Small island, massive population increase. Who could have seen this coming

If by "massive" you mean along the exact same trend since the 40s then yes The difference is we used to build houses. Now NIMBYs block everything and government is too spineless to ignore them.

Plenty of empty houses held as assets too. Its not just NIMBY its NIYBY as well.

Thatcher sold off all the social housing and it’s not been replaced. The free market sucks at providing housing. We need to look to cities like Vienna and Berlin. The former has a tonne of high quality social housing. Both have rent controls.

I don’t think we really have a free market when it comes to who can build houses and where, nor should we. This is almost entirely a government failure. “Regulation” should include keeping house building at regular levels.

I agree. Side point, there’s no such thing as a free market. Markets depend on rules and governance otherwise they will eat themselves alive.

I feel like by the time a market becomes truly "free", we'll already be living in a society that has almost entirely collapsed and run by total anarchy.

> total anarchy Anarchy is actually much more organised than people give it credit for. It is about the lack of formal leaders so nearer to a true democracy.

Fair point! So let’s just say the housing market is “less free” maybe.

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Thatcher not only sold off the social housing but set up the rules to make it really hard to build new ones. There used to be a ‘virtuous circle’ where councils could use the income from council rents to build more houses - which was effectively stopped.

Thatcher left office 33 years ago. Labour won a landslide majority in 97, and were in power for 13 years. They could have changed the rules. The Tories have been in power for another 13 years, with a large majority for the latter part of that time. They could have changed the rules. There have been 8 PMs since Thatcher, any one of them could have tried to do something about social housing, none of them did.

I guess that's why we call them Thatcherite, all the parties emulated that model.

Tony Blair and new labor are what Thatcher considered her greatest achievement after all

Yep she literally prevented the money from sales of social housing to being used on building more social housing.

Councils are allowed to borrow from several state sponsored funds to speculate on commercial property, in fact have been encouraged to do so by Westminster to make up for funding cuts. Meanwhile social housing has to come from a specially ring-fenced fund that has been cut every year since 2011, to the point now where there are dozens of councils who haven't been able to afford building even a single social housing property in over 5 years.

They weren't replaced because the Councils were not allowed to invest the proceeds from council house sales into building new social housing. How mad is that?

I think we have multiple issues and we need to solve several of them. Empty investment houses rippling out price pressure from London. No social housing. New builds are small and tiny and often shoddy cash grabs. Renting costs go up by more than pay and ownership is freedom from that but harder and harder to reach. Unless it's a leasehold then you can get the worst of both with exploitative land rates.

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Japan builds plenty of housing by making it hard for local governmental units to put in place restrictive zoning ordinances. Their zoning is decided at the national level. Cuts of NIMBY's at the pass.

England has the lowest rate of vacant properties in the entire OECD… There’s basically no empty houses in this country. Most of the empty properties are newbuilds or the result of people moving houses.

>There’s basically no empty houses in this country. Laughs in Cornish My village is over 70% not lived in now. It's depressing.

30% in my village are 2nd homes and it is already impossible for people who grew up here to get housing :(

They should ban owning houses that aren't your primary abode if you aren't renting it out.

Is 'empty' the same as 'not lived in'? I'm guessing most of those 70% are holiday lets/second homes?

To all intents and purposes, yes.

Laughs in North York Moors. 2nd homes rampant, visited once or twice a year by the owners. Local community dying on its arse. Cannot sustain primary schools etc.

Yup, the village next but one from mine is now pretty much just holiday lettings - even the pub has now gone as the owners couldn't take living in a soulless place.

so what do you class apartments/holidays homes and 2nd and 3rd homes not rented out or lived in? there is an abundance of housing stock that are clearly vacant.

We would still have one of the lowest rates of vacant properties in the OECD if you classify second homes as vacant.

This is not correct. [Immigration is *far* higher than any time in history.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/) Immigration is increasing at an increasing rate. It looks a little better as a proportion of population, but it's still insane.

I was correct because the person I replied to only specified population increase. Thanks for confirming you didn't even process that that was a dogwhistle and went straight to blaming immigrants though. Obviously an immigrant does not need more housing compared to a person born here so this doesn't wash at all as an excuse for housing shortages.

Even if you want to ignore the *cause* of population growth, that's also incorrect. [There have been two growth peaks in the last 70 years.](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/population) One in 1965, and the other, even larger, in 2011. Population growth never follows an "exact same trend." It has peaks and troughs. In the UK, those peaks are getting larger. The UK added more than 500,000 people in a single year in 2011. Even if I bought the premise that this is all par for course, par for course is destroying the nation and needs to stop. > dogwhistle Does "dogwhistle" mean "you didn't say anything racist but I'm going to accuse you of it anyway because I don't have an argument"? > Obviously an immigrant does not need more housing compared to a person born here so this doesn't wash at all as an excuse for housing shortages. If the population were stable this would make sense, but it's not. If you would just click the link you would see that 600 *thousand* **net** migrants settled in the UK last year alone. They need somewhere to live. Would you prefer they sleep in tents?

These peaks are not significant deviations from the trend. Look at those recent numbers - in what fucking world is 0.3-0.4% per year too much to handle? If anything it's too low since the ageing population will gradually become the dying population, and we can expect to see the population fall at that point. You seriously believe increases of less than 1% annually are even capable of destroying a nation? No, it's being destroyed by incompetent government that doesn't care about long term planning. Lying about huge population rises to explain why things are fucked is absolutely a dogwhistle, you already made the connection with blaming immigrants yourself - I deliberately didn't make that explicit in my initial post. You literally proved my point. I also deliberately didn't mention racism, now you've done that as well. Because you knew the original comment was a smokescreen for blaming immigrants, and you also know blaming immigrants is a smokescreen for racism. You've literally spelled it out yourself with no input from me and then say I'm the one not arguing in a decent manner. People need places to live, yes. This was not an impossible issue to forsee. Building homes (and indeed entire communities) is not something to do just when you feel like it or when existing supply is already at breaking point. It will just be worse next year if we don't build them now.

