Does the UK need to start building new council estates to deal with the housing crisis?

Dr Steve McCabe with analysis on the need for new social housing.he also discusses Labour’s plans to develop parts of the UK green belt.

Transcript

00:00Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, social housing is another crisis. And you look at the levels

00:07of homelessness, they have gone up. And of course, that costs councils who've got to

00:12deal with homeless. They've got to put them somewhere. So they end up in bedsits and hotels,

00:18which of course is utterly dreadful. Why did that stop? Well, of course, again, we had

00:23a lot of social housing built in the post-war period. But again, I'm not going to lay everything

00:29at her door, but a certain Margaret Thatcher, you know, the right to buy, of course, you

00:33know, the, dare I say it, the sort of the good housing, council housing, if I may sort

00:37of call it that, insofar as, of course, the sort of traditional sort of properties, you

00:41know, they were sold off, which left councils to sort of deal with the sort of, they obviously

00:46lost revenue from that. The Labour Party says its plans to build on parts of the Greenbelt

00:51aims to ease the housing crisis by developing urban adjacent sites. They focus on creating

00:58affordable homes while protecting the green spaces. The Conservative Party opposes the

01:03plan, arguing it threatens the countryside and suggest prioritising brownfield sites

01:09instead. Well, it's, I mean, the simple answer is yes, because of course, if there's more

01:15supply, because of course, there is a sort of a problem of the sort of the existing number

01:18of houses and the sort of the fact that the population is, despite the sort of the fact

01:22that sort of, I don't know if people saw in the recent statistics, for the first time

01:26since 1976, there were more deaths than there were births. But of course, add in the sort

01:32of the incoming sort of population, i.e. migration, both legal, and of course, the other sort

01:37of form, which of course is often sort of regarded as being illegal. So of course, we

01:41have more people, you know, there is bigger demand. And of course, house builders are

01:44not building in the sort of the huge numbers they did, certainly in the post-war period.

01:48So I mean, clearly putting in more supply is going to be good. But hey, you know, that's

01:53a long term solution. And I suspect that sort of the issues of sort of planning are

01:57going to sort of play their sort of their role in this.