This eight-page report won a silver Property Press Award, and measures it campaigned for were later included in the government’s housing white paper. It reveals the property generation gap - the average family can now afford a small two-bedroom flat, compared to a three-bedroom house in 1975 - and shows how the housing crisis affects us all. Even Dame Kate Barker, the economist who blew the whistle on the shortage with her 2004 government review, now has a boomerang child at home - her 24-year-old university graduate son earns too little to rent. And Lord Richard Best, the 70-year-old peer who has campaigned for tax incentives to help older people downsize, is struggling to persuade his wife to leave their four-bedroom family home.

1. S P A N I S H F L Y
Will a new airport transform the
fortunes of Valencia and the ‘orange
blossom coast’? | p34
M A K E Y O U R B E D S
How to design the perfect
herbaceous borders | p52
PLUS Abigail Ahern on colour: part two
E X I T S T A G E L E F T
Actress Anna Chancellor’s boho semi in
Acton goes on for £1.35m | p28
PLUS Thomas Hardy perenials
S E C T I O N 7 1 9 . 0 4 . 2 0 1 5
HOMEHOME
SUNDAY TIMES
GARDENING
COURSE
WEEK 6
INSIDE

2. 19.04.2015 / 13
SUNDAY TIMES DIGITAL
Confused by the housing crisis? Watch
a 90-second video guide on tablet and at
thesundaytimes.co.uk/homevideo
Ask Dame Kate Barker what her
housing crisis looks like, and she tells
you: “My younger son is homeless.” Like
more than 3m parents across Britain, the
economist, who blew the whistle on the
country’s house-building shortage more
than a decade ago, now has a boomerang
child at home — her 24-year-old
graduate son earns too little to rent.
Ever since Barker’s influential
government review of 2004, the term
housing crisis has remained in the
headlines — and been the subject of
kitchen supper parties in the suburbs.
In the 20th century, people fought for
equal rights, gay rights, animal rights. In
the 21st century, housing rights have hit
the streets. It is now the subject of mass
rallies in Westminster, celebrity-led
crusades against redevelopment and even
protests against rising property prices at
a Foxtons branch in London.
Every week brings new figures: the
average age of a first-time buyer in the
capital is now 37, yet some banks have
started to reject mortgage applications
from those in their forties. More than
10,000 streets now boast an average
house price of £1m, but the number of
55- to 64-year-olds taking in lodgers
has soared by 75% in the past two
years according to research from
SpareRoom.co.uk. There are an
estimated 610,000 empty homes in
England, but 2,714 people slept rough on
any one night last year.
What does it all mean? Is it really a
crisis that a 26-year-old can’t buy their
first home in their preferred location,
that a mortgage-free baby gloomer can’t
sell their main asset for as much as
they’d like or a multimillionaire has to
pay a mansion tax? You might argue not,
and a lot of people have done very well
from bricks and mortar, but that doesn’t
mean there isn’t a problem — and it’s
beginning to affect all of us.
In London, business leaders surveyed
by KPMG for the CBI named housing as
one of the biggest threats to
competitiveness, and Mark Carney, the
governor of the Bank of England, has
called the housing shortage and the
resulting distorted market “the biggest
risk to financial stability, and therefore
to the durability of the [economic]
expansion”.
There is a shortage of about 2m homes
across Britain — following more than
30 years of building far too few — and it
affects everyone. The backlog has pushed
up house prices at a rate that, if applied
to food since 1971, would see us fork out
£54.56 for a 2.5kg chicken, according to
the charity Shelter. It is no longer about
the 1.4m people on social housing
waiting lists; now owners of
multimillion-pound empty nests worry
about where their children will live.
“Everybody under the age of 40 has
some kind of housing problem: they
can’t buy or can’t move,” says Lord Best,
an independent peer and chairman of the
all-party parliamentary group on
housing. “The older generation
has done very nicely, but it
hits you in the pocket as
well when your children
or grandchildren need
large sums from you.”
ANATOMY OF A CRISIS
Exclusive research
by Hamptons
International for Home
has revealed the full
extent of the property
generation gap across
almost 3,000 postcode
districts in today’s money. At
present, the average household,
which means a £40,000 income, could
afford a small two-bedroom flat with
643 sq ft of living space. In 1975, that
household would have been able to buy a
three-bedroom house more than a third
bigger at 1,024 sq ft.
Of course, the gap manifests itself in
more ways than simply how much space
you can buy, says Johnny Morris, head of
research at Hamptons. “For millennials
[born between 1980 and 2000], many
simply can’t afford to buy, having to rent
long-term or live at home with their
parents. Others will compromise on
location, space and quality of property.”
The gap between the have-properties
and the have-nots is widening. Almost
half (48%) of households aged 25 to 34
rented privately in the year to March —
more than doubling in the past decade to
1.6m, according to the English Housing
Survey. Meanwhile those who own their
homes outright overtook those with a
mortgage last year, driven by a 38% rise
in outright ownership among over-65s
since 2004.