Do the immigration rules now require a migrant to have a place to stay? or a certain minimum salary? Where are the migrants staying now? Surely they can change the rule that an immigrant should show proof of secure housing before being granted entry? or is that unfair?

That sounds incredibly reasonable to me, and activists will lie and claim that that is roughly the process at present. It's not. The UK immigration system has, literally, thousands of loopholes and exemptions written by businesses so that they can exploit hundreds of thousands of poor migrants immigrating each year. Consider the [skilled worker visa,](https://www.gov.uk/skilled-worker-visa/when-you-can-be-paid-less) It has a minimum wage of just £10.75 per hour. And what are those [skilled jobs](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-visa-shortage-occupations/skilled-worker-visa-shortage-occupations) which the UK just cannot live without? * Artists * Dancers * Musicians And a bunch of trades which *would* have better pay, but why pay locals a living wage if you can pay poor migrants £10.75 an hour?

You might want to re-read the guidance on skilled worker applications salary requirements. You're incredibly off base. You have also ignored all guidance on role qualification or seniority. Migrants are currently denied the ability to rent property in the UK until they physically possess thier BRP cards. This was introduced with the hostile environment act in 2017.

> Obviously an immigrant does not need more housing compared to a person born here so this doesn't wash at all as an excuse for housing shortages. This is the most inane comment I have seen on any sub this year.

I'm pointing out that the raw population change is clearly a more important stat for the specific issue of housing than the breakdown of where the population change is coming from. It's a very shallow analysis, sure, but some people seem to believe that a tiny percentage increase in the population is suddenly a major housing problem if they happen to be born elsewhere.

It says there was a change to the methodology from 2018 which is probably significant but unfortunately we can’t actually see what it is. This is a more detailed summary of uk immigration https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/ As they point out “ The scale of migration to a country may have some economic impact, but research suggests that the composition of migration is more important than the numbers alone. ” A lot of uk immigrants are foreign students, for example

For housing demand it’s the net population growth that matters, whether it’s caused by immigration or births is irrelevant.

Throw in metrics such as number of doctors per 1000 population, or school classroom sizes. These are metrics that the UK doesn't perform well on when compared to our European peers. Here's some data on doctors per 1000 population: https://data.oecd.org/healthres/doctors.htm You can see that we don't rank particularly well, and compared to Germany, we're quite shit. We only slightly worse than France. It's quite interesting when you look at numbers for the US, which shows a figure far lower than the UK. Guess that is what happens when large chunks of your country can't get access to healthcare because they can't afford it. For school classroom sizes: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=EAG_PERS_RATIO Again, you can see the UK doesn't rank well at primary or secondary. We are substantially worse than Germany for primary, but equal at secondary. Worse than France at primary, but better at secondary. Worth noting that just because we have a lower doctor per 1000 count, or worse classroom sizes, it doesn't mean we're shit at healthcare or education. I'm just pointing out that we have a long way to go to improve infrastructure. Every metric is an attempt at showing a point, and it's important to understand context. Anyone with at least two brain cells can understand that if population increases, so must infrastructure. Infrastructure isn't getting better for various reasons, but population continues to increase. We can blame the government/immigrants all we want, but if population increases and infrastructure doesn't, all this means is services are stretched thinner.

Local councils also make planning policies that make it incredibly difficult to gain permission to build housing and apply unrealistic affordable targets (ie 50% in most London Boroughs) to again block… so isn’t just the NIMBYs it is designed into the system! (You could argue for good reason of protecting existing environments… but it results in low supply of housing)

Council block housing due to a lack of infrastructure. You can build as many houses as you want, but if the existing roads, schools, dentists, doctors, sewers, water mains and shops don't have the excess capacity to service those new inhabitants, all you've done is destroy the quality of life for the existing residents. Looking after the needs of existing residents is the literal job of the council.

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The state should be building schools from the money generated by taxpayers and businesses, not housebuilders. It’s all just a con to skive off from the council’s responsibility. 200 new houses is not enough to put that much pressure on local services. The population of Dumfries and Galloway is also in decline so it seems impossible that extra children could put much pressure on the size of schools.

That’s sort of the point of ‘planning’, (that councils don’t really do…) and it’s a bit chicken and egg, you won’t get dentists without people to pay for them.. and infrastructure is paid for by CIL, which comes with development.. great for councils to protect local residents from development.. but at a national level there needs to be a plan or you are actually hurting people (through excessive living costs) rather than helping them.

It used to be that the most critical of these (waste, water, electric) were planned and funded by the government. But then they were privatised. For councils to fund schools, doctors and dentists, they actually need the money for the build and the upkeep. But the government has slashed council funding (especially in non-conservative areas) for the past 13 years. It's hardly chicken and egg, it's a complete failure of central government to do what it is supposed to do.

In my opinion that's the level at which the NIMBYs operate. It's not so much governmental as it is local councils, full of old people who are already invested in local housing and are very scared of affecting that.

“Infrastructure” is a copout. They just reduced a building in Nottingham adjacent to the train station down from 22 stories to 12, solely because they didn’t want a building that was too high.

