Britain's housing crisis -the brownfield solution

摘要

As the dust from the May general election begins to settle, housing - a key point of discussion during the campaign - remains a key issue. The governing party - the Conservatives - promised during the campaign that they'd build 200,000 new houses, but this simply is not enough. And in real terms, how many of these will even get off the ground? There's no denying that our housing shortage is a political hot potato of epic proportions. During the election campaign, Green Party leader Natalie Bennett got caught out on talk radio station LBC when she said that her party planned to build 500,000 new homes for £2.7bn (a cost of around £60,000 per home) if they came into power. The interviewer Nick Ferrari amusingly quipped "what are they made of? Plywood?" in retort, and proceeded to rip the ill-conceived policy to shreds. Humorous as it may be, this just highlights the problems that face the ruling party when it comes to finding the budget to build all of the new houses we need.