The Hamptons data, which takes into
account how the value of money has
changed because of inflation and
mortgage affordability rules, pinpoints
the areas with the biggest gulfs: E8 in
Hackney, east London, tops the chart
with 441% real price growth. A £40,000
income would now buy you a 293 sq ft
studio there, compared with a 940 sq ft,
three-bedroom terraced house in 1975.
That skyrocketing growth has enabled
Richard Blanco to amass a buy-to-let
portfolio of 13 properties across London
and Nottinghamshire on the back of a
two-bedroom flat in E8 that he bought as
a twentysomething in 1995. (It’s still his
home.) “It was partly luck. I wanted to
buy in Clerkenwell or Islington, but
couldn’t afford it, so, reluctantly, moved
to Hackney. Of course it grew on me and
now I love it,” he says. In 2003, he
remortgaged his flat to buy another just
like it around the corner, starting a
career. He is now a representative for the
National Landlords Association.
On the flipside are millennials such as
Heather Elliott, a graphic designer, 26,
who rents in a six-bedroom Victorian
house in the borough with six other
media and design types, all under 29, for
£3,600 a month. “I’d love to buy, but it’s
a million miles away. At least I’m
managing to save because there are so
many of us to share the costs.” If they
have a repeat of their 5% rent rise last
year, however, several housemates will
be priced out.
Outside London, Brighton (240%),
Bristol (174%) and Bath (164%) have the
biggest property-generation gaps. Yet in
a reminder that Britain’s housing market
is far from uniform, real prices fell in
four areas, all in the north: Hull (-14%),
Hartlepool (-8%), Middlesbrough (-2%)
and Grimsby (-1%). At the extreme,
Home
A SPACE
THE SIZE OF THIS
PAGE IN PRIME
CENTRAL LONDON
WOULD COST
YOU £1,830
Lonres/Dataloft
The housing crisis is moving up the political agenda. It’s not only hurting first-time
buyers: it’s affecting all of us, from families squeezed into flats to millionaires
despairing about taxes. What does it mean for you, asks Martina Lees
truths
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3. problems,” says Alan Ward, chairman of
the Residential Landlords Association and
owner of 10 rental properties around
Manchester — two of which he built
himself. “We are in a business to provide
a good product to a growing demand.”
What about landlords who break the
law? “There are enough rules, but they
are not enforced.”
FIRST-TIME BUYERS
For the past year Lucia and Conor Hull,
with their daughters, Juliet, 1, and Ella,
3, have been living with Lucia’s parents
in Ealing, west London. With joint
earnings of £60,000 a year, they can’t
even afford to rent in the area (useful for
childcare), let alone buy. “Renting would
cost half of our income,” says Lucia, 33.
And buying? Hamptons’ generation-
gap data show the couple would be able
to get a mortgage for a 445 sq ft one-
bedroom flat locally — provided they
could save more than a year’s income for
a 20% deposit of about £62,000. In 1975,
they would have been able to afford a
three-bedroom terraced house (974 sq ft)
with a £37,000 deposit in today’s money.
“I think it’s appalling,” says Lucia, who
works as an events organiser while Conor
is training to be a physics teacher. “For
my husband, it’s difficult to live with his
in-laws. It puts a lot of pressure on our
marriage.” Lucia’s father, Richard
Platings, 66, who runs an events lighting
business with his wife, Isobel, 59, says
they would have liked to help their
daughters buy. “Unfortunately we don’t
have the means.”
Over the past decade, the proportion of
Making ends meet From left,
Nathan Jackson, Grace Hall, Hannah
Wright, Antoine Thevenet, Heather
Elliott, Jamie Hall and Stephanie
Ronson. They share a six-bedroom
house in Hackney, where prices
have risen 441% in a generation
years ago with huge debts, she lost their
three-bedroom house in a shared-
ownership scheme in Hertford and gave
up her full-time job as a manager in
the probation service so she could pick
up Anna from school. Scully found a
part-time role at a French holiday
lettings firm, “but now I can’t even get
a rented home for myself”.
The only landlord who would accept
them on partial housing benefit let them
a damp two-bedroom house without
central heating in nearby Ware. It was so
icy that, after Scully complained, the
council’s environmental health service
ordered him to do £20,000 worth of
repairs for “a significant hazard of excess
cold”. The landlord has since served
Scully notice that she will be evicted in
June. “My daughter keeps asking me
where we’re going to live and I can’t tell
her.” They now face homelessness, as all
the local lettings agents refuse tenants on
benefits, even if they work.
“The irony is, my story can happen to
anyone,” Scully says. She’s right:
middle-income earners such as her made
up two-thirds of all new housing benefit
claimants in the past six years, reports
the National Housing Federation. About
213,000 private tenants were evicted last
year after asking for basic repairs, the
House of Commons Library reported in
November. (A new law passed last month
means courts can no longer enforce such
evictions.) And the end of a private
tenancy is now the most common cause
of homelessness, says a recent study by
the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
“I’m not denying that there are
shoes,” Frey says. “We don’t interact
because there’s no place to do it. It
becomes a place to sleep, not to live.”
