Build it Yourself
Government proposals will see annual housing targets for Hastings increase from 490 to 722, but currently we are only managing just over 115 a year – KEN DAVIS proposes a DIY solution
We need more homes and that’s a fact; we need a better planning system and that’s a fact too. Nationally, the Labour government is looking to build 300,000 houses a year over their term in parliament, and that’s a dream, with little idea of how it might become reality.
At the moment there are about 200,000 houses built a year. Vestry (consisting of Bovis, Linden, and Countryside), is the country’s largest housebuilder with an anticipated total build this year of 18,000 houses (up from 17,000 in 2024). Hardly a spectacular leap forward. Interestingly, the number of self-build houses in 2018 – the latest year that figures are available – was 13,000. The lack of a more up-to-date figure is both a reflection of how unimportant government deems the potential for people building their own homes, and how hugely off-putting our dysfunctional planning system is to potential self-builders.
As we all know, the country got itself into this mess when Margaret Thatcher decided to sell off council housing stock; something that a subsequent Labour government stopped but then David Cameron reinstated. However, successive governments have always made three fundamental mistakes with housing. The first is to think in numbers rather than a balance between numbers and quality. The second is ignoring the instinctive nest-building power behind those that want to, and are capable of, self-build. The third is not to use publicly owned land to drive the latent base self-build load that is stymied by an absurd planning system and having to buy your building plot upfront. Making un- or under- used public land (and there is a lot of it) available free of charge until any self-build house is occupied, and simplifying the planning system, would produce far more houses than Vestry and the like could ever produce.
Moreover, the filling of gap sites, perhaps awkward and beyond the developer norms – they prefer green fields where standardisation and cost cutting can prevail – when correctly directed, can rejuvenate existing urban areas and so encourage local residents and small scale developers to invest time and money into existing buildings. Self-build not only has a track record of being completed to higher standards, but can be very varied in how it is achieved. It can run the whole gamut from self-design and laying every brick, etc., by the self-builder, to buying in a standard off-the-shelf design for a prefabricated building with maybe just the foundations and incoming mains services being done by a local ground worker.
With even government ministers now making statements about the ineffectiveness of the planning system, it’s clear that a major overhaul is necessary to create an easier system to use and one which recognises the value of self-build. On a currently pending application to turn a run-down Victorian two-bedroomed house into three energy efficient flats, I had to pay a fee of £1,200 and received a 61-page document of the ‘planning requirements’ I had to respond to, and we are supposedly in a housing demand crisis! Just how such demands encourage anyone to submit planning applications is simply beyond me, especially when the ‘requirements’ which have to be answered are either very costly to provide, unnecessary, or contradictory.
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