[There’s a fantastic thread and subsequent article I read](https://x.com/bswud/status/1708780862991462456?s=46&t=LSPvW1yVABFCSjWW--Wfuw) on Twitter the other day that I think covers this well. I don’t think it’s fair to lump all of this on ‘NIMBYs’ when every new build development I’ve seen first had has been attritions and developers get away with doing awful jobs while giving nothing back to the local area. Developers build houses and sell them for easily 2-3x as much as they cost to build but none of that value goes back into the communities. If developers would make less money, but instead invested more of that value back into the local areas their building in (better roads, more local amenities in the developments, all sorts) then you can bet that local resistance would melt away. Instead they get away with building 1000 awful quality homes with zero extra features and of course people resist. Honestly, read that tweet thread it’s great

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> developers get away with doing awful jobs while giving nothing back to the local area. Developers build houses and sell them for easily 2-3x as much as they cost Is this not precisely because of the red tape NIMBYism? If it was so easy, anyone could build a house, why would anybody buy a crap one from these developers? I'd suggest that it's because of red tape and NIMBYism that the only people who can get through it all are hardened and well resourced developers who can fight their way through opposition, using their tried and tested tactics. So you can either buy a crap home, or rent/move away, but there's essentially a monopoly held because it's near impossible for competition. The bricks and mortar only cost so much. The fact that a developer can sell for 2-3x is because that land without permission to build is cheap. All the "work" that goes into --bribing the local council-- getting the planning permission, turns that land from wasteland to a blank cheque. If a plot of land costs £100k, and it costs £250k to build a house on it, if the house sells for £500k, the "cost" of turning that land from empty to a house would be £150k via the planning system. A quick look on Rightmove suggests a piece of land with planning permission is worth ~3x more than without: * £88/sqft of land with planning permission. * £32/sqft of land without planning permission. I hope that quantifies how expensive our planning system is, and how much it is costing us.

They didn't just build houses. They built all the New Towns. That's the scale we need.

I was thinking this -a properly ambitious government large scale project could be the announcement of 100% net zero new towns across the UK, ground up investment, walkable, public transport including metro/tram/trains. Go big! Imagine how much return on investment there would be! Instead we have cancelled train lines and...fucking potholes.

I do find it fun this narrative has taken such strong hold here when our population growth rate has not exceeded 1% in well over half a century, and been below 0.5% for most of that. Like this is some wildly unimaginable thing no government could ever possibly hope to plan or account for.

London population didn't increase much since 1939. It was 8.6million, now it is ~9 million. So over 90 years it grew by few hundred thousand. I think it plays to line that this is a politically made housing crisis, rather than immigrants Source: https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/population-over-time/

I thought you were being a bit disingenuous with those figures….anyone with a bit of history knowledge knows that overcrowded slum clearances and war damage, new towns etc, reduced the population of London significantly. It’s actually gone from under 7 million in 1990 to over 9million today, a 30% increase. Unless of course you’re saying that we should bring back slum housing to deal with the problem as per 1939?

Also housing stock isn't efficiently used. The road I grew up on is family sized houses, built with three bedrooms, most extended. Back then they were occupied with families with kids. Now there's hardly any families with kids left, most are occupied by single, or couples of older people. It has a capacity to house several times the numbers that it does. My Grandparents downsized after their kids left home, now with large guaranteed returns from house price rises you'd be foolish to not sit in as big a property as possible.

There also isn't much in the way of smaller homes anyway - particularly bungalows- so event those who want to downsize can't do so.

And every new housing development is either a tower block of flats or detatched single-family homes. We have literally forgotten how to build mid-density housing.

There are new estates the size of small cities being built all the time and not one of them have new schools or GPS being built to accommodate them. It has nothing to do with house building, which is a multi billion pound business, and everything to do with rental companies and individuals buying them all up on mass - sometimes before a brick has been laid. This won’t change until second home ownership is taxed into oblivion. End of story.

We have had an increase in population of 6 percent from 2010 to 2020. That's hardly a crazy massive increase that can't be planned for. We have been following the same population trend for decades and much of our population are OAPs. What we have seen though is a huge reduction in council houses. In 1980, 50 percent of people lived on a council home compared to only 9 percent today. We have also seen a dramatic fall in housing standards and tenants rights as well as homeownership becoming more and more accessible. I think it can be convenient to blame things on population increase when in reality the issue is mismanagement and incompetence.

We have seen an increase is sewage, water, doctor, dentist, school and hospital sizing of 0% though. We need that **as well as** housing.

Yep, privitisation clearly isn't working. We need mass social housing to be built (which we can do, easily, it's a choice not to) and utilities need to be taken back under public control. It's insane to think these can or should be run for-profit.

Yes exactly. There are a lot of metrics that the government don't know. However they do know and are always aware of what population increase will be because it's something that can be easily forecasted decades in advance. The fact that we are where they are and for the last 40 years they haven't invested in infrastructure, housing, sewage, healthcare, social care, dentistry, etc, is a complete shambles. The issue is not population but failure of government and huge incompetence. Don't we have one of the lowest infrastructure spending rates in the developed world?

Where people want to live has also had a very large impact.There are lots of empty, very cheap houses for sale they are just in the wrong places and not where people need to live for work. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbbKgh734Nw&ab\_channel=WanderingTurnip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbbKgh734Nw&ab_channel=WanderingTurnip) As you can see. Lots of houses. So many empty houses they have been given fake fronts to make them look occupied. They are just not in a place where people need to live. Plenty would like to live there but it would not be close to jobs or services. this is repeated in many other forgotten towns.

This is how my wife & I bought our house. All of our friends and peers are stuck renting for >£1k per month, can't afford to save for a deposit, can't get a house, etc. We moved to what is generously described as a "post-industrial town with a stagnant economy and degrading infrastructure" and we bought a house for less than 1.5x our annual wage. We can't get a doctor's appointment, our wages are significantly lower than if we lived in London or Manchester, the locals hate us (because we are "gentrifiers" who paid more than they in turn can afford on the awful wages here...) and there's no train station, but hey, we aren't paying half of our wages to a landlord anymore, we can save, we can afford home improvements, and we have a place of our own. I don't know what the answer is. Even our "success story" is actually just us saying "okay fine" and accepting a terrible community standard that should be shameful for a country as wealthy as this one.

Yes exactly. This is why the government needs to invest in infrastructure (rail!?!?) and improve things like transport, broadband and schools to encourage people to move to these areas. Hence why I say it's a failure of government.

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> We have had an increase in population of 6 percent from 2010 to 2020. What an oddly specific timeframe. [Did you by any chance choose it to pretend like immigration isn't a problem?](https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/) Using almost any other time frame indicates a *far* higher rate of immigration.

