The Real Reason Britain Stopped Building

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Seven main reasons why the UK has struggled to build, leading to housing crisis and shortage of infrastructure.
0:00 Intro
0:37 Planning Restrictions
1:51 Rules and Regulations
3:12 Lack of Infrastructure
4:05 Lessons of HS2
6:07 Austerity
7:54 Bureaucracy
8:47 Failures of Private Firms
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Опубликовано:

3 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 329

@dbee8085 12 дней назад

I work in construction and I'm amazed anything gets built in this country. There's always a way of stopping anything being done.

@nicholaspostlethwaite9554 12 дней назад

I wish that were remotely true. Every greedy request for planning gets through. It is even assumed consent unless the arcane limited acceptable objections can be made and in time. Developers need to stick to redevelopment or quit the sector. Not one new building on any square inch of green land.

@fern8580 12 дней назад

1-Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to be different. 2- There is an administrative class which manages the State for its PROFIT, and not for the NATION”

@bradleywilkinson4246 10 дней назад

Maybe is the things that were built were designed to look nice people wouldn’t have a problem.

@nicholaspostlethwaite9554 10 дней назад

@@SaintWill70 You stick to redevelopment and keep your filthy houses off ANY inch of green field space and I and most will have less problems with the disgusting developer 'business'. Yes building regulations once they have easily got permission to rape the land by covering it in houses, ensuring houses are build to a decent standard would be irritating. Not a fan of red tape and regs but the Problem is so many cowboy builders, what else do you suggest instead? Yes most of it is make work for bureaucrats, civil servants all leaching great livings from the tax payer. They take the taxes anyway and just spend them on other rubbish so the costs to me are in fact zero. Have given up expecting decent principled well intentioned and acting, political and establishment class. They are only in it for themselves. Selling their fields etc. With Starmer looking like he intends being a grave robber, thief, nice man! Charity housing associations should not exist, or need radical changes, it is grossly unfair some get subsidised better homes than those paying their own way. Or some new balance is needed. Portacabins only for 'social' housing? Certainly should not be getting a penny from the taxpayer. Social housing, subsidised in any way, should be substantially less 'nice' than normal housing.

@davidmorgan6896 10 дней назад

@@SaintWill70Such a stupid derogatory term "NIMBY" and it reveals your massive bias on the matter. People don't want to see green spaces built over - they can never be put back. They don't want to sacrifice SSIs and World Heritage Sites for the sake of shaving 15 minutes off an unnecessary journey. As for the regulations you disparage, they are there for good reason. We should be building better homes, energy efficient and safe homes, not just feeding an industry designed to maximise profits and the expense of long-term viability.

@AdrianNelson1507 12 дней назад

Friend of mine lives in Finland. They voted on getting a new tram network. Tram was built ahead of schedule and came in under-budget.

@stephenscaife9993 10 дней назад

We are building houses purely to house the growing population , the growth is driven purely on high immigration . Poor planning properly is definitely an issue .

@bartekpulkowski9765 10 дней назад

@@stephenscaife9993 You aren't building houses. Point me to the year when house building targets were fulfilled. Second point , bigger population means more workers and projects to build, bigger tax revenues as well. Maybe stop voting for same old.

@georgesdelatour 10 дней назад

@@bartekpulkowski9765 “Second point, bigger population means more workers and projects to build, bigger tax revenues as well.” We’re experiencing the most massive levels of immigration in our entire history. Last year a record 1.2 million people immigrated to the UK. Yet we have labour shortages and housing shortages, taxes are at a record high, per capita GDP is declining, and labour productivity has collapsed. If the immigration bonuses you expect aren’t kicking in at that level, what level will they kick in at?

@villhelm 9 дней назад

No it doesn’t. The VAST majority of the migrants are net drains on the economy and they create more competition for jobs and housing. You can literally map the housing crisis and the strain on services onto the population expansion on the same timeline. When you bring in million people in a year, you need a city the size of Birminghams worth of infrastructure to cope with them. We need to reduce the population by 20 million people, not build 20 million more houses.

@nade5557 9 дней назад

@georgesdelatour we have a similar immigrant population percentage as the US. Less than places like Australia. Basically, immigration isn't actually the problem, is mismanagement and robbery from those in power

@Will-kt5jk 10 дней назад

2:24 - it’s worth pointing out that the level of vacant properties is also ridiculously high: (from the ONS) “On Census Day, 21 March 2021, there were 1.5 million unoccupied dwellings in England and 120,450 in Wales.” “In 2021, we estimate that 89.7% of unoccupied dwellings in England on Census Day were truly vacant, while 10.3% were second homes with no usual residents.” (Wales has a slightly higher proportion of these that are 2nd homes) That OECD data suggests

@georgesdelatour 10 дней назад

Are some of these homes just not in the places where the jobs are?

@Alex-cw3rz 10 дней назад

@@georgesdelatour well, with the ability to work from home probably not, combine that with investment in local employment so that the area is where jobs are. In addition build the 1.1 million homes with planning permission that are not being built, then the government start building housing again and you've bascially solved the housing problem.

@margaretgreenwood4243 9 дней назад

Exactly. It has always been so

@justinstephenson9360 9 дней назад

Those figures have been bandied about for years and yet those putting the figures forward never deal with the long running problems with the figures. The figures for vacant properties include, in no particular order, those which are uninhabitable, those which have planning permission for redevelopment which has yet to start or for which a planning application has been submitted but not yet granted, those subject to legal proceedings which prevent them being sold usually divorce or probate (the latter being a problem that has got a lot worse over the last few years). And of course there is the issue highlighted in other posts about the vacant properties not being where the jobs are - not everyone has a job that you can work from home on.

@mikefish8226 9 дней назад

So what? They aren't your houses. If any owner wants to keep an empty house, that's their business. A significantly bigger problem, that's worth pointing out, is the ridiculous level of immigration. Which not only pushes up the demand for housing but actually increases taxes.