The compromise means her room costs
a below-average £450 a month, “which
is why I stay”.
One in six shared homes across Britain
has no living room — up from one in 10
three years ago, SpareRoom.co.uk found
in its annual survey of more than 10,000
flatsharers. It’s a symptom of the rise of
the private rented sector, which has
more than doubled since the early 2000s
from 2m to 4.4m households in England.
It’s good news for anyone wanting to
go into buy-to-let, but it is harder for a
private tenant to save up for a deposit
while spending an average of 40% of
their income on rent — compared with
the 20% that a homeowner pays on their
mortgage. Those high costs cause more
than half of 24- to 29-year-olds to delay
having children for as much as five years,
a recent YouGov poll for Shelter found. A
10th of those surveyed admitted they
wanted to leave their partner, but hadn’t
because they couldn’t afford a new place
to live.
Yet the worst affected, according to
Danny Dorling, professor of geography at
Oxford University and author of All That
Is Solid, are children in their early teens
who have had to move schools and
lose friends several times
“because mum or dad
cannot pay the rent the
landlord wants”.
A million families
with children joined
the private rented
sector in the past
decade. One of
them is Sonia
Scully, 41, and her
daughter, Anna, 10.
When Scully’s
husband left her two
in Hull’s HU4, you can now get
almost double the space for your money
compared with 1975. “The shift of the
economy southwards and the decline
of industrial employment has had a
particular impact,” Morris says.
This also shows how the crisis is not
merely about building too few homes.
Too often, we’ve built the wrong type of
homes in the wrong places. In the six
years since the financial crisis, more
than twice as many homes have been
completed in struggling Hull (2,880) than
in soaring Brighton (1,360), Home’s
analysis of government figures shows.
In total, England needs about 240,000
new homes a year just to meet the
population growth — let alone make a
dent in that 2m backlog. Yet, last year, it
completed less than half that at 112,400.
As the wealth gap grows, we are also
using homes less efficiently. “Space is
income elastic,” says Kate Barker. “The
richer you are, the more space you
want.” (Surely everyone needs a leather-
lined cigar parlour in the basement?)
Rebecca Tunstall, director of the Centre
for Housing Policy at the University of
York, used census data to calculate the
growing mismatch between people and
rooms. In 2011, the best-off 10th of the
population had five times as many rooms
per person in their houses as the worst-
off 10th — up from 3.7 times in 2001, the
fastest rise in a century.
Behind all those numbers, however,
are real people’s lives. Here is what they
look like.
RENTERS
The primary-school teacher Nicola Frey,
33, has no living room in the house in
Kingsbury, northwest London, that
she shares with three other
thirtysomethings. “Home should be a
place that you come back to and enjoy;
here it’s just four walls to keep your
BRITAIN’S
NET HOUSING
WEALTH IS UP 58%
SINCE 2003 TO
£3.2 TRILLION, A THIRD
OF WHICH IS HELD
BY OVER-65S
Chartered Institute
of Housing
Kate Mably and her
partner, Ant Fanshaw,
sold their complex of
barn conversions near
St Austell in Cornwall
for about £1m, but
have been living in a
caravan for nine
months as they
cannot find a suitable
home to downsize to.
Ironically, Fanshawe’s
pod-building business
is thriving on the
downsizer market
(halodesign.co)
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4. 19.04.2015 / 15
£70,000 in tax and fees, according to
research by Dataloft for Landmark Lofts.
The loft conversion firm reports a 64%
jump in inquiries in the first two months
of this year compared with the same
period in 2014.
DOWNSIZERS
Lord Best has campaigned for tax
incentives to help older people
downsize, but on the eve of turning 70,
he has yet to persuade his wife to leave
the four-bedroom home near York where
they raised four children. “In keeping
with so many others of our generation,
Lindy and I discuss downsizing
endlessly, but somehow fail to agree on
where and when we should move,” says
the peer. “We love the house, but the
children have all left home. While I am
fighting fit in my ‘extended middle age’,
we should definitely be planning a
move to somewhere smaller and more
manageable — without steps and
stairs, within a stroll to shops. If we
leave it until a health crisis, our choices
will be more limited. However, the
housing on offer is often simply not
attractive enough.”
The Bests are among 2.3m households
of over-65s with two or more empty
bedrooms, according to the 2011 census.
Most only move once the death of a
spouse, an accident or a maintenance
disaster forces them to do so. “Culturally
we just hang in there as long as we
possibly can,” Best says.
Michael Longcroft, 74, lost his wife,
Diane, to cancer a few years ago. “I
miss her terribly and I find living on my
own bloody awful,” says
the retired engineer,
who is now selling
the four-bedroom
house in Hail
Weston,
Cambridgeshire,
Wilkeses have borrowed 95% of their
home’s value. As Jo puts it: “We’re
mortgaged up to our eyeballs. How will
we be able to help Molly one day?”
