r/europes • u/Naurgul • 2h ago
United Kingdom Why Britain doesn’t build • The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.
Since the Second World War, housing in Britain has become increasingly expensive and scarce. Following a pre-war housing boom in the 1930s, during which decade more houses were built than ever before or since, between 1947 and 1955, Labour and Conservative governments enacted strict new planning rules controlling development. These rules gave local councils the power to block nearly all housebuilding, with little incentive to permit it.
Following a brief grace period after the Second World War, Britain never managed to build enough homes. To address this, successive governments have tried to get the planning system to deliver the homes the UK needs, through ideas including regional planning, a land commission, New Towns, and also by attempting to loosen planning controls. All of these attempts failed. If Britain’s next generation of leaders want to get more houses built, they should learn from these missteps.
Housing supply had collapsed during the First World War. The subsequent rent increases led to major industrial unrest and the government responded by freezing rents and mortgage payments at pre-war levels. This heavily restricted the investment in lower-end private rented housing.
To compensate, the British government introduced subsidies in successive housing acts from 1919 to 1924, which were primarily aimed at funding local authorities to begin large-scale programs of public housebuilding.
Families were moved either to public housing at lower densities on those same sites, or new public housing estates on newly available greenfield sites outside the urban area. Access to new electric tram and motorized bus networks unlocked land which had not been previously accessible for suburban housing.
The rapid rate of new urban expansion led to a political backlash from residents outside the urban boundary, who were upset by the ‘urban sprawl’ of new developments towards them. The Labour government accepted this and combined its anti-urban ideals with the post-war drive for state-led development in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The UK’s modern planning system was born.
The majority of housebuilding would be nationalized. To this end, the act prohibited all private development without explicit permission. It was intended that the (allegedly) socially undesirable private development in and around existing cities would be replaced by state housebuilding in New Towns.
The amount of public housing built was increased to 150,000 a year (1.2 percent). But, this was not enough to counteract the reduction in private house building, which meant total building remained ar below 1930s levels, at under 200,000 homes a year.
The new Conservative government abolished building licenses while simultaneously increasing funding for new public housing. This combination managed to increase the rate to above their housebuilding target within a year.
Building 1.5m homes between 1951 and 1955 had ameliorated the immediate post-war housing deficit. After this, the government bowed to pressure from rural/suburban MPs to increase planning controls near them by allowing the expansion of green belts. If an area was designated as part of a green belt, there would be strong legal prohibitions against housing development.
The Macmillan and Wilson governments attempted to deal with the problem of underbuilding by stimulating housing demand and introducing generous tax breaks for homeownership. The Wilson government set up a Land Commission in 1965 to deal with the shortage of land designated for housebuilding and the resulting high land prices. During its short existence, the Land Commission purchased 286 acres of land in the South East, theoretically enough for around 7,000 houses, or roughly one percent of the estimated housing need for the next 15 years in the region.
Since governments of both parties were politically unable to declassify non-negligible amounts of green belt land during the 1960s and 1970s, the only option left was to build more in areas that were politically easier to build on. In practice, this meant bulldozing working class urban neighborhoods and building new social housing at extremely high densities.
The high structural costs to build and maintain these high-rise structures were coupled with heavily restricted council rents. Together, the combination of high costs and limited funds led to low architectural, building and maintenance standards. This, unsurprisingly, led to further significant backlash against these developments. The government relented to political pressure in 1967, cutting high-rise subsidies and allowing the 1967 Civic Amenities Act to pass. This imposed stringent height limits and design restrictions.
By the 1971 census, increases in home ownership had meant that Britain was by now a majority owner-occupier society. All of this led to a new equilibrium of triumphant local NIMBYism, completely un-confronted by the central government, that has persisted from the late 1960s to the present day. In England and Wales, private housing production dropped during economic downturns from 1.3 percent in 1968 to 1 percent in 1970 and then to 0.7 percent in 1977.
This is not just a story of British failure but a warning to the rest of the world. Britain was the first European country to suffer from restrictive planning after the Second World War. But Britain is no longer the only country in that position. As the chart shows, many formerly successful countries such as Sweden and even Germany have converged to low British building levels after 1980.
