As housing inequality increases, new homes are being built where they’re least needed

New research from the University of St Andrews has shown that, despite the policy focus on increased house building across the UK, new homes are created where they are least needed and housing distribution is increasingly unequal. 

Published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, the research analysed housing data by following every local authority district in England and Wales through four censuses, from 1991 to 2021. They found that by 2021 most local authorities held their widest surplus of homes over households in 30 years. London’s homes in the latest census outnumbered households by 8.7%, as its prices set records too. 

However, researchers also discovered that new homes go where they’re least needed. 

Until 2001, local building and local population increased together, and more housebuilding was observed in places of relative housing shortage. However, since then it has reversed, piling up where a surplus already exists while high-pressure areas attract the least. This has created a widening gap in housing distribution, further worsened by the geographies of housing overcrowding and of low-use homes, coined ‘Concentric Mismatch’. 

Researchers found a hollowed-out core of second/empty homes in London (Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Camden), a ring of rising overcrowding around big cities (Barking and Dagenham, Birmingham, Oldham), and a commuter belt using up its spare rooms. This shows that housing pressure that has progressively been pushed outward. 

This year, the UK Government has promised the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war years and confirmed the ambitious housebuilding targets of 1.5 million new homes by the end of the current session of Parliament. These findings provide a fundamental flaw at the heart of how homes may be distributed to provide housing stock where it is most needed. 

Gauthier Dulout from the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, who led the research, said: “The answer should be about addressing mal-distribution, not more housebuilding targets: 1.5 million homes is 300,000 a year – similar to Harold Macmillan’s ambitious 1953 figure – but with little control over where they are actually built. We should be asking where and for whom should this housing go. How is this problem solved? We should be more ambitious and bring forward new systems-thinking to tax, to tenure, to new housing delivery, in order to address this increasing inequality and better use the existing housing stock.” 

ENDS