@musiqtee 12 дней назад

Well… What’s local & national to the UK can’t explain this. Most OECD countries have these issues - even in “rich” Norway. I suggest the reasons are transnational, or supernational. Four decades of handing ownership of [insert here] from the public to the private sector has consequences everywhere. Brexit, EU or being a US state or Scandinavian (former) social democracy - No real difference… Our governments & councils may have ‘money’ (central banks, QE, bonds), but investment without ownership is just rent (debt). Who owns this capital? Corporate entities do, where neither borders nor democracy legally matter. That’s _real_ power. Legislative change needed, but not wanted… 👍

@johndover3626 11 дней назад

In the present U.K. political set-up, London and the south east will always get top priority, say 120 kilometer radius of Buckingham Palace. HS2 is merely the latest example.

@apebass2215 10 дней назад

Spoken like someone who has never been to Medway

@UnimportantAcc 10 дней назад

Central London* Even the south east get shafted now too 😂😂

@peterwait641 10 дней назад

Council tax higher in south and you have to pay to dump some stuff at tip. Also Barnet formula gives more money to Northern councils. Add to this wages do not compensate for much higher rents and house prices. If i lived near friends in Blackpool same house would be less than half that of Weymouth.

@tomjohnson9833 5 дней назад

Back in the real world, the South East of England gets the lowest amount of govt spending per capita, despite being one of the top per-head tax payers.

@CorinaGilligan 4 дня назад

The people who invested made their money so who cares if they cancel it !! Same with all the convid contracts , daylight robbery and they get to walk away smiling

@davidhayman7623 12 дней назад

We need Land Taxes to disincentivise land banking and higher council tax for lower density areas, which can lower if density increases this would realign the incentives and get us building again.

@rob-123 11 дней назад

The problem is we favour the large developers to do all the building. They will use their large scale to take control and deliver massive developments for zero profit. However if they risk not making the money back they slow the builds to a few houses a month until the market returns that level of no loss on their project. The reason they do this is to them that 30 mill development is just a way to clear a large amount of money through our system without paying tax for their investors. The outcome for all this is just super slow development.

@davidhayman7623 11 дней назад

@rob-123 I agree bad incentives bad outcomes

@edjones3410 12 дней назад

I wish all the politicians would watch your videos, then they might have a better idea how to run the country, great content!

@___Q-bot 11 дней назад

Politicians understand the problem, they just always trade long term benefit with short term populist ones.

@philiphall8325 10 дней назад

Back in Brunel's day it was all about developing the country for the new industrial age (and making money). Now we are in a post industrial age, development has no purpose except to make money for developers. As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are loads of empty houses all over the place which are just investments. It needs to have an overall strategic aim which benefits people and the general environment not just piecemeal speculative development to make money.

@ratttttyyy 11 дней назад

I'm working on a small office in my home town. It's planned to be built on an empty car park in the middle of town. Nothing crazy. 15 months to receive an official response from Cheshire East Council on the discharge of duties application.

@frasermitchell9183 12 дней назад

The newts bill here in Crewe for a new link road was £210000. 18 newts were found and "re-housed", so it cost £11666 to move each newt. The Hough By-Pass for the A500 cost even more. Leicestershire County Council spend £1.7 million looking for newts on the planned Earl Shilton By-Pass. One newt was found. Until barminess like this is eliminated, there is no hope whatsoever for this country. Yet this is an EU Directive that is totally ignored in the EU !

@riveness 11 дней назад

It's not an eu directive. In fact it was a conservation law from the uk that got adopted by the eu. The real issue if there was enough environmental services, as opposed to massive cuts, we would know beforehand where these populations were and could avoid the issue by planning accordingly. Saying we should just build over them or ignoring the conservation issues ends up where we are now, with increased sewage, a massive bio diversity loss in the uk and increased land soil. If hs2 had had a local info, it would have avoided that route. And no it wasn't 40 or even 4 million. This upfront info was available on projects that I worked on in the Netherlands. Stage 1 studies in the uk, by comparison, are incomplete. I am not surprised that people with no background in construction would fall for this. I work in a steelworks with three adjacent sssi. We have no issues on management in that regard and have increased the sssi areas. The biggest issue. Councillors ignoring the planners.

@stephfoxwell4620 11 дней назад

Brilliant summary. Moses Attenborough has killed pragmatism.

@Alex-cw3rz 10 дней назад

It is not an EU directive stop spreading misinformation either edit your comment or delete it.

@philiphall8325 10 дней назад

If it is an EU directive surely we don't have to do it (as we aren't in the EU).

@nicholaspostlethwaite9554 10 дней назад

Yes barminess like that needs ending by not building ever more stupid roads! Or rail lines. The UK is one of the most nature denuded nations on earth! We can get everywhere we want to already! Not a single new road has any place being built for mere convenience or speed of traffic flow for selfish impatient drivers. There is also the fact in a few years there will be vastly fewer cars used. They will be on call and driverless. Few will want or need to keep one sat on the side of the road or in a drive for 95% of its existence.

@Alex-cw3rz 10 дней назад

7:55 this is actually more of a problem with news articles, if you look into it not very little of what they said is true, in fact the 300,000 pages figure is just made up from what I can find. The planning application was submitted in 2022 with an 18 months predicted date, however naturally the July election pushed it back. The planning fees thing is a huge misnomer and actually impossible to find out what they are talking about and what the costs even were and what was included was land acquisition included for example. The huge issue nowadays it cost so little in Norway because it was built by it's government with zero profit incentive from start to finish. Whereas here everything has to be done by contractors and consultants who charge thousands of percent in profit.

@over-engineered 10 дней назад

some one I know had to pay £45,000 for a newt pond for just 3 bungalows

@jameslewis2635 11 дней назад

I bought my house a bit over 5 years ago for £50,000. This week I looked up some similar houses on the street I live in that are on sale and those are going for £75,000. If the housing market was expanding (as in new houses and apartments being built) at any kind of rate that could possibly address the ever increasing consumer demands there is no way my house could add half again to it's value after just 5 years, even allowing for the amount of inflation we have experienced in that time-frame.

@avancalledrupert5130 10 дней назад

Where's this. Where are there houses for under 200k ?

@peterwait641 10 дней назад

Due to energy costs a brick that cost 45 p ten years ago was £1.12 last time i bought some, costs of building have gone up a lot because nuclear industry privatised and Blair had gas ones built .

