Lockdown and the size of British housing

The man has a point here:

Tom Wall highlights one of the great problems in our housing, lack of space, which is exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic (“Two adults, five children, one room: ‘It’s really scary but what can I do?’”, News). We have a confusion of “overcrowding” standards in housing law and even the latest minimum standards for licensing of houses in multiple occupation originated in the 1930s – is 10.22 square metres really adequate for two people to live and sleep in as their permanent home? We need an overhaul of these standards that must recognise the adverse health effects of lack of space and crowding, including the spread of infectious diseases, unintentional injuries and mental ill health.

Prof Gabriel Scally, quoted in the article, is right: the housing market has led to the modern equivalent of the Victorian slums that the new diseases will just love. At the same time, we build the smallest new homes in Europe, so we are storing up problems for the future.

Dr Stephen Battersby

Britain does build the smallest new housing in Europe. The bit that the Good Doctor gets wrong being “the housing market has led to…” the problem in fact being an absence of market, not existence. For planning laws only allow permission to be granted for projects of minimum density - it is this which leads to 30 to 35 dwellings per hectare. Given the cultural preference for a des res with a garden this and this alone explains the less than 80 m2 rabbit hutches now built as new housing.

Back before we had such a prescriptive planning system speculative builders used to throw up those 30s semis and detacheds that people now fight to be allowed to buy. One solution is therefore our oft suggested blowing up of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors.

Another possibility is that we just insist upon those in the planning system - from the MPs who vote on it, the civil servants who administer, the local councillors who approve and the planning officers who examine - live, en famille, in the estates of shoe boxes they allow. As we are rather sure very few to none of them do now. At which point we can just leave it to public choice economics, that insistence that public servants are subject to the same economic incentives as the rest of us, to return us to a system of new dwellings being houses that people would like to live in being built in places that people would like to live.

That or the blowing up, either would work.