A Million Homes Will Need to be Retrofitted for 30 years

Housing need manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as in solving increased levels of overcrowding, acute affordability issues, young people living with their parents for more extended periods, and impaired labour mobility (resulting in businesses finding it difficult to recruit and retain staff), and increased levels of homelessness. Then there is the problem of “fit for climate change dwellings”, which is the majority of all homes.

Older properties need to be updated. Around 18% of the UK's annual emissions come from existing homes, which will still be standing in 2050. 80% of 2050’s homes have already been built.

It is also widely acknowledged that the retrofit challenge is monumental. Every year over one million homes will need to be retrofitted for 30 years. We cannot afford to retrofit them twice. But if we retrofit them well, we can enjoy many environmental, social and economic benefits.

New houses need help to achieve sales. 313,043 households have now bought a home with the support of the Government’s ‘Help to Buy’ Equity Loan Scheme. The question to ask is whether the houses were built to meet the local need or were they built speculatively and required subsidies to sell them?

House price escalation has attracted fund investment resulting in circular property inflation. Meantime the housing stock cannot match the needs of a growing population (this applies in Scotland and Wales as well).

As the government White Paper puts it: “It is no longer unusual for houses to “earn” more than the people living in them. In 2015, the average home in the South East of England increased in value by £29,000, while the average annual pay in the region was just £24,542. The average London home made its owner more than £22 an hour during the working week in 2015 considerably more than the average Londoner’s hourly rate and that's over twice the minimum wage.

That’s good news if you own a property in the capital, but it’s a big barrier to entry if you don’t.

Meantime the growing move towards house prices falling is a problem. Recent figures add to evidence that, despite government subsidies, the property market is now in the grip of a downturn, with experts predicting values could fall by more than 10%. That would erase some of the gains made over the last two years.

Many houses are in poor condition, and a significant proportion of the housing stock is unused.

There were 225,845 Long-Term Vacant Dwellings in England in 2019, an increase of 9,659 (4.5%) from 216,186 in 2018. Long-term vacant dwellings at 0.9 per cent of the 2019 dwelling stock in England are an interesting underutilised housing asset.

Thus we have knowledge of the nature of the housing stock in the UK. There would seem to be a lot to be done not only to add to the housing stock but to bring the existing properties to be climate change ready.

Photo by Hisham Yahya