Since the credit crunch, the plight of
the second stepper has become more
prevalent. Simply getting onto the
property ladder is no longer a guarantee
of being able to move up it.
“While a lot of emphasis is placed on
the difficulty faced by first-time buyers,
the effect on second steppers are often
underestimated,” says Lucian Cook, head
of research at Savills. Those who bought
their first property after the financial
crisis “haven’t seen enough growth on
their home to fund a step up the housing
ladder”. Cook calculates that the average
home bought by a first-timer five years
ago has risen in value by about £23,000.
Yet mortgage rules are stricter and bigger
homes have gone up proportionally
more, which means those families need
an (often insurmountable) deposit of
£61,500 to trade up.
Some compromise by squeezing into
smaller homes to keep children in their
favoured school; others buy further out
and commute longer. Many, such as
Andre Ribeiro, a property manager, and
his wife, Alfke, a financier, extend
instead. The couple paid £60,000 for a loft
conversion that added two bedrooms, a
bathroom and a roof terrace to their two-
bed flat in Balham, south London. “We
moved up, instead of out,” says Andre, 42.
Upsizing from three bedrooms to a
four-bedroom house in the Ribeiros’
borough of Wandsworth costs an
estimated £280,000, plus more than
Conor and Lucia Hull
have a joint income of
£60,000 a year. They
and their daughters,
Ella and Juliet, live
with Lucia’s parents
in Ealing
”Renting would cost half of our
income. For my husband, it’s difficult
to live with his in-laws. It puts a lot
of pressure on our marriage”
25- to 34-year-olds who own their
homes has plummeted from 59% to 36%,
the English Housing Survey reports.
Where do they all go? They rent. Or, like
Lucia, one in four adults under 35 live in
their childhood bedroom, according to
the Office for National Statistics. Of those
that do buy, the Council of Mortgage
Lenders estimates that almost two thirds
get a leg up from their parents — and that
amounts to about £2bn a year.
A gulf is opening up between those
who can borrow from the bank of mum
and dad and those who can’t, says Kate
Barker. “It’s made more uneven, I bet,
not only by whether your parents have
housing wealth, but whether they
develop Alzheimer’s. I know that’s a
really tasteless remark, but it’s true —
they’d have to pay for the care.”
That makes Elizabeth Wood, 39, an
exception: in January, the personal
assistant bought her first home, a two-
bedroom new-build flat in Warmley,
near Bristol, without any help, for
£118,000. “It took me 15 years to save
money for a deposit, and in order to do
that, I’ve spent the past two decades of
my life renting in shared houses.”
No wonder it took so long: the average
deposit for a first-time buyer is now
£26,000 — more than eight months of
their gross annual earnings. That is
double the four months’ salary required
on average in the five years before the
financial crisis, exclusive research by
Savills estate agency shows.
In London, it’s far worse. First-time
buyers earn £56,300 a year on average —
and have to stump up more than 14
months’ income (£67,000) for a deposit
on the average first-time buyer house
price of £238,600. That is forcing
the age of the average first-time
buyer in the capital to 37, analysis by
JLL shows.
SECOND STEPPERS
With a toddler and no garden, Jo and Iain
Wilkes, both 40, were bursting out of
their small two-bedroom in Shoreham,
East Sussex — yet on their NHS salaries,
upsizing seemed out of reach even in
neighbouring , and less fashionable,
Worthing. “We couldn’t afford Brighton,
so we had moved to Shoreham. But house
prices there went up something like 17%
in two years,” says Jo, a physiotherapist.
After a six-month search, they came
across a three-bedroom house at
Cissbury Chase, a new Barratt
development in Worthing, where they
could buy with a 5% deposit and a 20%
Help to Buy equity loan. “Without it, we
wouldn’t have been able to buy a bigger
home,” Jo says. The Wilkeses moved into
the £270,000 property in November.
Molly, now 3, “loves her pink and purple
bedroom”. And for the first time, she has
a garden to play in. However, the
Vicki Couchman; Francesco Guidicini; John Lawrence

5. 16
“summarised people’s hopes to better
themselves”, says Deborah Mattinson,
founder of the research and strategy
consultancy Britain Thinks. Today,
however, policies aimed at easing the
housing crisis fail to capture the public
imagination. “It’s about fear and not
about hope,” she adds.
In 2001, when homeownership in
England and Wales peaked at 69%, all
the councils combined built only 160 new
homes. Private housebuilders never filled
the gap, and not-for-profit housing
associations have built only about 19,000
homes a year on average since 1978,
government figures show. House prices
rocketed, homeownership fell to 64%
and buy-to-let landlords took on the
social tenants who could no longer find
council homes. Over the past 20 years,
the housing benefit bill doubled to about
£25bn a year.
The financial crisis amplified it all,
more than halving the number of home
purchases to 730,000 in 2009 and
doubling demand for private renting.
It also cut the number of smaller
housebuilders by half to 2,400. “Put
simply, if buyers can’t buy, builders
can’t build,” says Stewart Baseley,
executive chairman of the Home
Builders Federation.
