England is now “the most difficult place to find a home in the developed world”, housebuilders have claimed in a snapshot of the housing crisis that also found a greater proportion of people in England live in substandard properties than the European Union average.
The Home Builders Federation (HBF), an industry group representing companies that build for private sale, found that England has the lowest percentage of vacant homes per capita in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 nations, including most of the EU the US, Japan and Australia.
It drew the comparisons before next week’s Labour party conference, as housebuilders again called for planning restrictions to be eased to accelerate construction.
About a quarter of private renters in the UK are also “overburdened” by housing costs – spending more than 40% of income, compared with just 9% in France and 5% in Germany, according to OECD data.
Labour has said it might release greenbelt for building when it is “dilapidated, neglected scrubland” and will “put social and genuinely affordable housing at the very heart of our plans to jump-start the housebuilding industry”.
Stewart Baseley, the executive chair of the HBF said the figures are “a wake-up call, demonstrating the urgent need to act now to prevent us falling even further behind”.
But renters on Wednesday night issued their own warning that “lots of expensive market-rate housing won’t bring housing costs down to affordable levels for the millions of people trapped in poverty by sky-high rents”.
A manifesto issued by eight tenants unions, Generation Rent, a campaign group, and the New Economics Foundation thinktank called for more than three million new council houses, tougher action against rogue landlords and rent controls, which are opposed by Labour.
“Promises to ramp up housebuilding will take many years to deliver and people stuck in the private rented sector in the here and now urgently need proper protections from unfair eviction, eye-watering rent rises and dangerous disrepair,” said Conor O’Shea, a spokesperson for the renters groups.
The interventions signal the dissatisfaction that builders and renters feel with the government. This week, Michael Gove, the housing secretary, told the Conservative party conference his party would not “build all over the green belt and destroy precious natural habitats” and would instead “build in the hearts of towns and cities and on brownfield land”.
But Baseley said: “Developers are still too often hampered by a restrictive planning system, an anti-development mindset and short-term politics trumping the needs of communities. The country is in dire need of more high quality and energy efficient new homes.”
The study found the UK has the lowest number of homes built since 1980 of any of Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.
Housebuilders have faced attacks from environmentalists for lobbying successfully over pollution of waterways and for delays to carbon-cutting standards. The HBF’s call for the construction of an extra 100,000 homes annually is in line with estimates by social housing providers and homelessness charities.
The construction industry has been frustrated by the government’s stop-start approach to planning reforms, as it has weighed the need for more building against opposition from voters in Tory constituencies concerned about over-development. The party lost the 2021 Chesham and Amersham byelection after the Liberal Democrats focused on the government’s plan at the time to increase housing targets in the south-east increasing pressure to build on the countryside.
Meanwhile, renters remain concerned no-fault evictions have still not been banned despite the Conservative party pledging to do so in April 2019. Rents on new tenancies went up 12% in the year to August, the highest level in at least nine years, according to the estate agency Hamptons.
The proportion of homes in England that fail to meet the government’s decent homes standard was 15% in 2020, the HBF audit shows. By contrast the share of the population living with leaking roofs, damp or rot in Poland was 6% and 12% in Germany, figures from Eurostat show. By the same Europe-wide measure 18% of homes in the UK were classed as having leaking roofs, damp or rot.
