Britain has a housing shortage. Homes are expensive mostly because we haven’t built enough of them where people want to live.
We’re more than five million homes short of having the same homes per person as the average of France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
The cause of this shortage, and the reason is it’s so difficult to address, is that we’ve made it far too hard to build new homes. Restrictions on land use, unnecessarily extensive applications for planning permission and a system that over-emphasises objections have left Britain in a long term housing crisis.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A sensible approach to planning can deliver the homes Britain needs.
PLANNING PERMISSION 1937 vs. 2025
London isn’t building anywhere near enough homes. It hasn’t since the 1930s. What’s changed? We found the planning application for a block of flats built in 1937: one page application, two pages of drawings, approved three weeks later. By 2025, it’s a completely different story.