House building soars in North-East Derbyshire

About 210 new homes were built from April 2017 to March 2018, 62% more.

The growth rate is much higher than the average for England, where new house building activity rose by 8.5% since the period 2016-2017, according to the new data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

This data includes just new houses built from scratch but doesn’t take into account conversions of houses into several flats or changes of use from an office to a dwelling.

Private developers in North East Derbyshire built most of the new residential houses - about 90%. The rest were built by housing associations.

Besides the number of homes completed, building started on 210 new homes in North East Derbyshire from April 2017 to March 2018, up from 130 over the 2016-2017 financial year.

All these ongoing residential projects are financed by private developers.

Lindsay Judge, senior policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank that works to improve the living standards, said the housing market cannot rely solely on the private sector to increase the supply of dwellings.

“Just as important as hitting housebuilding targets is delivering the right kind of homes. That means vastly increasing the proportion of genuinely affordable homes, and not relying solely on the private sector to boost housing supply.

“But housing associations and local authorities need more money if they are to deliver more affordable homes, which requires central Government to give them larger grants, extend their borrowing powers or allow them to raise additional funds locally for building.

“If the Government really wants to get to grips with Britain’s housing crisis, it also needs to focus on the fastest growing tenure, private rented accommodation.

“Recent plans to scrap letting fees and extend tenancy terms are welcome. But ministers must go further to improve the quality and security in private rented accommodation, not least as a record number of children are now living in privately rented homes.”

From April 2017 to March 2018, around 160,470 new dwellings were completed in England, far behind the government’s goal of supplying 300,000 new homes every year to meet the demand. About 82% of these new dwellings were built by private enterprises.

Taking a long view, house building has been mostly decreasing since the 1960s. The early years of this decade saw house building at its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s.

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-house-building