The result is a market where, for those
lucky enough to own, more and more
of their wealth is tied up in property.
over-60s would be
interested in buying a
retirement property. If
all of them were able to
do so, it would free up
3.29m properties for the next
generation, including almost 2m
three-bedroom homes.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
In 1918, more than three-quarters of
families in England and Wales were
renting privately while the rest owned
property. Then came the “homes fit for
heroes” campaign and, after the Second
World War, a three-decade building
boom during which councils delivered
about 90,000 homes a year. By 1980,
when almost a third of the population
were social tenants, Margaret Thatcher
introduced policies for a “property-
owning democracy”, including the right
for council tenants to buy their homes at
a discount.
Since then, 2.5m homes with a total
value of more than £100bn have been
sold under Right to Buy, reports
Professor Steve Wilcox of the Centre for
Housing Policy at the University of York.
Half of that has gone into the buyer
discounts, and £55bn to the Treasury.
“Only an insignificant amount has gone
back into housing,” Best says.
Despite that, Right to Buy was one of
the most popular policies ever because it
where they lived for more than 30
years for £550,000. “As lovely a home as
it is, it’s too lonely. Recently I had a mild
stroke, which made it difficult to walk.”
After looking through the specialist
Retirement Homesearch, he has his eye
on a riverside three-bedroom flat in a
nearby village, down the road from one
of his two sons. “I’m a boating man and
there I could moor up outside the door.”
With the baby boomers hitting
retirement, demand is rising for
aspirational property to “rightsize” to,
rather than downsize with a sense of
dread. Yet supply is far from keeping up:
retirement housing make up less than
3% of new homes in the pipeline,
according to a report by Knight Frank
estate agency.
Research by the independent think
tank Demos found that a quarter of
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“THE LAND
ASSEMBLED FOR
HS2 IS ENOUGH TO
BUILD 220,000 HOMES
ON — ALMOST AS MUCH
AS ENGLAND NEEDS
IN A YEAR”
NHF
Philippa Roberts wants to downsize from her
eight-bedroom house in Ascot after her six
children have flown the nest, but hasn’t found a
buyer in a year (£3.5m; bartonwyatt.co.uk)
Peter Tarry; Matt Reading

6. 19.04.2015 / 17
Home has become an investment, like
gold or art, not just a place to live.
HOW DO WE SOLVE IT?
Political decisions got us into this mess;
political vision is the only way out. Last
month, for the first time, the whole
housing sector — those who build, rent,
plan, design and campaign for homes —
came together at the Homes for Britain
rally in Westminster, demanding that the
new government draw up a long-term
plan to solve the housing crisis within a
generation. “Honk for homes,” one
placard read; and another, held by a
blonde in her twenties: “We don’t want
to stay home 4ever.”
“There has been a complete
failure by successive
governments to tackle the
housing crisis,” says David
Orr, chief executive of the
National Housing Federation,
the umbrella body for
housing associations, which
organised the rally. Over
the past five years, the
coalition has made
more than 500
announcements that
included references to
housing and had four
housing ministers.
We don’t need any
more short-term
vote-winners, Orr adds. “What we
need is politicians with vision, who will
make housing a priority and look to
long-term solutions that go beyond their
five-year term.”
“I’m 100% behind that,” Best says.
Kevin McCloud, the Grand Designs
presenter, and Sir Michael Lyons, the
former BBC Trust chairman who
authored the most significant property
review of recent years, have also backed
the campaign . So have 34 cross-
industry organisations including the
Royal Institute of British Architects, the
Residential Landlords Association, the
Home Builders Federation and Shelter.
Barker agrees that no
government has grasped
the nettle of housing since
she published her report.
Measures such as Help to
Buy or Right to Buy
make a particular group
happy, while others —
such as those renting
privately — suffer.
n How is the housing
crisis affecting
you? Tell us on
Twitter at
@TheSTHome
using the
hashtag
#housingcrisis
Ataxonallyourhouses
A decade or two ago, you
bought a normal house
in a normal area, and
now — thanks to the
property price boom and
a dose of luck — you are
one of Britain’s 400,000
“homillionaires”. Which
makes you rich in equity,
(probably) poor in cash
and a political target.
Soaring house prices,
the result of decades
of building far too few
homes, have also made
it entirely rational to
invest in property. In
turn, our drive for bigger
properties, second
homes and buy-to-lets
has made prices even
less affordable for the
next generation.
We need to break
that cycle, argues the
economist Dame Kate
Barker. “The idea that
you can do it just
through supply seems to
me optimistic,” she says.
How do you even out
demand in a property-
obsessed nation? With
tax, says Barker, who
proposes a capital gains
tax on main homes
rolled up through our
lifetimes. “But, you
know, this is political
suicide.” Labour’s
proposed mansion tax
on £2m-plus homes,
confirmed in its
manifesto, is another
stab at this idea.
A more widely
supported
alternative is to
reform council tax, as
Wales did in 2005.
