There has been a lot of reading the tea leaves after the local election. Experts are popping up everywhere giving their tuppence worth of insight into what it all means for housing.
Total waste of time. Let’s get over it: all parties are BANANAS – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
So, let’s have a look at some facts and I apologise for including numbers – soooo booooring as my granddaughter says.
The number of new home registrations in the quarter from January to March was 27,673.
It doesn’t take Albert Einstein to multiply that by four and come up with a number around 100,000. And the trend is downwards so it will be difficult to meet even that.
And the trend is still downwards even when you include the pandemic years – this is the lowest quarterly number since 2012.
This is great news for Nimbys of all parties. Mr Gove’s plan for 300,000 a year – still government policy, incidentally – is not even a pipe dream. Unless you’re putting some wacky baccy in your pipe.
The volume builders are all folding their tents and battening the hatches. Volumes are heading south.
We can blame the end of Help to Buy, but all this did was create a temporary blip in the market. Without government intervention, we have now hit reality with a bang.
And who can blame the housebuilders? Why should they flood the market with houses no one can afford to buy? And then have a fire sale and cut their margins. The market wouldn’t like that. For a CEO it’s career-limiting.
Or, as happened in Ireland in the mid-noughties start knocking down houses that had already been built. It is not the duty of the private sector to solve the housing crisis.
What is needed is visionary government intervention not sticking plasters. The radical thinking that gave us the new towns and that built my favourite city, Milton Keynes, in the middle of Buckinghamshire.
Will it happen?
Now where’s that pipe?
Have a good weekend.
Tom
by the Planning PR guru 