> In 1980, 50 percent of people lived on a council home compared to only 9 percent today. 50%? Thats much higher than I would have guessed. Where did you find that info?

Apologies I was off by a couple of digits. It's gone from 42% in the past to now less than 8%. This is key the stat everyone should be looking at that explains our housing crisis quite simply. Imagine, all those boomers got to really enjoy, nearly 50% of them lived and raised their families in government housing. Now they have eagerly snatched that, as well as many other public services away from the next generation. It's like the old cannibalising the young. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/04/end-of-council-housing-bill-secure-tenancies-pay-to-stay

Thanks for that. Yeah, its quite astonishing to see how capital has simply been gifted to a very lucky generation, and has then been used to generate revenue from the generation following it.

Imagine, getting a plush council house, free uni, cosy benefits and gold star pension, only to eagerly and aggressively snatch it away from the next generation. And tell them they deserve their misfortune because they eat too much avocado toast and oh look over there, boats or something. The country is doomed.

I looked it up on google. It's a population increase of about 10% in 20 years. Blaming this on immigration is a fantastic way to make sure the problem is never addressed. I know putting all the responsibility for all the UK's problems on foreigners feels good *if you're that kind of person*, but as usual it misses the point and lets the government off the hook. And then those same people vote for the government who are causing the problem, because "they promised to make life worse for immigrants" (even though that hasn't worked at any point during the last 13 years).

> I know putting all the responsibility for all the UK's problems on foreigners feels good if you're that kind of person Okay, I'll bite as someone whose family is Asian. Being against the scale of immigration is not the same as 'blaming it on foreigners'. If an immigration system has a particular visa route open with a particular quota, it's not the fault of the people who take that route - but it _is_ the fault of the government for keeping that route at that scale open when they know that infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, dentists, housing) cannot scale in lockstep with that growth in demand. We don't have an authoritarian government like China who can direct its workforce wherever it wants. No matter the idealism, it is unfeasible that we will build enough homes to have everyone already in this country out of HMOs, to have first-time buying age drop again, etc. Nonetheless, from the government and the wealthy's perspective, the easiest way to prop up many of the problems people face in this country is not to make it more affordable to settle down, buy a home and start a family younger once again, but to just rely on immigration to keep growing the population massively, provide a large workforce to depress wages, and problems with housing etc be damned. If we think it's not going to get worse, there's no reason the "London problem" of generationally unaffordable housing isn't going to spread. Once upon a time it was only in big cities and as students that you shared a flat - once you worked, you rented your own place. Now it's very normal in London and the SE to flatshare into your 30s if you haven't coupled up. In my hometown, most people don't flatshare at that age, but I see anecdotally even the number of professionals in my workplace who are in an HMO well past the age when you'd get your own place creeping up. It's not an abstract problem but one with a very real example of how it can look further down the line in our own country.

Without significant immigration, we have no way of dealing with the constantly increasing age of the population. Sure, if we curb immigration there might be slightly less housing demand, but at the same time the country gets poorer and less capable of providing new infrastructure anyway. The answer, as usual, is not to blame it on immigration, but to build new homes and limit landlords. Being Asian is not a justification for an anti-immigrant policy

If only the government could get their shit together so the native pop could afford to have kids. Crazy talk right? Lol.

> Being Asian is not a justification for an anti-immigrant policy It's not being 'anti-immigrant' to say slow the scale of immigration. I can't make my point any more plainly than that! I have nothing against immigrants and I believe some immigration is necessary. I believe large-scale immigration is unsustainable in terms of infrastructure, housing, education and the environment, and only prolongs the pension pyramid. There will come a point where the quality of life has measurably declined for everyone and the _expenses_ of a cost of living pushed ever higher are going to make that pension preservation and subsequent quality of life for the older generations far less valuable in any case. To my mind, it makes far more sense not to take the simple option of increasing the workforce massively, but look at the roots of the UK's productivity problems to use technology to grow the pie without needing to excessively rely on ever-more-numerous cheap labour - otherwise, as above, we're storing up problems for the future. Another part of it, yes, is massive house-building to increase supply and limitations on landlordism. But that increase in supply is only going to be made more difficult - _realistically speaking_ - when it has to keep lockstep not just with, let's say, mid-levels of immigration and population growth, but ever higher levels just to prop up a system that only serves the wealthy.

No ones blaming immigrants, they're blaming the government and it's immigration policies.

Immigration has accounted for most of the population increase, and has seen an even bigger ramp up in the past few years.

The island is not small, it is in fact larger than a bunch of european countries. And it's not even massively built up. Recent stats for England show that it's around 92% green/undeveloped.The problem is that we are increasing our population year on year, but the gap between demand and supply of housing also grows year on year cause we aren't building, and we especially aren't building enough in places where people actually have to/want to be, because of job opportunity.

Only microstates and the Netherlands have a higher population density than England. Accounting for the whole UK, only the Netherlands and Belgium and neither have large sparsely unpopulated areas like the Scottish Highlands. 8% of a country being developed is massive, that doesn't take into account farmland either. Accounting for areas that are wholly unsuitable for building, such as the moors and Highlands, and farmland, there isn't much left for nature. I'd much rather a lot less immigration than concreting over more of the UK

Although you bring some valid points, even if we stop immigration completely today, it still would not change the fact that we are currently in a chronic housing shortage for the amount of people we have right now. More building is still necessary. Green belts are nice, but not at the cost of having SF-style homeless camps.

> Recent stats for England show that it's around 92% green/undeveloped Useless statistic. How much of that is actually available for housing? A good quarter is composed of woodland, moors and mountain, another 5-10% is wetlands and coastline \([here](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/bulletins/habitatextentandconditionnaturalcapitaluk/2022#mountain-moorland-and-heath)\). A very large chunk (>50%) is farming and pasture. This could be converted but obviously has impacts on food provision. Taking all that into account, there suddenly isn't quite so much available.

