Originally Posted by
Ged
It's not so much more housing needed as less
people.
The UK is drastically short of decent, suitable,affordable homes.
The country can easily support 100 million people. I am not saying
increase to that level, but the country has a land surplus and can
easily feed itself.
It's the infrastructure such as roadways and amenities such as energy and
the services such as health and the unemployment due to an almost none
existent manufacturing base that can't sustain millions of extra people.
As the population increases the infrastructure increase with it. You are
assuming nothing changes only more people come about. We are short of
millions of homes right now. The land and planning system chokes the
building of homes. The free market can deliver, if the market is opened
up. The state currently subsidises all homes.
- Tax relief on mortgages for private homes
- Direct subsidy for public housing.
There is better ways of spending taxpayers money, when the free market
with little state intervention can deliver.
Extracts: Unaffordable Housing - Report....
Moreover, as we have said, there are not enough existing
brown field sites to solve the problem. The Rogers Report,
which might be expected to take an optimistic view on the
subject, estimated that, during the period 1996 to 2021
there would be a demand for 3.8 million homes. Of these,
however, on their calculations, only some 531,000 could be
built on the sites of currently vacant land or derelict buildings,
that is about 14 percent of the total
There is no reason to suspect that the position has
changed significantly since Best carried out his research.
Indeed, given the stringency of the British planning system
the urban proportion has, if anything, increased far more
in other countries than in Britain. This was even confirmed
in the Rogers Report. Figure 8 is taken from the Report and
shows that the assertion that England is a country that is
slowly being buried under tarmac is simply not true. 35.1
million inhabitants live in cities of more than 20,000
inhabitants. These are roughly three quarters of the total
population. Yet, these people only use 7.2 per cent of the
land. What this means is that, contrary to popular belief,
we are not living on a crowded and urbanised island, but
only in crowded and extremely dense cities.
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