@samuelaubrey2612 10 дней назад

Here in Shropshire you can bribe the local council for planning, I think it's the same in many counties

@davidmorgan6896 10 дней назад

That certainly seems to be the case.

@jontalbot1 8 дней назад

What evidence do you have for such a statement?

@Turanic1 10 дней назад

From 2008 it all went downhill and never up

@fortune-cookie-monster 9 дней назад

Agree to a point. However, the financial crisis of 2008 didn't just happen. It was the result of "cheap and easy to get mortgages" creating a housing bubble as investors turned homes into investments. I bought a 2 bedroom flat in Davigdor Road, Hove for £193,000 in 2004 but the people next door bought a beautiful 6 double bedroom Edwardian house for £172,500 in 1997. I see it is now listed on Zoopla for £1,750,000. That property is "worth" more than 10x what the owners paid for it. If I were a little older and had been able to buy a home in 1997, instead of 7 years later, I would have spent considerably less and I would now literally be a millionaire. To make matters worse, my flat was leasehold, which is another whole new can of worms. To say our system is broken is the understatement of the century. However, apparently this has nothing whatsoever to do with institutional and systemic political and economic failure. Nope, those benefiting from this madness (government, banks and the establishment, not the owners who are actually really lovely people) want us all to just blame immigrants and hope they can continue fleecing the British people for another 5 years or so. Shame on us all for allowing these criminals to keep exploiting us.

@sandponics 6 дней назад

The country has been going downhill since 1860.

@chessticals 9 дней назад

Communities would be more accepting of new houses if they were well designed and fitted in with the surrounding architecture. Cheap red brick houses next to pretty thatch cottages in small villages - and people wonder why local residents fight so hard with planning applications.

@Alex-cw3rz 10 дней назад

There are 1.1 million homes in this country with planning permission that are not being built, planning is well ahead of developers. Our planning system is not perfect and needs change, but for some bizarre reason not one planner has ever been asked what to do and they only ask groups not involved and of all people the Bank Of England, who struggle with economics let alone other subjects.

@nicholaspostlethwaite9554 10 дней назад

Well my neighbour, a local planning officer, Applied and got away with permission to build an 'annex' bungalow effectively, in the back garden of a mid terrace. Having openly said previously in chatting with me that it is a well known scam they have problems stopping! Later they get separated off and sold as a home. Access difficulties and so costs, alone seen to have stopped him doing it so far. Someone would not roll over and let him have more then the foot only access to the back and width rights he had. :) He ended up with a police conviction (community resolution order) for harassment too, including a threat to kill. Greed is an terrible affliction of all involved in housing and development. Ban all green land building and then make redevelopment on existing building footprints effectively, easier. Bulldoze town centres shops no one will want any more. Stack up container conversion homes.

@juangomezfuentes8825 9 дней назад

There are so many not being built because of the uncertainty of the planning system. Big companies buy several plots at the same time with the hope some get planning permissions. So they shoot everywhere at the same time, even when they do not have, or want to have, the capacity to build them all. They are just playing the numbers game. Why take the risk of only applying for the permission where you actually want to build and take the risk of being rejected, when you can do 4 or 5 at the same time and have them as back ups. Of course, the only companies that can do this are the big ones, with a huge financial muscle to resist that uncertainty. Small companies cannot do this strategy and they are essentially removed from the market. So that in part explains why there are more permissions than building sites. Another is, big building companies are now, after killing the small competitors thanks to these excessive regulations, became a cartel that fix prices and decides how much is going to be built. You dont really need a big conspiracy to do that. Just having the interest of these big construction companies aligned is enough to do it without even having a meeting. They "share" enough information already online in the data bases that dont even need to talk about it to make it happen.

@nicholaspostlethwaite9554 9 дней назад

@@juangomezfuentes8825 The people I know grasping the millions for their fields do not sell the land to the developers. They seem to sell 'rights' to buy it. Then when the developer thinks they have a chance they apply for the permissions and only when they get the permissions do they buy the land or there is some deal that pays for the land after the thing is done I suspect. That way all costs of having to put in stuff like roads ends up coming out of the land seller's pay off. Point being I am not sure there is so much land 'owned' by the developers and not with building permission. But as you point out in other parts, the whole thing is corrupt and manipulated, this is how the UK does corruption rather than gangsters and mafia. All the political class are neck deep in it too, as Starmer shows wanting to let even more rape of the land for housing to happen, even in Green Belt.

@davidgreen4288 10 дней назад

Profit over need is the biggest problem in this country, it needs a complete overhaul with a proper plan as with any task if the tax payer is involved it will cost alot more then if it were a private task, until the uk people smash the current system the constant asset stripping will continue and the rich poor divide will grow

@juleswombat5309 6 дней назад

We cannot do big Infrastructure anymore, we need to. However at some point it becomes unsustainable to keep building houses, just because of the UK population growth is out of control. People want a better quality of life, not GDP Growth that that Industry and CEOs keep asking for. Reduce population, increase productivity, embrace modern AI tools, grow GDP/ Capita for a sustainable and more environmentally friendly future.

@nadeemchaudhry6585 12 дней назад

Big fan of the channel, but I have to disagree with a number of points. The lack of housing has nothing to do bats, newts, etc, that is just an excuse used by developers for years to increase their profits. Over the last 20 years 100,000's of flats and houses have been built in all major cities around the UK, the problem is all,

@edjones3410 12 дней назад

Its a real thing, my brother in law used to work as a "newt officer" for the planning permission office in Gloucestershire.

@nadeemchaudhry6585 12 дней назад

@edjones3410 100% 👍 but the point I was tyring to get across is that developers make the situation worse than it seems. We need to have these rules in place for wildlife and for humanity. Being in the business myself I know, if developers had their way ( and they are slowly getting there) they will just bulldoze St Paul's cathedral and build a block of flats if they could!! Hence why need to have a level of planning restrictions in place.

@RichardEnglander 11 дней назад

You need to include the population increase of some 8 to 10 million in 25 years.