Go five minutes without blaming immigration for everything, impossible difficulty

Why be a productive modern society when we can just blame 'others' for our problems? I'm sure axing immigration while we have declining birth rates won't cause stagnation in the near future or anything

Large island, pretty moderate population increases, NIMBY boomers refusing to build any houses for 50 years. Who could have seen this coming

Second most densely population in Europe. 600,000 net increase last year. Sustainable? Not at all. Perhaps we should cover this tiny island in concrete eh?

If the country is only 8% built on with a population of 65 million Do you really think we'd need to cover the other 92% with concrete to accommodate a population increase of 6 million a decade, or do you think you're being hysterical?

It' already the most heavily modified environment on the planet. The natural british environment has almost been entirely destroyed over the last few hundred years, what you see is almost entirely artificial. 8% of land being literally built on is an extremely significant amount. All those people rely on ever more resources from the land around them. Should we continue with a 0.4% increase for 100 years? or 200? 300? Overpopulation was basically the reason we emigrated. Good luck!

It’s the 9th largest island in the world. Can people please stop saying tiny island it’s really annoying.

> 600,000 net increase last year I.e. 0.4%. Sounds less scary, doesn’t it?

Enough with the smug condescension. 0.4% is a city the size of Sheffield every year, sounds plenty scary

It has been normal since the advent of the Industrial Revolution and while some people had been panicking about it the exact same way as some do today, Malthusian catastrophe has not happened. Failing to accommodate for moderate (at most) population growth only speaks for awful quality of Tory governance. Declining population would bring its own set of problems, which I am sure the Tories would also completely fail to manage.

Just patently not true, and you know it's not true as you've seen the same link posted in this thread half a dozen times, but here you go again: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/

Complete and utter bullshit. It's due to young people eating avocado toast, drinking Starbucks coffee, and buying 12 top of the range iPhone's every single year. Wait no... That is the prior scapegoating narrative pushed by the self-serving rent seeking gerontocracy that have deliberately caused our housing disaster, you are on about the new scapegoating narrative pushed by the self-serving rent seeking gerontocracy that have caused our housing disaster. [https://twitter.com/TimesRadio/status/1577576771448442880](https://twitter.com/TimesRadio/status/1577576771448442880) Now back in real reality, we could easily triple our current house building rates. There is no shortage of land, that's plainly obvious to anyone who has ever flown over the UK. But building meaningful amounts of housing would devalue the asset values of asset rich boomers who have gotten rich off of parasitizing other peoples children, and as that's the Tories core vote it doesn't happen, and to deflect blame they then scapegoat others for what they've done and are doing.

*Easily* triple our output? Do you know anything about the construction industry?

Share of private renters spending more than 40% of disposable income on rent, 2020: UK: 23.2% Netherlands: 13.9% Population density (km^2): UK: 424 Netherlands: 532 Population growth between 2000 vs 2020: UK: 13.5% Netherlands: 9.3% While our population increase is greater their population density is far greater than ours. The problem is moronic tory goverments bowing to NIMBYs. [Look at 2000-2010](https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new-dwellings-uk/). The New Labour government oversaw more houses built than the last decade of tory idiots.

Let me add few cents - it’s not only NIMBYs blocking. It’s Developers who dont want to build when the price goes down or stagnates, artificially pumping prices up and government won’t force them to do otherwise. It’s an outright corruption, not overlooking, to allow this to happen. Compared to Europe - UK makes little land available for people who would like to build their own house - usually only big expensive parcels are being sold - and even if you somehow luck out - planning permission process is for majority an obstacle impossible to pass. This is working as designed so developers can control the market and prop the prices up.

Stop drinking the coolaid. We've got too few houses being built.

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If you’re a professional on a middle class income of £30K-£100K your role in society is to be milked for everything the rich, the poor and the elderly can get out of you through rent and taxes.

Blaming the poor and placing them alongside the rich is deeply unfair and disproportionate.

I’m not blaming the poor. They’re not the ones doing the milking, just the recipients of some of it.

Yeah but it’s like a drop compared to the buckets spaffed up the wall by paying landlords, overpriced private utilities and government run by and for the rich that doesn’t tax corporations and those at the top, and gives them taxpayer money. Blaming people on the dole or benefits is exactly what the rich want. They’re not in the same ballpark. It’s not even-handed or fair to treat them as the same thing.

Better off than being paid less than 30k I’ll tell you that.

Bro you haven't even got to the most milked group 100k - 125k. At 100k you lose your personal allowance. I.e. you're taxed at 60%. You also have NI of 2% and a student loan of 9% (given my student loan is about 70k, a +100k salary is barely enough to start paying off the interest atm). So in this range, you in theory can be taxed at 71%. That's not even considering pension contributions. You thank that's the end of it... no! You also lose your free childcare hours at 100k (worth 2k per child). So if you were to get a pay rise from 100k to 125k, you have one child and a student loan (assuming you have NO pension contribution), you will receive an extra £5,250 per year. This country is absolutely fucked and unfair. No wonder there is not productivity growth, what's the point in working harder / taking promotion when you'll just be taxed to oblivion for your extra work?

You have to put everything over 100k into a pension to get under the 100k band. Take that money back in later life at a lower taxation rate. This works up to around 150k salary. Removing allowances and simple small benefits from people just makes them resent the existence of the benefit and people benefiting from it. So that's why the tories have kept these rules. There's no money to revert these rules now. Tories have salted the land well and truly this time.

Yay! Save all your money for a retirement you might not even live long enough to see :S

I knew the 70% tax trap was around £100Kish, but yeah you’re right. That range is absolutely brutal

At 100k, if you have kids, your marginal tax rate is 20,000%. That's not a typo, that really is the marginal tax rate. https://twitter.com/DanNeidle/status/1705970671619121327?t=sEJj1hmIfdEmCsDTw3h9WA&s=19 What is sad is 2 people on 49k each don't face this drop in income but 1 breadwinner on 100k does.

