A plan to get houses built and please the public

Britain needs more homes. This is such a commonplace that I have doubtless started articles with that four-word sentence before. But although this has been widely accepted as a commonplace for years – decades even – Britain still needs more homes. I believe this is because policymakers have not found policies that deliver new homes without upsetting voters. Today’s new paper from Create Streets, ‘Create Mews’, offers a way forward.

Despite broad support for more house building in theory, the rate at which we have built in the places where people most want to live has profoundly undershot demand for many decades, leading to a vast and growing wedge between the cost of building and the price of housing. That failure has turned housing into a scarce speculative good, like gold or fine art, and left people with excessively small homes and excessively long commutes. In many cases, where public transport is less extensive, it has priced them out altogether.

But Britain is not America. None of its cities are surrounded by endless unoccupied space and there is precious little pure wilderness within reach of them. England in particular is a long-urbanised country, more densely populated than most others. This means a dearth of ready places for new homes that are not already next to someone, and even fewer places near the existing urban agglomerations with the best opportunities and amenities.