@davidmorgan6896 10 дней назад

It seems as if all major infrastructure projects are simply just mechanisms for moving money from poor people to ruch people.

@silverbaker2194 День назад

I briefly worked at a construction firm (temping) where I heard a horror story of an entire housing development being demolished because it couldn't be sold quickly enough, so it was cheaper for the developer to tear it down than cover the costs to leave it in place. House prices are too high for people to afford or being built in the wrong areas and developers aren't willing to carry the costs. It's all mad!

@sweatshirt.e3480 9 дней назад

Great video 👍

@Nobumblegumforyou 10 дней назад

Town planning act needs to be reformed.

@markprothero2666 6 дней назад

I’m going to send this to some of my colleagues who work in environmental consulting. They’ll love it.

@BobBuilder-mq9wr 11 дней назад

Reason .... MPs and policy makers have invested interest in property so want there assets rising due to supply and demand . Same old

@mkoschara 9 дней назад

Another great video.

@erongi233 День назад

The French/Italians are building 170 mile slightly sub hi-speed rail link between Turin-Lyon with the second longest rail tunnel in the world of 36 miles long for a planned total cost of 25 billion Euro about a fifth of the cost of HS2. One heck of a tunnel.

@rinnin 11 дней назад

5:00 if you think the costs & delays in Britain are bad, you should look across the pond to the National Children’s Hospital in Dublin failure

@jazztec4255 11 дней назад

Glad to hear you come from leeds mate! Best city in the UK! 😊

@GreenAlien2023 9 дней назад

The older I get the more bitter I become due to witnessing increasing incidences of complete ineptitude. I'll die a very grumpy old man!

@Gashinshoutan2009 10 дней назад

Can't the uk government start a state owned construction company to basically speed up the process of planning permissions and actually build more social housing throughout the country? Especially if the big private developers are just banking up the allotments and limiting the supply of properties.

@DanivirAmadeus 9 дней назад

Why would the government solve a problem that they are profiting from creating?

@nade5557 9 дней назад

Yes, they can. They won't though because they are all in kahoots with said companies

@bipollarazralon1262 10 дней назад

I'm Brazilian and I think your British accent is so charmy!!!

@illegalopinions4082 6 дней назад

Everyone is quick to say we need more houses but change their minds even quicker when they vant get a GP appointment in the next 2 months due to all the new arrivals.

@tomjohnson9833 5 дней назад

For the cost of HS2 we could have designed and built a new generwtion of zero-emission regional aircraft that only need a small runway at each end of the journey, instead of a massive concrete and steel barrier across hundreds of miles of countryside and habitat. The idea that trains are environmentally friendly is insane.

@Robert-vw3od 12 дней назад

They want a service sector country, and they do not like workers, they look down on manual labour. there is a program about the German car industry and the British and one of the last things said in the program is that in Germany a mechanic is a highly respected person like a doctor or solicitor and that is how it should be.

@kobemop 12 дней назад

They know those workers have protection, so they can't over exploit them like service workers. But yes, most western countries are quite financialized and rent-based. The only industrious Western country is Germany but however they relegate car manufacturing in other parts of Europe/EU.

@maxharbig1167 12 дней назад

@@kobemop Sorry but Italy is the second largest manufacturing country in Europe after Germany and it doesn't "relegate", whatever that means, car manufacturing of groups like Stellantis. the 50/50 merger between FIAT Chrysler and PSA and SEAT manufactures cars in Spain. I don't think you live in Europe or know much about it either.

@nothereandthereanywhere 12 дней назад

@@kobemop 'The only industrious Western country is Germany' There isn't any industry in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary? Hmmm, makes you wonder where are all the cars coming from... (the named countries)

@thecrimsondragon9744 12 дней назад

@@nothereandthereanywhereI think he meant countries forming the developed west ie which are mainly from Western Europe. The countries you mention are Central/Eastern Europe and less developed (though Poland seems to be making good progress).

@nothereandthereanywhere 12 дней назад

@@thecrimsondragon9744 you are right, Im being silly!

@irwinsaltzman979 День назад

HS2 construction reminds me of the subway expansion in NY City. every area had ability to stop the project if they did not get everything they want, even after project started leading to way over cost. Also no attempt at having a general contractor, who hired subs. Instead so many contractors handling so many aspects of the project , many times without coordination. One comment was they could have given all the people in the area free bus tickets for 30 years and saved money. ( not fact checked)

@mohammedfarhaan6843 12 дней назад

Also, I noticed UK has a substantial amount of activism and it goes beyond the rational scope. UK needs to find a balance and develop tier 2 - tier 3 cities.

@stephfoxwell4620 11 дней назад

The middle class in Britain are being hollowed out financially. The way they stay relevant is to hector others about nature and our historic errors.

@kailashpatel1706 11 дней назад

Sorry can you explain that again?

@MichaelPickles 11 дней назад

Activism needs to be banned. Well maybe designate a field in the middle of nowhere where they can protest. It will have the same effect

@davidmorgan6896 10 дней назад

@@MichaelPicklesWhat a stupid thing to say. I take you believe in bending over for anyone in authority to take advantage of. There is significant protest in my area over the building of a giant powerline from the coast to central cities like Birmingham. The electricity is generated in coastal windfarms, but needs to be transported to where the demand is. This means permanently scarring the landscape without benefit to the local people. Of course there is opposition to such a scheme and rightly so.

@davidmorgan6896 10 дней назад

What do you mean "beyond the rational scope"? Isn't it right that people fight to protect the rural environment from the blight of industrialization and urbanisation.

@paxundpeace9970 9 дней назад

Can you do a video about green belts. Those are huge barrier to get new housing build.

