How do we fix the UK housing crisis?
How do you fix a housing crisis that has its foundations in policy decisions that go back decades? Unsurprisingly, there is not one answer.
The issues of high house prices – illustrated by thelarge swathes of Great Britain in which key workers are priced out – as well as a lack of affordable rented homes and homelessness will need a wide range of measures to tackle. We asked experts for their ideas.
“The UK’s housing affordability crisis has been building for decades, with younger generations locked out of home ownership and spending long periods of time living in often high-cost, poor-quality private rented accommodation,” says Lindsay Judge, research director at the Resolution Foundation thinktank.
“Sadly, if anything, the pandemic has made housing even less affordable for young people.”
Judge says a fresh approach is needed that includes building more homes in high-demand areas of the UK, such as the major cities.
The National Housing Federation, which represents housing associations across England, suggests new skills and methods of construction could help in future. “This includes building homes in factories out of materials such as timber frames, and then assembling them on site over only a few days,” the NHF says. “Such methods enable homes to be built more cheaply, to a higher standard and more quickly.”
The NHF says research from the National Audit Office has suggested that if modern methods of construction are used instead of traditional bricks and mortar, it could be possible to build up to four times as many homes with the same amount of on-site labour.
Judge describes the private rental sector as the “‘wild west’ of Britain’s housing stock”, and the Resolution Foundation says it should be professionalised. The
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