Countrywide, Britain’s
biggest residential
estate agency,
suggests a new
band I at the top that
pays 3.3 times what
band A pays, up from
three times. A £5m band
H home in Camden,
which now pays £2,640,
would pay £4,620 as
band I. A mansion tax
would cost £10,640.
At the same time, the
1991 house values on
which council tax is
based should be
brought up to date.
“At the moment, a
£350,000 home and a
£35m home pays the
same – that’s just
weird,” says Lord Best,
chairman of the
all-party parliamentary
group on housing.
This idea was backed
by 68% of respondents
to a YouGov survey for
the HomeOwners
Alliance last month,
compared with 60%
who supported a
mansion tax.
Any tax is
unpopular, Barker
admits. “People
don’t want houses
built and they don’t
want houses taxed.
But if they say
that, they can’t
turn round and say,
‘Hey, my child can’t
afford a house.’”
Martina Lees
you? Tell us on
The Wilkeses
used Help
to Buy
TIMES+
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Tyrwhitt. To find out more, visit
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7. Franck Reporter/Getty
A new
dawngeneration” of them (no word on where).
Garden cities with green spaces and
spacious homes herald a return to big
developments on new sites, but Milton
Keynes, the last of the postwar new
towns, delivered only 3,500 homes a year
at its peak. And they take decades to
build: Northstowe, a new town of up to
10,000 homes on the edge of Cambridge,
was discussed 10 years ago, but
construction has only just started.
The fixes Remember Labour’s failed
eco-towns? The nimbys will likely be the
biggest stumbling block. Given the scale
of the crisis, say KPMG and the charity
Shelter, starting at least five garden cities
should be a legacy of a new government.
3GO UP
The facts Height restrictions make it
impossible to build above seven storeys in
about three-quarters of central London,
which is why it has fewer skyscrapers per
person than most cities in the developed
world, according to the LSE. Still, there
are 120 towers under construction or with
consent in the capital, providing homes
for 120,000 people — equivalent to the
population of Cambridge
The fixes “London’s population grew by
1.1m over the past 10 years and is forecast
to grow by 1m over the next decade,”
says Nick Whitten, associate director of
residential research at JLL. “Upwards is
the only realistic option.”
Can we build
more homes?
Yes, we can.
Industry experts
offer 10 ways to
fix the shortage
HOUSING
HOUSING
CRISIS
CRISIS
2015
HOME
20
HOUSING
HOUSING
CRISIS
CRISIS
It’s easy to point to £350m-worth
of empty mansions rotting away in
Belgravia or the Bishops Avenue, north
London, and blame the faceless foreign
speculators who own them for Britain’s
housing crisis. It’s much harder to solve
the real problem: each year we build
100,000 fewer homes than we need.
So how do we get to 240,000 new
homes a year? Home asked more than 30
of the housing industry’s top movers and
shakers for their solutions. Here are their
answers (banning overseas investors is
not one of them).
1GO OUT
The facts Seven in 10 new homes are
built on brownfield land, yet the
government estimates that there is only
enough of it for 200,000 new homes by
2020 — less than 14% of what we
need. Where else can we go? Out into
the green belt. That does not mean
concreting over the countryside, says Paul
Cheshire, professor of economic geography
at the London School of Economics (LSE).
He found that only a quarter of green belt
inside London’s boundary consists of parks
or protected or public-access land. The
remainder is mainly intensive farmland
(with less biodiversity than suburban
gardens) — and golf courses, which cover
more of Surrey than houses do.
The fixes Review what we call green belt,
says Countrywide, Britain’s biggest estate
agency. It points out that the concept
dates from more than 70 years ago, when
cities were in decline. The Royal
Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics)
wants a new “amberfield” category for
“brownfield land and low-quality green
belt and greenfield land that’s ready to
go”. But how to get past the nimbys? Pay
them. Dame Kate Barker, the economist
who first identified the housing shortage
in 2004, suggests direct payments and
council tax cuts for those affected.
2BUILD NEW TOWNS
The facts The Conservatives back
“locally led” garden cities of about
15,000 people, including at Ebbsfleet,
Kent, and Bicester, Oxfordshire; the
Liberal Democrats want at least 10 and
Labour says it will build a “new

8. 19.04.2015 / 21
SUNDAY TIMES DIGITAL
Discover how Britain’s housing market has evolved over
the past 35 years in our interactive guide, on tablet and at
thesundaytimes.co.uk/home
7ENCOURAGE DOWNSIZERS
The facts Some 3.4m households
consisting of over-65s are potential
“right-sizers”: 1.1m have one spare
bedroom and 2.3m have two or more
spare bedrooms, according to census
data. Yet Britain has only about 530,000
retirement properties, of which only a
fifth can be bought, the think tank
Demos has found.
The fixes Lord Best wants developers to
meet this need and a “help to move”
government scheme offering over-65s
stamp-duty breaks on properties under
£250,000, and loans to bridge any gap
between their previous and new home.
