UK Politics
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This is exactly why the government is right to reform planning law and allow more building, even if that on its own won't be sufficient to deal with the scope of the crisis.
Reforming planning is good, some of the ideas I’m not 100% behind though.
I'm never 100% behind anything, but I think that in a crisis - and this is a crisis - you need to be radical and take risks. Caution is not going to cut it.
In all fairness whatever they do, it will be wrong, or too much or not enough.
You’re right about it being a crisis.
Not really, the thing that stabilises house prices more than continual building is increasing community/council housing. If that is available at reasonable rent at a decent scale, it curbs rent prices in the surrounding area, and takes house prices back down with it, as the only people able to afford houses at the moment are those wealthy enough to see them as investments, not homes
Iirc they've already cancelled Right to Buy, which is an important first step
In principle, there's nothing wrong with the right to buy.
The issue with right to buy is that sold off council stock is not replaced and that many people can't get a council house in the first place.
But you still have to either build it or convert existing non-residential building into residential building. Existing planning law makes it much too easy for nimbys to block either, hence the need for reform. Fact is, we need to build, convert, and add more council housing, but we need new planning law, first, to make any of those three possible.
There doesn’t seem to be any hinderance to the large developers that bang up low-quality estates by the hundred…
People feel like there are a lot of these, because they're conspicuous, but there really just isn't enough building going on.
Part of the issue with the low-quality housing is that it's often in the middle of nowhere, with no connections - because nimbyism has made it impossible to build housing where it's needed or to build the infrastructure that would improve the quality. So there's a vicious cycle of: good housing is blocked > low-quality housing is built > people point to low-quality housing as a reason to block more developments > good housing is blocked...