@robtyman4281 7 дней назад

The reasoning behind Greenbelt land is massively important, and should never be abolished. I don't want the UK to become like America - where planning is now TOO lax imo. It's at the other end of the scale to that of the UK. Both countries need to seek more of a balance. Planning needs to be more stringent in the US; and less unwieldy in the UK. Besides it's not really Greenbelt land that's the real issue here, but 'Brownbelt' land (old industrial land) that has been left to rot - with nothing done about cleaning it, and then clearing it up in order to build new housing, public transport amenities, shopping facilities, and the like. The issue with the UK is not so much that we're 'running out of land to build on' because we aren't! The issue is that there's masses of derelict Brownfield land that nothing is being done about; and no one is utilising it as they should be. But then this is because central government (Tories) have starved many Local Authorities all over the UK of funding. This means that L.A's now haven't the money to do anything about the former industrial brownbelt land within their cities, and immediately on the edges of it. And so a lot of new building in general has ground to a halt, because of this. Essentially the ball is in the court of the central government. But as with most things these days; a lot of the problems the UK now faces stem from the actions and decisions (government policies) taken by the Tories over the last 14 years. It was NOT this bad under the last Labour government. Nowhere near as bad as it is now re: Planning for new buildings. L.A's back then (2010) received more funding to actually complete large building projects. But as we know, the Tories are excessively 'pro centralisation' and anti- federal (anti- devolvement of power). This why the situation in the UK with so many things now, is vastly different from the situation back in 2010. Labour were not as crushingly pro-centralisation. They also trusted LA's much more than the Tories do. This too has made a huge difference. There's a real lack of trust shown by central government towards all LA's - even Tory controlled ones! This mindset needs to change. Hopefully it will do, with a Labour government in the near future.

@Simply1ism 10 дней назад

The title says we stopped building. I thought I'd help humanity of the Uk and was building them for two years. No shortage of work or a career in it. Now back in Environmental monitoring again i find there's demand like never before cos of the population comproming the land, water and air! Have recently investrd in NG for new infrastructure. Well done raising the discussions. If things can be resolved in the next decade I will stop considering retirement in France. Thanks 👍

@sirjohng1 9 дней назад

Where do you live? All around where I live our farmland is disappearing under homes at an alarming rate with Services nowhere near able to respond.

@BittersweetMayhem 18 часов назад

Totally agree. The UK doesn't actually have much land to build on. We already deforested everything and now selling off farm land. It can't all be housing

@ivanviehoff6025 9 дней назад

A excellent summary. Ultimately, we can't afford not to make these investments, or we will get ever poorer. Some short term belt-tightening, especially by those who are better able to tighten their belts, to fund useful investment, is essential to our recovery. Two more impediments to building at reasonable cost here are safety laws, and our legal system. In Britain it is a legal requirement to implement safety measures that are disproportionately costly, in a tortuous chain of legal logic. A law requires safety risks to be made "as low as reasonably practicable". But how expensive makes something not "reasonably practicable"? In a case over interpretation of this, a judge ruled that if the cost is utterly disproportionate, then that is not "reasonably practicable". The implication is that if cost is only disproportionate, then it has to be spent. In 2021, the Office of Rail and Road, the regulator of Network Rail and Highways England published a paper sizing this, saying that cost that was only 3 to 10 times what a cost-benefit test would find reasonable, then the safety measure should be implemented. And so our cost-benefit guidance, which decides how to spend our money, is over-ruled. We have assessed a value of life, and a judge says we have to behave as if it was 3 to 10 times what research says they should be. Meanwhile our health system is using the lower value of life, and so improving the safety of public infrastructure grabs an unfair share of public funding vs the NHS. And then there's our legal system. A lawyer once complained that he supported a major railway contract in Spain, and the contract was only 20 pages long, in contrast to the 1000+ pages that would happen in Britain. Not much work for lawyers in that, nor indeed much negotiation support over all those details that had to be agreed. The reason is that so many of the things that have to negotiated and specified every time in British contracts are in a standard legal code in Spain, and other continental legal systems. It making the legalities of construction contracts so much cheaper, easier and predictable to deal with. I think it is no coincidence that the US, whose legal system is more similar to ours than to continental countries, also has a construction cost problem.

@8agpuss 10 дней назад

Lots of people who know nothing about planning talking about it. There are far more planning permissions in place for houses that never get built. Nobody ever asks planning professionals. It is easy to point the finger but without actual understanding nothing will change. There is a reason why new Governments claim they will cut planning 'red tape' but never actually do. In fact the process is usually made ever more complicated and opaque.

@juangomezfuentes8825 9 дней назад

It is not really about how many permission are approved in total but what percentage gets approved. The big companies apply for a lot of permission at the same time essentially to reduce the risk of rejected permission where they really want to build. This is actually pretty bad for small companies. A Zonal system like in the most of Europe will remove these unnecessary uncertainties that just play against the smaller companies that dont have the financial muscle to resist this system.

@tomjohnson9833 5 дней назад

If you allow a small nation to have an excessive population, you will be faced with the increasingly acute choice between building enough homes and destroying the countryside. We are already highly dependent on imports for most of our food, which makes us highly sensitive to food price inflation. Its all about population. Incidentally, if we controlled net migration, our natural birthrate would see a gentle decline in population, which would ease pressure on everything, from public services to farming, from utilities and energy to housing costs.

@justinstephenson9360 9 дней назад

Long delays in infrastructure projects in the UK is not new. The planning process for T5 at Heathrow was so long that it constituted almost the entire working career for some of the lawyers involved and that was 40 years ago. As for public spending cuts, it is not just cutting investment in new projects that comes top of the list but also the maintenance budget for existing buildings and infrastructure. A few years down the line the maintenance backlog is often so large that it is cheaper to demolish existing buildings and start again. Again this is nothing new, I remember looking at a proposal for a new hospital in W Midlands in the 1990s, the maintenance backlog at the existing site stretched back over 40 years to within a couple of years of the founding of the NHS Land banking is a great myth, it does exist but not to the level people suggest. The problem is not that builders prioritise high value, low volume homes to maximise profits but rather that the lack of skilled trades people means that they have little option but to do that. This has resulted in a feedback situation - fewer houses built means fewer opportunities for training of skilled trades, which leads to fewer people with the skills and hence fewer homes built. One way around that is for the building industry to adopt more modern building methods but the reality is that the building industry has moved away from that due to customers wanting a "traditional" home and the finance industry being wary of more modern construction methods

@edmundblackaddercoc8522 12 дней назад

It's all going to change as I've heard they have been given the go ahead to build new towns! Not a few houses,towns. Keep a look out I your local areas.