8FINE-TUNE PLANNING
The facts “We have a crisis in
planning,” says Kevin McCloud, the
Grand Designs presenter and chairman of
HAB Housing. “It has stopped being a
creative process and become a reactionary
one, with skeleton staff who moderate
mediocrity.” Mark Clare agrees that “the
level of planning just takes too long”. The
Home Builders Federation (HBF) estimates
that 150,000 plots are stuck in the
planning system awaiting final approval.
The fixes Housebuilders don’t want any
large-scale planning reforms. The
National Planning Policy Framework,
which cut some 1,300 pages of planning
rules to 65 three years ago, should have
time to bed in. However, it should be
homes over five years, the Chartered
Institute of Housing estimates.
“The simplest first step,” says Naomi
Heaton, chief executive of the property
fund London Central Portfolio, “is to bring
derelict and often local-authority-owned
empty homes back into circulation.”
6IMPROVE RENTING
The facts Britain’s 9m private tenants,
who include 1.5m families, rent from
about 1.4m landlords, estimates the
National Landlords Association (NLA). The
coalition’s £1bn Build to Rent scheme,
aimed at getting institutional investors
such as pension funds to back new
managed blocks, has seen only £150m
worth of contracts signed since 2012.
The fixes Matt Hutchinson, director of
the flatshare site SpareRoom.co.uk, says
raising the tax-free allowance on letting
out a room in your home would increase
supply and help keep rents down. “The
current £4,250 threshold hasn’t changed
since 1997,” he says.
Longer tenancies would make renting
more family friendly, says Shelter, which
wants five-year terms as the default.
And, despite the fact that there are
already more than 100 laws and
regulations governing the private rented
sector, in 2012, 150,000 more people
were prosecuted for not having a TV
licence than for poor or criminal
property practices.
4RELEASE PUBLIC LAND
The facts The public sector owns
about 40% of larger sites suitable for
housing development.
The fixes If Mark Clare, chief executive of
Barratt, Britain’s biggest housebuilder,
became prime minister, he says he would
“prioritise the identification and release
of surplus public-sector land that would
both raise funds and increase the supply
of land for housing”. Savills estimates
that we could build as many as 2m new
homes on government land.
5BUILD MORE SOCIAL HOUSING
The facts Housebuilding by councils
has dropped 99% since 1980; last year,
housing associations built 23,920 homes.
Between 2011 and 2015, the government
spent £4.5bn on affordable homes, while
housing associations put in £15bn of
privately raised money. About 40% of
the annual £25bn housing-benefit bill
goes to private landlords.
The fixes Raise government funding for
housing associations to double their
output, says Lord Best, chairman of the
all-party parliamentary group on
housing. “It’s like Crossrail or HS2 — it’s
investment that pays back in the long
term.” Councils, too, should be brought
back into play by allowing them to
borrow more against the future rent from
their social homes, he adds. This would
allow councils to build 75,000 new
enforced, says Stewart Baseley, chairman
of the HBF. A fifth of councils still don’t
have — as required — a local plan in place
for a five-year supply of housing land,
and the lack of such policies is the biggest
cause of planning appeals.
9FAST-TRACK DELIVERY
The facts Housing markets don’t
respect local authority boundaries.
Lack of co-operation across council
boundaries is a big barrier to the delivery
of new homes, according to Rics.
The fixes Set up Olympics-style delivery
units with compulsory purchase orders
to assemble land named in local plans.
10DIVERSIFY HOUSEBUILDING
The facts Since 1988, severe land
restrictions and red tape have reduced
the number of developers building 100
homes a year or less by 80%, to about
2,400 last year, the HBF estimates. Since
the credit crunch, construction costs
have spiralled — hitting builders of all
sizes. Andy Hill, a regional housebuilder,
says he now has to pay nearly twice as
much for scaffolding as he did last year.
The fixes The planning solutions,
outlined above, would help the small
guys, as would investment in training,
says the NHBC. The architect Lord Rogers
says he would also set up factories for
housing, “allowing for much faster and
more cost-effective construction.”
What do you think should be done?
Tell us @TheSTHome #housingcrisis

9. 19.04.2015 / 23
1946
1950
1955
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
2013
1960
£350,000
£300,000
£250,000
£200,000
£150,000
£100,000
£50,000
£0
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
Nominal house price
Labour Labour LabourConservativeLabour Conservative CoalitionCon
Nominal house price
Local authorities
Private market
Housing associations
Sources: Department for Communities and Local
Government, Nationwide, HM Treasury, Shelter/KPMG
HousingsupplyinEnglandsince1946
Councils have stopped building homes, but the market
and housing associations have failed to plug the gap —
so prices have soared
New dwellings per year
along a reopened Oxford-to-Cambridge
railway line.
n Review laws on compulsory
purchase to help assemble land at low
cost and to allow the uplift in value
when it is developed to be captured for
infrastructure.
n The Lib Dems’ big idea is “rent to
own” — a kind of hire-purchase system
that lies between renting and owning.
