We need to wake up to the scale of the UK’s housing crisis

We all know we’re not building enough homes in the UK. There has not been a year in the last 14 when we have got near to the government’s arbitrary target of 300,000. Just how low that target is has been rammed home by the government’s own estimates of net migration into the UK over the last couple of years.

Hardly a day goes by when Rwanda doesn’t appear in a headline. Enormous amounts of political capital have been expended on worrying about the 30,000 people who arrived on our shores without asking – and we seem incapable of finding a solution if indeed one needs finding in the first place. Rishi Sunak seems set on the threat of deportation and frankly while Keir Starmer might mock his lack of success he singularly fails to outline a serious alternative.

All good Punch and Judy in the Commons, but the real issue is not the 30,000 boat people, it’s the official confirmation that net migration into the UK stood at 672,000 between June 2022 and June 2023, the vast majority of new migrants being admitted legally.

This is the huge challenge the next government faces and that I hear nothing of in all the current debates. We don’t talk enough about our decades-long reliance on cheap migrant labour. While other advanced economies have invested more in technology and training, the UK first relied on the former Soviet-controlled nations of Eastern Europe whose economies were on their knees and whose people were desperate to come here. It was one of the main reasons for the large Leave vote in the 2016 referendum in the North of England that while workers there were generally tolerant of shop signs in Polish, they could see that these new hard working people were keeping their own wages down and they responded accordingly.

Many migrants left during Covid and found life back home massively improved after 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and never came back. We then increasingly relied on Ukrainians until the war erupted in 2022. Now the migrants are coming from Africa, the war torn Middle East and further afield. A new wave of millions of desperately poor families take incredible risks to get to the rich nations in Europe, the US and elsewhere where jobs and a safer way of life are possible. How the developed world responds to this massive wave of migrants who just want a better life than they suffer back home is not for these pages.

What does need to be discussed is what property industry should be doing to help address the problem, and the harsh reality is that it should be aiming for 500,000 homes a year minimum. That means training a new indigenous workforce where currently 30% of tradespeople are over 50 and not being replaced. It means reforming a planning system that is well known to be spectacularly poorly suited to encouraging development. It means at least half a dozen new Milton Keynes. It means taking a fresh look at urban densification and being less obsessed with where we can’t build and massively more incisive about the need for homes.

Getting away from reliance on cheap labour is a massive undertaking and will consume at least the next decade, even if the government is determined to tackle the problem. It is however vital if the UK’s population is not to grow even larger than the 70 million the government currently forecasts by 2030. Radical planning reform is long overdue. Training a decent construction workforce will not happen overnight so needs to start now. Meanwhile, homelessness will be a continuing scar on the face of our nation until governments of every persuasion accept just how serious our challenge is. We know all this. Why are we so blind to the sheer scale of the problem?