1.4 million years to clear housing waiting list
The National Housing Federation has just invented some figures to lobby the government with as they try and push their pet agendas.
Using some figures from a boring report someone in the organisation must have thought that hyping up the figures would be a good thing in scaring people into accepting their argument that the housing situation is in crisis. And with people getting all emotional they probably think it will help them gain support as they clamour for the government to do something.
So given some figures like the average wait for getting an allocated social home is 4.4 years and the total number of families waiting for a home is 589,000 what do you think is a nice high figure as a total amount of time to clear the backlog to sound scary? 4.4 years? 10 years? 100 years? or something like 1.4 million years?
Yep, 1.4 million years is nice figure to use. It’s big enough but if you say that it is three times longer that ten years ago it sounds like it’s a figure that has been used in the past. If it’s been used before it must be OK.
Or do you look at the figure and think what planet did the person who thought it up come from. Either that or the must be high on something. Alternatively they are probably an expert in irish feminist history.
SBML
H/t Simon Cooke
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1
November 2, 2011 at 06:59 -
The answer is simple release more land for house building. That would drastically reduce land and therefore house prices so more could afford to buy them and the building industry would do the rest. The government is attempting in a feeble way to do this but as usual the loons, tree hugers and vested interest at fighting it tooth and nail even The Telegraph is getting in on the act.
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2
November 2, 2011 at 11:42 -
Release more land from where?
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3
November 2, 2011 at 12:48 -
Not so much as release land as lower the cost of building on the land. A very large proportion of the build cost of a house is the purchase of the land. The reason it is expensive is due to the restrictive planning policies. An acre of farm is worth as little as 1% as one acre of land with planning permission.
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4
November 2, 2011 at 07:55 -
Housing is the Sacred Cow of the UK psyche, any action that would result in prices falling even if it had a net economic benefit would never be taken voluntarily.
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5
November 2, 2011 at 08:02 -
@ Super Sam
Yes and there is so many sacred cows, the NHS being yet another, the UK people are going to be up to their psyche in permanent impoverishment and social decline.
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6
November 2, 2011 at 09:03 -
Yep the figures presume the government or local authority house one person then start on the next one sequentially. This is of course not what happens. Thus people may wait four years, BUT after one person has been housed, the next persons clock does not start at that point, it is already running.
Epic stupidity, even from the NHF.
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7
November 2, 2011 at 10:45 -
When has there not been a housing crisis? We will carry on having a housing crisis as long as population keeps increasing.
They probably invented houses because of a national cave shortage.
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8
November 2, 2011 at 12:02 -
I keep articles reading about social housing in the UK. Not being English (or British) I am curious as to where people used to live before social housing came about in the UK. Did young people live at home with their parents, and grandparents even) until they could afford to move out? If so, what was wrong with that and why is it that some people seem entitled to have a home of their own paid for by taxpayers who in some cases are actually living in worse conditions because they do not meet the critieria for a free home?
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9
November 2, 2011 at 12:37 -
Before the provision of ‘social housing’ (built and owned by councils, but for which the occupants pay rent), there was a lot of sub-standard slum housing in most cities and towns. Some lived ten or more to a two-up-two-down terraced house. There was still quite a lot of this about as late as the 1950′s.
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10
November 2, 2011 at 12:52 -
Actually, Engineer, there still IS ‘quite a lot of it about’…
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11
November 2, 2011 at 12:11 -
In many ways the NHF and council planning departments are to blame for the problem with their insistence on using ‘traditional building practices’ to keep up the house price bubble.
There are other ways of providing cheap quality housing, you just have to look at the Keetwonen student housing in Amsterdam http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen.html to see that.
Such housing, if used by councils, would cut their waiting lists to zero with little or no effort on their part. Would they do it – no, because it would deflate the house price bubble.
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14
November 2, 2011 at 12:42 -
I suspect that things would be vastly different if New Labour’s immigration policy, slavishly followed by the “coalition”, had been killed at the starting gate.
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15
November 2, 2011 at 16:24 -
Thanks to the Engineer for this: “Some lived ten or more to a two-up-two-down terraced house.”
So the problem does not seem to be social housing as this was probably a needed and beneficial improvement, rather it seems to the be criteria used for giving it out and perhaps also the planning restrictions preventing the construction of additional housing which would be affordable by normal people (does council housing still exist or is it all privately owned but rented to tenants whose rent is paid by the local gov’t?).
I guess that what I am really trying to understand is why here in the UK it appears that it is regarded as everyone’s right to have their own home rather than a privilege that you work for and earn.-
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November 2, 2011 at 17:18 -
Actually, a full answer would be quite long.
It’s long been regarded as a good thing to own your own house in Britain. Perhaps that’s something to do with a long-held and deep-seated need to control your own little patch of territory, and it’s regarded as ‘the done thing’ to buy a house, with a 25-year or so mortgage, as soon as you reasonably can. That’s not so easy now, because hose prices are rediculously high at the moment, and most first-time buyers just can’t afford either the deposit or the mortgage.
Going back to our agrarian past (say, before the 16th century) almost everyone had either ownership of, or rights to, a patch of land on which to grow enough crops and raise enough animals to feed themselves and their family. However, during the 17th and 18th century, two things happened; the rise of the industrial towns, and the ‘enclosure’ by big landowners of much agricultural land with the displacement of the peasants working it – many migrated to find work in the towns, living in whatever hovels they could find. That broadly remained the case during the rapid population expansions of the 19th century – the reasonably well-off could afford to buy a house, the poor lived in slums as best they could.
By the early 20th century, it was realised that this could not continue, and better housing began to be built in new ‘council estates’. That continued until the last of the slums were cleared after WW2.
We still have many council estates, in which those that can afford to pay rent for their houses, and those on benefits have their rent paid. There are also private landlords, many of whom bought houses in the hope that their investment would appreciate and pay their pensions; as house prices have fallen in the recent economic turmoil, some may find themselves out of pocket.
So it’s a complicated picture. Owner-occupiers, private landlords, council estates. They tend not to be intermingled, but are generally in seperate areas, which arguably exacerbates social divisions and fuels the class differences that the British are peculiarly plagued by. Many perfectly decent people have lived all their lives on council estates – it should not, but often is, seen as a social stigma to be in rented accomodation.
Perhaps that desire for one’s own patch goes back to that deep-seated past and the security of tenure that used to exist in the middle ages and before, and was torn away from many during the industrial revolution. If you own your own patch, nobody can take it off you – “An Englishman’s home is his Castle”.
That’s very brief, but I hope it gives a flavour.
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17
November 2, 2011 at 20:59 -
I think part of the desire to own one’s home is to avoid the restrictions placed upon tenants, such as restricting the ability to have pets and to put up with the landlord’s taste in decoration.
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19
November 2, 2011 at 18:09 -
Surely if the avergae wait is 4.4 years then if nobody new was put on the list then it would take approximately 4.4 years to clear?
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20
November 2, 2011 at 19:12 -
….if we keep importing job seekers and financing child centred cash units, then we will have the planned population growth of 230,000 households every year until 2030 .
That will necessitate 250,000 houses a year , very year they build only 125,000 put them cumulatively behind…
..creates a housing shortfall..
prices go only one way in a shortage
they like tents outside St Pauls...supply and demand issues contimue
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