Britain's Housing Crisis

Broken Homes: Britain's Housing Crisis: Faults, Factoids and Fixes by Peter Bill and Jackie Sadek

Today’s housing crisis featured in an earlier Bookshelf. I make no apology for another housing-related reading recommendation, this time 200 or so pages of useful historic context, anecdotes and picture-painting stories.

Many of us have zero expectation that the new West Northamptonshire Local Plan will deliver housing estates any different than those built in recent decades - unsustainable homes lacking rooftop solar electricity and water heating, arranged in heavily car dependent layouts with, at best, only token local services within walking distance.

As in life, we are where we are today. If we are to progress to where we'd wish to be then some practical insight is useful. This easy to read book describes an industry for converting speculative land acquisitions into units of accommodation, where, instead of successful 'place-making', builders focus on superficial 'kerb appeal' to sell their homes.

Co-author Peter Bill, former construction surveyor and long-term industry commentator, describes how profit-maximising house-builders control their market and explains why it's their operational model that's created today's housing problem and not 'the planning system' that our new government says it'll be changing.

The other author, Jackie Sadek, has spent decades specialising in public-private sector partnerships, was a former Government Specialist Adviser on urban regeneration, runs an urban regeneration consultancy and chairs the UK Innovation Corridor, a partnership of local authorities, universities and innovation and science companies in the London-Stansted-Cambridge sub region.

It would be great to think that CA-WN could take an informed stand in advancing the debate on the kind of new development that is best for our region - a copy of Broken Homes has been donated to our lending library.