted fiercely where it’s most needed. Housebuilders have a poor reputation for quality, accused of erecting identikit estates that are densely packed and lack amenities. Listen to the not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, lobby and it’s easy to get the impression that the countryside is in imminent danger of becoming carpeted with brick-and-concrete rabbit hutches. Yet the reality is that the UK has no shortage of space. Contrary to popular perceptions, more than nine-tenths of English land is undeveloped; only 1.3% is housing.
These aren’t isolated anomalies. Tracing how they relate to and reinforce each other helps to explain how the dynamics of UK housing supply turned into a vicious circle — and why the Labour government’s plan to revive a postwar policy of building new towns may prove transformative.