@arghjayem 10 дней назад

Is that the current Government promising that? The one that said they’d have built 100 new hospitals by now?😂

@Brutalk1d 12 дней назад

High value - low volume - low quality...sounds better!

@ukrytykrytyk8477 8 дней назад

I watched the entire video just to see if you will ever mention land ownership structure. I haven't heard one word being told about it, why is that?

@jimbojambo4008 10 дней назад

The first to introduce planning law in 1947??? I very much doubt that. The first instance of planning permission in Denmark was in the 1850s, mainly based on fire and sanitation regulations.

@MightiiNinja 12 дней назад

Great video and analysis. The main issue I have with housing is that we, as a nation, have artificially, vastly increased demand for housing through excessive immigration. We need more houses, yes, but we should vastly reduce (or stop) immigration to the UK, at least until we’re in a position to accommodate others.

@abrin5508 11 дней назад

build more houses until immigration stops. why should people who need houses pay for incompetence of politicians.

@fortune-cookie-monster 9 дней назад

For decades, investors have been using housing stock as an investment vehicle, which has lead to house price inflation wildly above the official inflation rate. The inflation rate was artificially low in order to effectively stop the economy from imploding after the 2008 economic crisis. None of the causes of the 2008 crisis were addressed and the record low interest rates enabled larger mortgages, forcing normal people to take on increasingly large debts while wages don't keep up. The banks and large land owners are continuing to make an absolute killing from this, while the majority of us are slaving away to pay almost all the money we earn to service our debts. Notice that the I haven't mentioned immigrants yet but this is where they come into this sorry story... The governments blamed Covid and Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and yes, these definitely lead to a short term spike in inflation. However, house prices etc. were way too high even before Covid. This is because it's the compounding effect of inflation over decades, due to the artificially low interest rates mentioned above. This is the cancer that has caused the rising inequality. This is the reason we are getting poorer. So, now that everything, everywhere all at once is breaking because it is no longer affordable, the establishment wants us to blame immigrants. After all, if we don't blame immigrants, we may just notice that it is them and demand change!

@MightiiNinja 9 дней назад

@@fortune-cookie-monster excellent summary of why housing costs are as high as they are. I do not blame immigrants for the state of our country; the problems that you and I have mentioned are 100% our government’s fault. Both costs and demand would not be so high, if not for years of inept governance, and policies that only benefit the wealthy few. That being said, excessive immigration is the main reason for the current high housing demand. Native birth rates have not been at replacement levels since the mid 70’s, so even with the current rate of new-builds being built, housing supply would be enough to meet demand under normal circumstances.

@fortune-cookie-monster 9 дней назад

@@MightiiNinja Thanks. You are absolutely correct in pointing out that native birth rates have been falling. In fact, we have a demographic time bomb to throw onto the pile of other insurmountable problems that have been ignored by inept governments for so long. Immigration numbers have increased over the last decade too, this is true. The extra demand from immigrants definitely doesn't help the housing crisis for sure, but it isn't the driving force behind the crisis either. We have the highest level of homelessness in the G7 (by a long way) but more often than not, this is due to a lack of social housing and unaffordable house prices and rent. We can all agree on that. Those problems are mostly caused by council houses being sold off and not replaced and then house prices being inflated due to ever increasingly huge mortgages and investors using houses as a stock market alternative. In fact, there are huge numbers of empty houses being built around the Sussex Coast area, where I live, but the developers are trying to sell most of them as "shared ownership" because they are not affordable to most local people. Often, these houses are built on private roads with high monthly maintenance costs too because the impoverishes councils and no longer pay for the privatised utilities to be put in, like they used to. So around here at least, we don't have a housing shortage at all. However, with 3 small bedroom houses starting at £350k to £400k, we have a terrible affordable housing shortage. Nothing to do with immigrants at all, as far as I can see.

@MightiiNinja 8 дней назад

I haven’t been to your ends for a while, but it’s a great part of the UK. It’s very true, homelessness is a serious problem; it’s been on the rise in Yorkshire for the last few years, since I moved here (drugs are the main cause, but most people wouldn’t turn to drugs if their lives/society were functional). I do agree that we have a serious shortage of both affordable and social housing, especially in the South! It doesn’t help that a significant number of social housing is given to people who weren’t born here (especially in London), but you’re right - the biggest issue is that the few available houses in a good price range are bought up by landlords/developers. High taxes, bureaucracy, and bad/inconsistent policies have made housing and land the main investment vehicles, with little support for new entrepreneurs or SMEs that would traditionally receive more of such funding (yet another example of our government’s stupidity and shortsightedness). Ultimately however, when we have high immigration in such a short time (with a significant proportion of people becoming state dependents, in need of housing), it’s no wonder there’s not enough affordable housing to go around. Property developers will never build more houses than they need to, so if high immigration artificially inflates demand, they can keep their new-build prices high. I’m sure if the rest of the UK were like the Sussex Coast, the free market would inevitably lead to house price reduction, as the housing supply would be greater than the demand.

@adrianpope3182 День назад

Stopped building? Are you joking? It's carnage in Kent. Goodbye countryside, and vast swathes of Grade 1 farmland. The only good thing is that the people doing this to us will go hungry too. You can't buy food if it's not there

@PGHEngineer 9 дней назад

I only got a few seconds in and I was thinking channel tunnel, crossrail, hs2. Go away now.....

@terencewise7349 10 дней назад

From Terence Wise in UK.........This is not really about the green belt because as someone who regularly travels to our old English cities as you approach them you do so trough hundreds of acres of desolate industrial areas.

@o0oBeckyWilliamso0o 10 дней назад

Thanks for this video and the work that you do, it's brilliant. I think housing is one of the fundamental problems in this country and no politician wants to touch it, meaning the pressures on the NHS (who are the lowest social denominator) continue.

@warrenbooth2103 9 дней назад

A million houses takes up 150 square miles of land, and on top of that we lose 12 sq miles of land to erosion.

@MrAntreaspaok 11 дней назад

if only normal people had an insight in the construction sector, the contracts, the money, the scams etc....