Occupants of housing-association
homes would pay rent, but after 30 years
of rental payments the property would
become theirs. It is not clear what
happens if they want to move earlier.
n New energy-efficiency targets for
both homes and buy-to-lets.
Homeowners who improved their
property by at least two bands would
have their council tax reduced by £100
for 10 years. There would be a “feed-out
tariff” to reward homeowners who
insulate walls.
n “Encourage multi-year tenancies”,
and offer help-to-rent loans to tenants
to cover their deposits.
n Order landlords who fail to improve
defective properties to refund rent.
n Make new developments subject to
planning conditions that they be
occupied — or double their council tax.
UKIP
n Ukip hasn’t set a target for
housebuilding other than to say that it
wants 1m new homes to be built on
brownfield sites by 2025. It would
create a register of available brownfield
sites and grants of up to £10,000 per
plot to help with decontamination.
Houses built on brownfield sites and
sold for no more than £250,000 would
be exempt from stamp duty on the
first sale.
n Local authorities would no longer be
forced into housebuilding targets set by
central government.
n Residents could overturn planning
permission granted to large developments
— if they could collect the signatures of
5% of the local electorate, there would
be a binding referendum.
n The Help to Buy scheme would only
apply to British nationals.
n Legislation would allow lenders to
offer heritable mortgages, making it
easier, the party claims, for older
people to buy property with a mortgage.
The four leading parties agree on the need for a housing shake-up, but
the devil is in the detail. We assess their strategies for home help
C H A N G E S W E
W A N T T O S E E
n Commitment to a target of how
many new homes will be built and
where. Ensure a mix of property
types to suit local and long-term
needs. Properties should be well
designed, with high-quality
construction methods.
n Stop the right to buy. Enable
councils to build more by raising
their borrowing cap and relax rules
for housing associations, so councils
can double their output.
n Add new council-tax bands at the
top end and revalue all homes for
council-tax purposes. Stop
discounts for single households
and empty homes.
n Raise the £4,250 tax-free
allowance for letting out spare
bedrooms to increase supply (and
help people stay in their homes if
they need extra support). Introduce
standard six-month, one-year and
three-year tenancy contracts.
Encourage build-to-rent.
n Help older people who want to
downsize with stamp-duty breaks
on purchases under £250,000 by
over-65s, and offer equity loans to
bridge price gaps between their
previous and new homes. This would
also encourage private housebuilders
to build more for this age group.
n Swap low-value green belt for
protecting better-quality land
elsewhere. Introduce a new
“amberfield” category for brownfield
and low-value green-belt land
identified by councils as ready to go.
n Resource planning departments
properly, and force all councils to
adopt a local plan within six months.
n Treat large housing projects as
infrastructure, with Olympics-inspired
delivery bodies. Include big-picture
thinkers, regional representatives
and detailed infrastructure groups.
n Build both new towns and urban
extensions. Reduce council tax of
residents who are directly affected
by development.
n Boost the status of the housing
minister and appoint a capable,
charismatic lobbyist.
CONSERVATIVES
n Extend the right to buy to 2.5m
housing-association tenants.
n Local authorities would have to sell the
most valuable council homes when they
become vacant and replace them with
cheaper properties. The money raised
would also be paid into a fund to help
develop brownfield land.
n First-time buyers could register for
a new home at what is claimed to be a
20% discount. Under the Starter Home
scheme, developers on brownfield sites
would be excused from paying towards
infrastructure, and from the requirement
to add affordable housing, in return for
offering homes for less than £250,000 —
or less than £450,000 in London.
n A new London Land Commission will
identify and release public-owned land.
n Local authorities will be obliged to
allocate land for individual building
plots, to give self-builders a chance.
n The equity loan part of the Help to
Buy scheme will be extended to 2020.
A Help to Buy ISA will be available to
top up deposits by up to £3,000.
n Properties worth up to £1m will be
free of inheritance tax.
LABOUR
n Build 200,000 new homes a year
by 2020, possibly by forcing providers of
Help to Buy ISAs — a coalition policy it
would enact — to invest money from
savers in a future-homes fund. It claims
this would provide £5bn to build an extra
125,000 homes over five years.
n “Use it or lose it” powers to make
builders develop land that has been
granted planning or force them to sell it.
n “Right to grow”, whereby towns that
have overstepped their boundaries would
be able to force neighbouring authorities
to release land for development.
HOUSING
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Who holds Dan Kitwood/Getty
n Reform tenancy law. Three-year
tenancies would become the norm,
though with break clauses allowing
tenants to leave the property early.
n Ban “unfair” letting fees and restrict
the rate of rent rises.
nRaise council tax on empty properties.
the key?
LIBERAL DEMOCRATS
n The Lib Dems have out-promised
Labour by saying they will help 300,000
homes a year to be constructed. This
will be achieved partly by building 10
new garden cities, five of which will be
SUNDAY TIMES
DIGITAL
Hear from all the
parties in a video
interview, on tablet and
thesundaytimes.co.uk/
homevideo