Why Britain stopped building homes
For twenty years after the war Britain built houses at a rate it has never come close to since. The reasons it stopped are specific, and mostly deliberate.
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Britain in 1968 completed more than four hundred thousand homes. It has not managed anything close to that in the fifty years since, and for most of that period it has not seriously tried. This film is about the machinery behind that change: not one decision, but a set of them, taken by different people for different reasons, which together made building slow.
Three of those decisions do most of the work. The state stopped building directly. Planning permission became discretionary rather than automatic. And the value created when farmland becomes building land was left, mostly, with whoever happened to own the field.
What the film covers
Chapters
- 00:00The number nobody believesPost-war completions, and why the figure is real.
- 03:41Councils as housebuilders
- 09:12The 1947 settlementNationalising development rights without nationalising land.
- 15:30Right to Buy and the end of replacement
- 21:04Where the value goes
- 25:18What would actually change the number
Notes
The film moves quickly through the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which is the hinge the whole story turns on. It did two things at once: it nationalised the right to develop land, so that permission became something the state grants case by case, and it left ownership of the land itself untouched. Every argument Britain has had about housing since is downstream of that combination. We take it apart properly in the land question.
Demonstration data only — shape is indicative, figures are not sourced. Replace before publication.
The other half of the story is money. Councils built at scale when they could borrow to do it and had the staff to manage it; both were removed, gradually, from the late 1970s onwards. That is a local government story as much as a housing one, and it is why the same council that cannot build also cannot maintain what it already owns.
The land market does not respond to need. It responds to permission.
One thing the film deliberately avoids: the claim that any single group is responsible. Landowners, developers, councillors and residents are all behaving rationally given the rules they are handed. The rules are the subject.
Sources & further reading3
- Town and Country Planning Act 1947legislation.gov.uk, 1947The statute that made development rights a public grant.
- Live tables on house building: new build dwellingsMinistry of Housing, Communities and Local GovernmentThe primary series for completions, starts and tenure.
- English Housing SurveyMHCLGAnnual survey of stock condition and tenure.