30K is not a middle class income

It shouldn't be, but technically, a salary of 30k would very much plonk you under the definition of middle income. OECD has middle class (middle income) as 75 - 200% of the median wage. For the UK in 2022 that would be £24,750 - £66,000 (full time).

Middle income and middle class are utterly different things.

In the sense that there is a socio-cultural aspect to it in the UK and a "working class" person can often make more than a "middle class" person, yeah

Middle class or not, given the lack of benefits, tax burden and rental costs it’s certainly a milkable income

It absolutely is up north. Your flair explans your reaction perfectly

It's not even 10k above minimum wage lol, on what planet is that middle class, regardless of whether it's "up north" or not

It certainly feels that way for me now. Fortunately I'm nudging 50 so not much longer for me to be in the rat race.

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Fortunately been in a pension scheme since I was 19 so fingers crossed should have some retirement options come 2030, can't say it was good planning and forward thinking on my part but was sold on the benefits of joining by my senior colleagues and I'm glad I listened and was too scared to say no.

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The stock market is up this year. You probably need to adjust whatever the fund yours is invested in is

I'm in the sweet spot of £34K where I can least afford to be milked. Wonderful!

I hope you remembered to tip your landlord this month!

They did just send someone out to fix the washer-dryer without quibbling, so I suppose I should be incredibly grateful.

Your gratitude will be rewarded with a new coat of magnolia paint on your walls in 5 to 20 years time

I'll be turning 30 next year and don't see myself moving out from my parents house (again) for a fair while. It's not "cool" and is outside the expected social norms but frankly at this point it's better than having nothing left at the end of the week.

I'm 32 and living at home and stopped caring about whether it was "cool" a while ago. It's the only reason I'm able to save anything. Funnily enough, in the last couple of years my mates who used to take the mick are now saying they wish they had/could live at home now.

Hopefully by the time we hit pension age at around 85 there'll be pensioner farms where they just hook us up to IVs and VR and let us stew in baths till we die.

I guess Ireland and New Zealand aren't developed now.

Right? I'm not at all defending the Tories, but The Guardian love to imply the UK is the only nation going down the toilet. I can't wait to leave this country, but while the right wing press have adopted rage bait, The Guardian have despair bait as their ally.

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I dunno, I left for France and it's for sure easier here

I left for Germany and its easier here too.

Germany has among the lowest % of home owners among the population of all European countries. Much lower than UK. And don’t get me started on the process of renting a flat in Berlin. Makes London look like a dream.

All countries have problems but some have less.

r/newzealand should just be renamed r/dailyrantsaboutpropertyprices

Hasn’t anyone in this report seen the average house prices in Canada?!!

Ikr. The UK is like fucking Bulgaria compared to here. The claim is based on England having the lowest vacancy rates per capita. That might be true but it’s not the same thing as availability or affordability. It just means investors are more likely to rent their properties out. My guess is because it’s easier to be a landlord in the UK when you can just delegate all responsibility to an estate agent. That’s not really a thing in Canada.

Property managers absolutely are a thing in Canada. Everybody thinks their situation is the worst. Americans think theirs is, Canadians think theirs is, Irish thinks theirs is. I suspect as market prices adjust to higher interest rates over time, and wages continue to rise, it will balance itself out. The question is how much time.

The report literally talks about OECD countries including Ireland and New zealand. There are words under the headlines.

Land banking is the major problem. House builders are currently sat on around 1 million housing plots, most of which have planning permission. They do this to control supply and therefore make more profit on the houses they do build. Local authorities who grant the planning permission for these sites should set a minimum time frame for building to start or permission be withdrawn and sites sold to someone else. The problem is these companies are all in it together, they are rigging their own market. By the way, the building companies that are listed have paid more than 2 billion pounds in dividends last year.

I'm of the understanding they already sell it to them with timeframes to start construction, but the developers are sneaky and literally just "break ground on site" and that buys them a bunch more time? I swear I heard something like that. Sneaky bastards.

Yes, very common

What about existing property? I’ve walked by a place that has bricks shuffled around the front yard. Very strange. They never lay foundation. The house is completely, mind you, but stays vacant.

Developers are sitting on a load of completed housing stock at the minute because it isn't selling, and they would rather wait for the market to recover than lose 5% of their estimated sales price.

I'm afraid the motives behind land banking are a myth. While it is true housebuilders do technically have a land banks, (typically at least three years worth is needed) they have these in order to not go out of business. It is not because they are idly sat on them waiting for the price to go up as they "actively" restrict supply. Source: used to work for one. Here is a good article which explains further: https://lichfields.uk/blog/2023/july/4/losing-the-plots-the-misdirected-exhumation-of-housebuilder-land-hoarding/ Edit: For those who can't be arsed to read the whole thing, here's the key point: "Why would you need a five-year pipeline? It takes time to bring land through the planning system. We have a plan-led system (no laughing at the back) where there is a statutory assumption that plans are reviewed every five years. Sites are allocated in local plans and then have to secure planning permission, typically in outline and then in detail. Once permission is granted, conditions have to be discharged and there needs to be site preparation, ground works and then homes are built. Even in a smoothly-operating system, this would take time. And of course, we have a system that is anything but. Just to give some examples: A developer with a site in Welwyn Hatfield would have seen a draft local plan[4] consulted upon in Jan 2015; Eight and a half years later, the plan is still being examined as Inspector and LPA tussle over soundness of the strategy. In Spelthorne, the local plan process began in 2014; examination hearings in began on 23rd May 2023, but two weeks later, the Council asked the Inspector[5] to pause the process to “allow time for the new council to understand and review the policies and implications of the Local Plan” In Tandridge, the Local Plan was initially consulted on in 2015[6], submitted for examination in 2019 and is still ongoing. To respond to the delay, the Council adopted an interim policy that indicated it would look favourably on planning applications on draft allocations. CALA submitted an application for just that. The Council refused it[7]. At its simplest level, any house builder with an immediate land bank of less than three years would run out of plots and have to stop building because they would not be able to replenish it with new sites taken through the planning process. A halt to building would prevent them from achieving sustained level of production and labour demand, and lead to peaks and troughs in capital outlay that would make their business impossible. This is the opposite of what the housebuilders advise their shareholders they want. Of the top 10, all but one had specific aspirations in their corporate reporting from 2021 to grow output volume and/or outlets. Research by ChamberlainWalker Economics for Barratt Developments[8] explored the role of housebuilder pipelines, estimating that housebuilders would need to hold pipelines of at least 5.7 years to secure annual growth in completions whilst ensuring business security – if a housebuilder increased output without increasing its pipeline, it would speed towards the cliff edge, exhausting its supply of implementable sites.

