Can Labour Fix the Housing Crisis?

Friends of mine who work in town planning say that when planning permission is granted, developers often just sit on those plans for years, waiting for prices to go up. There needs to be a requirement to start building with a set period (I would say 6 months or a year) or lose the permission - "Use it or lose it".

There needs to be serious changes, the cost of houses is just insane. I've just bought my first house for £180k. Its only a small terraced house and when I checked the land registry it sold for £65k in 2011.

Thing is, what most urban areas need isn't single-family homes, it's low-rise medium density housing. Not the brutalist horrors of the 60s/70s, but good quality apartments, and these need to be encouraged. Equally, unless practices like land banking are ended, the issue won't be solved.

I generally don't like labour or a range of policies, but going to war with nimbys to increase housing and reduce house prices has my full and loud support.

We need a mix of housing. Apartments, town houses mixed density stuff, not just endless suburbs.

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Hopefully they go hard and set an example. The lack of action across the west on this issue has been criminal.

Freeing up land is all well and dandy, but apart from the ‘affordable’ properties (which will still be out of reach for many locals wanting to get onto the property ladder), what’s stopping the private developers from slapping on whatever price they want on them? Since buying in 2018, my house now has increased in value by over a third which is absolutely shocking.

Fingers crossed for changes. More importantly though, fingers crossed for Labour to not be in kahoots with housing holding companies. That would basically be a guarantee of demand subsidies which in turn would raise prices.

I live in dorset and the NIMBY problem here is insane. Literally everything from houses to sustainable energy gets protested against.

The issue is, to go along with all these new properties, we need schools, GP's, dentists, hospitals and all sorts to support these new communities as well as transport and road infrastructure. Are landlords able to buy and snap them up and rent them out anyway? Are they actually going to go to those who need them, which lets face it at this point, is a majority of the UK!

We haven't built enough houses sonce 1975 when we stopped local authority large scale building. It is not an accident

Countries like singapore and switzerland have fixed additional fees for people buying their second property, third, and so on (scaling up) to deter landlord markets. Surprising no one has proposed the same here.

Don’t expect house prices to go down, best we can hope for is they slow down

All this will result in is more land with planning permission, the idea that housing developers are actually going to increase supply to a point where house prices come down is quite frankly deluded. House builders need to be legally bound to deliver the housing within a reasonable time frame after gaining permission or lose the permission. There are already such constraints, but developer can continually renew the permission. There is already planning permission for years worth of house building and developers have increased their average profits by a staggering 1000% in the last few years by restricting building. And finally in order to do this do we actually have the workforce?

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How come it’s all being done on making planning permission easier, when there are loads of places with planning permission where the houses just aren’t getting built?

For development in green and grey sites there should be some sort of sustainable travel quota like there has to be a bus stop and decent bike paths to the local town

Seeing austerity unsurprisingly result in an increase in rough sleeping with people often in shop doorways and it barely get a mention during the election was insane.

The problem is that developers need to be incentivised to build on the land they have permissions for in a timely fashion rather the sitting on that land and allowing it to appreciate in value. NIMBYism is also a massive problem. It's why my home town never got a tram system despite nearly 30 years of planning and promises. As someone who is looking to buy a house and start a family in the next few years, I'm not exactly hopeful, though I'd like to be proven wrong.