Brickonomics

From a news story in yesterday’s The Daily Telegraph:

Five million new homes will be needed in England over the next 20 years, 1.5 million of them because of record levels of immigration, according to Government figures published yesterday.

From the accompanying editorial:

The basis of this claim is questionable.

Indeed it is. From the government press release announcing the new figures:

The household projections are not an assessment of housing need.

The basis of the claim in the Telegraph is questionable mostly because the Telegraph has invented it. The government figures released are projections of future household growth if current demographic trends continue. They are unconstrained by the availability of housing.

But as both the government and the Telegraph are well aware, housing is extremely expensive at the moment, and likely to remain so for some time. So whereas one person households account for 150,000 of the 209,000 projected annual household growth, in reality many of these single people will not form households of their own, but will stay at home or share with other single people. Alternatively, they’ll all go live in tiny flats in London, sparing the Telegraph’s beloved South East from the depradations of Mr Prescott’s bulldozers.

But even if that doesn’t happen and every single new household requires a new home, every single one of which must be built on new land – how much land would be used up? Handily, Charles Clover of the Telegraph has the calculation to hand:

If translated into new homes built, this would mean the loss of more than 368 square miles of countryside … in 20 years. That is a rate of urbanisation of 16 square miles a year.

The total area of England is over 50,000 square miles. I would have thought that a government that allegedly wants to ‘concrete over the countryside‘ can do better than less than 1% of the land area in 20 years.