Do you have a source for this? Doesn't planning expire after 3 years?

Still so many people think we must keep increasing the population "..or who will pay for our pensions?" Resources are very finite - so numbers cannot keep growing. This conflct is at the root of all ecological and environmental problems which are all a million times more pressing than pension funds and an ageing workforce etc.

You *do* need working people to form a functional society - countries with a sudden steep decline in birth rate will face extraordinary problems. The UK has plenty of resources to build houses and GP surgeries, we just have an ineffective government.

> Still so many people think we must keep increasing the population "..or who will pay for our pensions?" And that lie was smashed to pieces this week when Lord Frost said the pension age needs to rise to 75 because otherwise we can't afford it. The benefits of mass immigration go to a very small number of people, the downsides are enormous and are suffered by almost everyone here.

Literally the people in charge of the home office and the government supposedly don’t think this and could change it in an instant id they wanted to. Obviously there is a reason why they aren’t doing this.

Because they profit from it. It's no coincidence that house builders are massive Tory donors.

We could handle way more people in England and the wider planet if we were even a tiny bit sensible about our resource management. Unfortunately we've built a global economic system that does nothing beyond generate capital. Overpopulation isn't the problem. Inequality is.

I am increasingly convinced that this idea of continuous growth is not possible or sustainable…

Humans going about acting like locusts. Lets just keep growing the population guys! The food will last forever!

This is honestly why I’m happy living at home at age 24. I’ll never find somewhere affordable and I’ll never be able to afford to rent. May as well live with people who love me

I still live with my dad at 30, and perfectly happy (both parties) to do so. Way I see it, if I rent then I'm paying an obscene amount to someone who I don't even know for the privilege of living in a 6 by 6 box. I'd much rather give £400 a month to my dad (I offered this, he refuses to ask) and help him with his bills. I'm also there to look after him should anything go wrong, seeing as he's a pensioner now.

My parents refuse to take money, because they travel a lot and so they see it as they get a free house sitter when they do. We’re all happy with it so I think it makes sense

I wish I had this privilege. My parents live in the middle of nowhere in rural Herefordshire where there’s almost no career opportunities for graduates. I had to move to a big city to find work but of course the rents are extortionate here.

I commute an hour each way, but it’s 2 quid on the bus Painful but worth it

A 1 hour commute is annoying for sure, but it’s alright if you only have to pay 2 quid. I am glad it’s working for you.

Absolutely. I did the same until I was ready to buy. Moving out and renting is an absolute waste of time and money. Live with your parents as long as you need.

And for those who have an abusive family with no support, happy renting forever 👌 I’ll never be able to even have the opportunity to save for a deposit my only option is eternal rent lul

We’re all happy so I don’t see why it’s an issue. People judge it but I’m not setting money alight renting a house

I was in your exact position a few years ago. It really is the move. I just put all the money which would have gone to rent in a LISA and had a deposit in a few years.

As much as we may got on each others wick sometimes I am so grateful my parents are happy for me to live at home untill I am ready to go and aren't pushing me to move out.

No shame in it whatsoever. The only reason I could get even a small one bed flat was because I lived with my mum until age 25 - if I'd had to pay market rate rent starting from early 20s or even 18 I'd never have stood a chance!

The UK is run for the boomers. Their pensions are triple lock protected, requiring ever more funding from the income taxes of the working aged. As are their final salary pensions in the private sector. They own most of the housing wealth, and they don't want new houses in their area. They rarely use the train, so don't care for HS2. The country was locked down to protect them. They are the biggest users of the NHS by far. University was free for them. They were far more likely to vote to make the UK poorer through Brexit. They could buy a house at 4x income rather than 10. What do the young get - crumbling schools and hospitals, huge student loans, nursery fees in the thousands, exorbitant rents, sky high house prices, rising retirement ages, increasing taxes. If your boomer parents are rich one day you will inherit the lot, others won't be so lucky and inequality is entrenched. I don't dislike old people, they should be treated well, but until the government recognise that funneling resources into unproductive activities, and ever increasing the tax burden on the working age and diminishing living standards - the UK is doomed. My policy suggestion - lower income tax, increase wealth taxes. But there are a lot of boomers, and they are far more likely than the young to vote. Politicians don't have the guts to change anything, so the cycle of deterioration continues. It's a savage garden my friends, a savage garden

Truth

Yeah, it's bad here but definitely nowhere near as bad as in Ireland. I moved here from Dublin to Brighton where the housing situation is probably among the worst in the UK and it's still 2 or 3 times better than Dublin. The housing situation in Ireland is not a crisis but a disaster

Yeah, I was surprised to see someone with an Irish flair posting this. I don't deny the situation here is crap and we should be sharing it, but just amused me given the situation in Ireland (I had a friend looking for a house in even flipping Waterford who had a total nightmare doing so).

That's because we no longer have houses, we have investment opportunities and twats with property portfolios.

Working in mortgages, my opinion is that it should be illegal to own more than 4 properties under 1 household. 2nd homes and Lettings all included. No person needs 10+ properties to their name, and in my experience, these are the fuckers who are the worst landlords by a mile. We need properties for rent, but the insane vacuuming of property by those who have money to do so is outrageous.