@lukecottrell1426 9 дней назад

Planner here, 1:13 is not true, CIL and S106 delivers millions of £££ for public services - this omission is telling if the fact most people don’t realise how much land value uplift is levied towards public services

@khairulnaeim756 11 дней назад

They are different way,but up to their people yes or no ...

@andrewwoodgate3769 9 дней назад

I don't want hectares of poorly-designed sprawl trashing the environment.

@Pegaroo_ 9 дней назад

7:12 Is the government responsible for construction of new reservoirs in the age of privately owned water companies? Shouldn't that investment come from said water companies? Isn't that what we pay our bills for? Same goes for power lines, National Grid is listed on LSE

@will2brown50 6 дней назад

Yes, but this is a failure of the water regulator which sets ridiculously low rates of investment for these firms. In an ideal world, nationalise them. For a compromise, regulate them properly. What we have right now is a joke. The companies do all they are legally made to do, and no more, and we should have expected that really.

@Pegaroo_ 6 дней назад

@@will2brown50 No they do way less than they legally need to but the government told regulators not to test the water so the water companies stopped treating it

@ericritchie6783 10 дней назад

... There's plenty of land to use that doesn't infringe on wildlife and conservation... A lot of agricultural land with very low ecological value that could probably do with more workers on hand to grow a greater diversity of crops to better standards. The trouble is you can't just put a dwelling on the corner of a field because you can't change land registered as agricultural use land to residential use very lightly. Even if in practice the square metres here and there on the margins of fields is hardly going to meaningfully reduce yields. (As in houses dotted around on margins, not housing estates in the middle of a big enough field) Then if you are growing a greater diversity of crops with more work related dwellings around it could potentially improve yields. This whole moaning about not being able to evict bat's or rate species of whatever from the few margins they have left is seriously out of all proportion.. It's just another line of attack on conservationists and environmentalist "Greenies." Perhaps if these new houses weren't so shoddy and fit into landscapes better (literally earthships style homes why not) perhaps people would be less adverse to having them around their back yards...

@shaun906 12 дней назад

labour has policies to fix some of these problems. what do you think of the tone of their manifesto?

@Tropical_Frank 10 дней назад

Procurement Corrrrruuuuppptionnn!!!! No bid contracts and over invoicing.

@BittersweetMayhem 18 часов назад

I know regulations are strict but that is for a reason. These houses need to last for decades. They cant be poorly designed. The whole community needs to be considered when these are built. Drainage, height, building materials and other stuff i probs dont know about. I dont want them to just throw up crap houses. Design them properly. Why dont they just limit the number of non UK residents who can own property. So we dont get investors from other countries just owning shit.

@mraksuperk 12 дней назад

Unless their house building targets are for social housing it is a waste of time. Also the truth is that they ie the government are lobbied by the banks and lenders to not hit their targets because it could crash their bubble.If they supplied the demand then house prices would crash and the lenders loans would be in negative equity.

@tabithan2978 10 дней назад

Maybe it’s best because isn’t England the most densely populated country in Europe now?

@juangomezfuentes8825 9 дней назад

No, it is not. The UK is the 52th most dense country in the world. In Europe among the countries bigger than a single city is the third. But that is miss leading too, because it is not the same to leave in London than in the Highlands, or simply in Salisbury. If you live in Moscow, you wont feel that Russia has a low population density, because you dont really care what is 100 km from where you live being or not being in the same country. Doesnt France account for the Guyana province to do their average?. That is what I mean. Depends on what particular part you live, not the average of the entire territory. China has a density of half the UK, but I bet that is not what the average Chinese feels like. Build more in London is probably not that good, build more in Salisbury probably is. Everything is relative.

@robtyman4281 7 дней назад

No, The Netherlands is.

@peterteagleteagle9958 12 дней назад

Even if say you got permission to build say a million houses ,where would you find the bricklayers, plasters, carpenters

@barbthegreat586 10 дней назад

Exactly!

@VeteranAlpha 10 дней назад

You can thank Brexit for that. Without Brexit you would've easily found workers from all over the EU to do bricklaying, plastering and carpentry. But you reap what you voted for. 🤗

@andrewsalmon100 7 дней назад

Why does everyone bang on about price?. It's infrastructure. It's the corruption jealousy thing: oh I should personally have that cash for my obsession.

@davidhartwell4826 10 дней назад

If this was the 1930s we would not have the National Grid because the Nimbys and Bananas ( ban anything near anything) would have objected to the grid pylons striding over the hills and through the dales the same as they are objecting now to a grid route in East Anglia distributing power from the North Sea wind farms.

@nicks4934 11 дней назад

If Brunel was alive today he’d be turning in his grave

@Sam-zw1py 9 дней назад

That doesn't make sense

@tobylynch 8 дней назад

He wouldn't be able to build anything with today's regulations.

@dennisfraser6896 10 дней назад

No building in Aberdeen and surroundings there are new buildings everyehere.???????

@rogermanvell2367 5 дней назад

In a democratic polity people have the right to have a say on the population size and density of their country. I suspect that building more houses is rather akin to building more roads i.e it has the effect of increasing demand further and ruining the once emblematic countryside of England. A rush to build on the countryside will be a terrible mistake for the quality of life of millions in England.

@ianbooth3164 12 дней назад

I've advocated emigration for young people since 2010 and see no reason to change my mind. The decline into poverty is inevitable with our governance model. It's over.

@riveness 11 дней назад

If you want to make the environment loss, you should, for a proper argument, address the massive diversity loss. Local issues are generally due to local councillors ignoring planning advice.

@arghjayem 10 дней назад

08:10 our planning system is disastrous. Ironically it was only really created because we were building too much and the government wanted to slow building down! Well that backfired! 😂

@bipollarazralon1262 10 дней назад

Mr. Tejvan Pettinger, you guys don't have skyscrapers in the UK?

@BittersweetMayhem 18 часов назад

People hate living in apartments. Particularly families. And it does deprive people of gardens, block sunlight and reduce community spirit

@mohammedfarhaan6843 12 дней назад

As an international student, I was often confused about UK. So developed in some areas but lagging behind in the other areas. That’s when I noticed that UK had stopped investing in infrastructure and that it has high costs for menial services.

