Britain’s real housing crisis may be one of distribution rather than shortage, Andrew Brooks argues
There is a housing crisis in the UK. Media coverage consistently raises a series of interrelated problems, including affordability for young people, low-income families living in cramped and substandard buildings, overcrowding resulting from migration, and pressure on the green belt created by new developments. All of this would suggest there is a real shortage of accommodation in Britain, but is that truly the case? Is there insufficient capacity in the UK housing stock?
Focusing on England, which has by far the largest population and a higher density than the other nations, the most recent government data show that in 2024 there were 25.6 million dwellings. Census results indicate that the average house in England has three bedrooms, so that amounts to 76.8 million bedrooms. In 2024, the English population was 58.6 million, but if we assume that adults who live together as cohabiting couples (57 per cent) share a bedroom, then only 45.2 million bedrooms are required. So, as England had 76.8 million bedrooms, but the population needed only 45.2 million, there was excess capacity of more than 30 million empty bedrooms. Or, to put it another way, two out of every five English bedrooms were not being slept in.
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From this perspective, the issue was not capacity. There was no absolute shortage. Rather than homes being full, the problem was that housing stock was chronically underused.
The numbers I give above are a rough working; of course, the picture is more nuanced. Some spare bedrooms may serve other important functions that enrich domestic life: home offices, gyms, spaces for visiting friends and family, and so on, although whether these are all counted as ‘bedrooms’ in official figures is up for debate. Conversely, many children share bedrooms, further reducing demand on space. There are also ongoing changes to permanent and temporary accommodation types: an increasing care-home population, more students in halls of residence, rising numbers of inmates in prisons, and armed forces in barracks, all of which are modes of living that don’t fit neatly when mapping housing.
Over the last quarter-century, the rate of housebuilding has slightly outstripped population growth: there were 21 per cent more dwellings in 2024 than in 2001, compared to 19 per cent more people. So, if the problem was simply one of supply, then it might be expected to become less pressing. However, subjectively, the prominence of housing availability as a social and political issue seems to be increasing year on year rather than declining. Simply calling for more housebuilding and nudging up the total number of properties won’t resolve the problem of access and affordability.
Despite the increase in housebuilding, many new and old flats and houses are left empty. There were 719,447 vacant dwellings in 2024. If each of those housed the average 2.35 residents, that would accommodate an additional 1.7 million people. This further indicates that, essentially, there is not a problem of housing stock, but of distribution.
What is called a ‘housing crisis’ is really an ‘empty room crisis’, caused by vacant properties and uninhabited bedrooms. This is a policy challenge that could best be solved by finding political and economic answers that use the existing national property portfolio more effectively.
Trying to correct the housing market raises fundamental challenges to the ways in which people both choose to live and manage their finances. The reality is that, for most middle-class people, their wealth is primarily retained in bricks and mortar. Many larger properties are the empty nests of older generations, disinclined to downsize and move away from the family home they needed before their children grew up.
There are rooms where the beds are empty, but the spaces are full of memories of raising young children. Yet the baby boomers and older generations hold on to their big houses for pragmatic as well as sentimental reasons. Despite recent reforms, property is still a relatively tax-efficient form of investment, one that is resilient and has a sustained record of growth, while the transaction costs of moving are very high. Stamp duty is a tax on mobility and a huge disincentive for those wanting to take a step down the property ladder. There needs to be a more effective way to de-link life savings from property assets.
I don’t have a full answer to Britain’s accommodation crisis, but I do know that the starting point for creating better homes for the millions of people living in cramped, unaffordable and substandard properties is to find simple ways to get them into the millions of empty bedrooms.