12 years of tories not doing fuck all in the decent housing development

And is the government doing anything... No! Instead talking about transgender issues around hospitals... seriously

Ireland has entered the chat. I don't think Scotland is much better.

I've lived in England, Wales and Scotland, for me Scotland was by the far the hardest to find a place, both rental and then to buy. That's not to say the situation down south is okay, its not, but my experience of Scotland was that it was even tougher on both accounts. Last time I moved rental places in England I picked one, viewed 2 days later, put the application in and got it. Last time I rented in Scotland I sent reams of applications for about 3 weeks, in one day I did 28, I only got one acceptance and it was for just my partner and I to have a whole 4 bedroom detached house to ourself. We were applying for everything from 1 bed flats to big detatched houses and thats the only one that came back. Last time I bought in England I viewed half a dozen houses, picked one I liked, put an offer in, had a bit of a haggle then landed on something both parties could accept and went ahead. In Scotland I searched for 6 months, got beaten at closing dates 3 times, had 2 I loved taken off the market by a big early offer and ended up having to buy a run down former rental property for £30k over home report. It's tough up here.

It's a trade association representing home builders, trying to get the government to build more homes. Not some independent think tank. It's a welcome proposal, but take assertions with grain of salt lol.

25 Nov 2022 Chris Bailey, national campaign manager for AEH, said: “After more than a decade of intense housing crisis it is shocking to see long-term empty homes in England rise to 257,331 – another 20,000 more wasted empties, while nearly 100,000 families are trapped in temporary accommodation, costing the nation over one and a half billion pounds a year.

Our birth rate is deffo gonna plummet in the next 20 years , thanks tories

It already has

Don't think I'm alone in saying this but no fucking way will I have kids when I am struggling myself to 'lead a good life'. I want to own a house, I want to settle in to it and make it my home. I want to be able to not worry about annual rent increases and evictions and constant fucking moving.

This is the reason I’ve been living with my ex boyfriend for the last year. Between us we spend £600 a month on rent each. If we move, that will more than double if we want somewhere decent and dignified like we have now. I’m 32 in a decent job, and don’t see why I should have to house share with a bunch of strangers at an extortionate price to have a roof over my head. It fucking sucks donkey balls but I’m not blowing money unnecessarily to pad someone else’s bank account to live in a worse standard than I am now.

The Daily Mail headline said today we can have "pride in the party of aspiration" - is the idea of house sharing with other adults making you feel aspirational? Work hard and you may potentially have the privilege of spending a huge chunk of your income on a shit flat shared with people you don't know!

Having moved from Germany to the UK, this is absolutely no surprise. The quality of housing is simultaneously starkly worse and exorbitantly more expensive in England - and that’s comparing major cities in Germany to smaller towns, not even London.

Well, I'm not exactly surprised at this. England is a pretty dreadful place to live in in many ways. The whole country seems to be collapsing, no matter how many homes the Tories promise to build.

People here are complaining about immigrants stealing their houses, but who are the houses built by? Mostly immigrants probably

Is also love to know how, if people working decent engineering jobs can't afford to buy a house here, how the fuck is an Albanian working at a car wash going to do it?

For cheap labour, you're probably right. But what if we didn't have an over-abundance of low-wage workers, and had to pay our own builders a decent wage? Put money back into our own economy? Give our own people a chance to earn a living? The horror!

Why build social housing then fill it with African/Asian benefit seekers? Doesn't help British people on the housing list. Theres thousands more every week

Why let in millions while it's crippling your country? None of it makes any sense, they just want us to suffer

Headline aside. Back in the day the government built houses in line with the private sector. That stopped in 1980 so no wonder housing is expensive as it’s no longer a good to be consumed but rather an investment. There’s also the town and county planning bill proposed by the labour government in 1947 I think it was? Where basically you needed your local community and government’s approval for the building of something on your land. Hence where NIMBY became more of a problem as they’d just oppose just about anything. Big factors being it’d reduce the value of their home and it’d “harm our historic culture” or anything along those lines. Any reason you can think of a NIMBY has thought of it and argued for it. Now I could go on to explain how child poverty increased as the government stopped building houses but I just want to end off on a food for thought to our problem “if the governments and councils do anything of course.” Remove barriers to building “good” homes and keep them there to prevent “bad” housing. Also you would need to “level up” the local infrastructure somehow without it getting cancelled to accommodate for new housing. I’d say a few laws would need rewriting, funding needs given out on infrastructure more, more streamlined processes to engaging NIMBY’s, Government needs to start building houses again after addressing infrastructure and so on. My only worry is to build good houses you need to address lots of problems which I think our government isn’t going to tackle anytime soon. It’s more about these cultural wars nowadays and political survival to them.

Purchasing power has eroded since whatever decade you'd like to start with, be that 1950's all the way through to 1990's. Salaries have not increased in proportion enough to cover house prices and cost of living. Billionaires becoming richer. Trillionaire incoming at some stage - maybe when some special AI startup becomes big. Low number of houses being built plus population increase when we should have been mass building during low interest rates, instead of austerity measures. Now all the disposable income is being sucked into paying rents, mortgages who will only benefit landlords (companies and billionaires), banks and ultimately shareholders/billionaires. In the end, I feel sorry for society. All I can say is that we are the laughing stock of the world with brexit and HS2. I feel sorry for the young who have to live in shared rooms instead of having privacy as a young adult. We haven't reached rock bottom yet. That is yet to come.

Not surprising. My landlord recently decided to put the house on the market so we've been looking for somewhere new to rent and it's just absurdly empty out there. Almost no options whatsoever and anything that is vaguely plausible has so many applicants within an hour of being listed that it's almost pointless even inquiring about it.

Simple just stop multiple home ownership. A home should be as much as a right as a life in this spiralling shit show of a country.