@user-rk3vw3pk4w 12 дней назад

The only way the UK is developed is finance. In other fields the UK is far behind other western countries

@NoJusticeMTG 12 дней назад

By 'we're not building enough electric network' that is of course, the privatised national grid company, inexplicably taken out of the public domain by thatcher

@Harry-TramAnh 12 дней назад

Try and get permission to build a new power station or wind farm.

@dewindoethdwl2798 12 дней назад

Inexplicably?? The reason was to put any money made into private hands, shareholders, instead of into the treasury. Thatcher was looking after her city mates who have asset stripped the infrastructure by failing to maintain it in fully reliable condition and then leveraged hard to get more money out of the business, hence the debts. Pure social vandalism.

@fl-ri- 10 дней назад

Yeah but they can't build anything because the planning permission. Where Margret Thatcher messed up wasnt privatising industries, but privatising without repealing the 1947 planning act.

@dobias28 11 дней назад

No mate, renewables are not the future. Maybe a dream at best but nothing more.

@etaokha4164 11 дней назад

London bridge has fallen down

@prolarka 12 дней назад

I am pretty sure that all these problems will solve themselves if we only accept everyone as immigrants with very low bar for entry. The politicians would never lie to us, right?

@tedmagnum6968 9 дней назад

The UK doesn't have enough Green spaces left as it it. It doesn't need more "contrete for growth". Use the brownield space of which there is a lot of. Repurpose and reuse. These huge housing companies want flat clear green land. Because it's cheaper to build on. And houses which do get built !!! Here on the Wirral, they only seem to build five bedroomed detached houses with double driveways and gardens. And then you get two old people living in it. You could build DOUBLE the amount of decent smaller homes in that space. And home three times as many people.

@matthewharding-ew1ts 12 дней назад

You have the UK as the third most densely populated country in europe? To be correct, England alone is slightly behind the Dutch as the most densely populated country.

@xVancha 12 дней назад

He said the UK was behind Belgium and the Netherlands, but there's a handful of countries in Europe that are higher than any of them.

@TheBooban 11 дней назад

I don't see anything wrong with protecting bats. We build stuff all the time and then they are environmental catastrophes. Its often just careless and short sighted. You just need competent people to handle these regulations. I think the government lack these people.

@dewaard3301 12 дней назад

Thinking it's just one reason is what's keeping us bogged down in discussions about which policy change to make.

@raffiefoxmew3691 11 дней назад

There's no point building new homes when by the time the new homes are built, the population will have increased by twice as many as the homes built. With the human madness that is going on with population out of control, if that were any other species, we'd be issuing major population culls and would have years ago. We are mammals and not immune to overpopulation and over consumption of the land. Fix the population crisis as a matter of international emergency, then deal with the rest. There is no higher priority, if you really want the problem solved for good, rather than just kicking the can for the next generation to suffer even harder with.

@nade5557 9 дней назад

Simply put: developments are by companies for profit. We need the government to step in and stop this nonsense, and actually build the million or so houses that have planning permission for the people

@simonhodgetts6530 10 дней назад

Michael Gove.

@jontalbot1 8 дней назад

Stick to economics and not planning which you know little about. Local authorities do not have a veto. They operate within a national framework no one saw as being problematic for decades. The thing which has changed is public attitudes. There is widespread opposition, especially among older and more affluent people to any form of development. Politicians simply reflect that.

@timjones9962 11 дней назад

You haven't got any good tradesmen left, they've all left for greener pastures and I don't blame them.

@UtubeRwokeLefties 12 дней назад

The real reason is that all the money is wasted on London.

@chrishart8548 12 дней назад

New houses dont really cause more pollution. Pollution as its just the same amount of people spread throughout more houses

@barbthegreat586 10 дней назад

It's not the houses, it's the infrastructure that you need to build to service new houses.

@PauloAdriano-zo2ng 9 дней назад

Yes, yes, yes. There was a Time when Persia was the center of the known world (550-330 BCE), but times change. The Greeks suffered the same fate. Britian is no longer Great, it's just another middle ranking European power with lots of debt, the same is true for France. History is cyclical. Greatness and Prosperity never rest in just one or two places, they move around in both Time and Space.

@jacmar44 12 дней назад

The up and down nature of investment in the UK drives the costs. All contractors in the UK know projects may be cancelled or shelved and so do not set their rates reasonably but instead have a feast and famine type attitude where they aim to stuff their pockets whilst projects are flowing to see them through downturns. It then becomes a case of people leaving industries when they're unmaintained - early retirements, redundancies etc, so you don't keep experience and technical continuity. If railway building and electrification was done through a manageable rolling programme costs would fall significantly.

@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi 12 дней назад

was the "national trust" mentioned ? :-)

@MartinJG100 12 дней назад

Let's not forget the pincer movement of excessive immigration and the demographic 'boomer' ticking time bomb with an increasing number of available properties as numbers gradually dwindle.....

@widebleek8138 11 дней назад

There is one way: RJT 🇪🇺

@markawhite888 10 дней назад

The best overview of british planning and the impact on UK infrastructure I have heard in 2024. Will any party take heed and plan for the long tern of UK infrastructure.

@davidcarr2216 11 дней назад

Britain was also a military nation and had a great big empire with resources and cheap labour to draw upon. Today it doesn't have any of that. It has low growth and so investers have turned it into a rentier economy - wake up and smell the coffee. This video is about nostalgia. The future will not be the same as the past.

@davidlegrice4207 12 дней назад

Environmental protection so often get blamed but I do wander just how much effect they actually have compared to other issues, especially when you consider that some things people might think of as environmental protection are actually just nimbyism in disguise such as green belts which arbitrarily block development on green land around a city regardless of it's environmental value (so people on the outskirts of the city don't have to see houses from their back window)

@barbthegreat586 10 дней назад

The main problem is that there aren't enough people to build, not the bats. This is the same for several other EU countries. And you also nentioned nothing about land ownerships because bats are the low hanging fruit.