Why Britain doesn’t build

That's 50 years ago. It's literally not even one lifetime ago.

> Theresa May tried to sell this as part of her election campaign. It was a disaster. No one wants to be forced to give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into.

It's not as simple as "give up some of their personal wealth to pay more for an NHS they've already paid into". If you have 20K in your bank account and no property, you have to pay for your care. If you own 2 flats worth 1M each and have 10K in your bank account, you pay nothing. The so-called "dementia tax" would have make this situation fairer. Besides, they wouldn't have to release equity while alive, but the cost of care would be paid by the heirs upon selling or inheriting their parent's property.

Imagine a scenario where you have 20K in your bank account. You child inherits only 10K, because you had to pay for your care. Now imagine you have 2 flats and 10K in your bank account. Your child gets the whole lot. Does this look fair?

Theresa May, that, as far as I'm concerned, should be sent to the Hague for architecting the hostile environment for foreigners, had only one non-demented idea in her entire political career: making social care fairer, and that's what killed her premiership. I can't think of a more emblematic example of what is going on in the UK.

Like a lot of things in Britain there's a chronic lack of development, and a 'pass the buck' trend.

Our water infrastructure is another prime example. There's been no real investment in decades and the system we have in place was designed for a population in the 1950s. As a result our reserves are woefully inadiquate, resulting in the annual 'hose pipe ban'. The rhetoric around it has changed recently though. According to one of the water boards its "because everyones working from home", ignoring the fact that we've had these issues long before the uptick in WFH.

Our electricity supply is just as bad, although this is one area thats getting a fair bit of private investment with offshore wind, but the lack of storage ability makes this useless at certain times of the year, resulting in situations like we had in late 2022 where old mothballed power stations had to be turned back on to meet demand.

Our housing issues are extremely frustrating. What little development does happen is often carried out to the bare minimum specifications to pass building regulations, with houses that may as well be made of paper and rooms the size of clossets due to massive overdevelopment on each plot of land.

Really we should've been building 3-4 new major cities spread around the country. We've had a few smaller scale towns (Cambourne comes to mind) but they don't go nearly far enough to solve the issue.

We've also got huge swaths of abandoned industrial land in the north, and whilst there has been some regeneration it's often "premium" tiny apartments in places like Manchester and Sheffield, primarily being sold to landlords who then let them out to university students.

Why would you think that? A well built house can last hundreds of years. Why should it not be an investment?

It makes absolutely no sense to put any kind of money into something that one day will be worthless - like I read that it happens in Japan that on average a house is worthless after about 40 years.

I am in Indian immigrant living in the UK for past 5 years. The housing system here feels extremely stupid to me. They basically resell houses 100+ years old at 5% higher value every year. It's kinda like gold or bitcoin, except those assets are actually very limited in number. But housing is simply artificially limited due to policies.

Total UK housing stock is worth 10T GBP vs 2.2T GBP GDP output. Don't think any other country comes even close in terms of skewed reliance on housing as a driver of wealth. I can't imagine the reduction in net worth of citizens (65% are owners) when house prices crash 20% due to higher interest rates. That would be 2T of the 10T value - almost the same as GDP.

Anecdotally, every British person I know has a common long term goal - save enough money for a 5-10% deposit on a mortgage. The incentives here are all wrong. You build wealth by investing in a house & taking 90% loan to value mortgages instead of actually working harder. Work is just a means to save enough for deposit & afford a mortgage premiums and maybe 1-2 holidays a year.

People complain UK is stagnating. Companies don't want to IPO in London. I can tell why - banks don't want to lend to SMEs. 50% of their lending is actually housing mortgages. Same with people - they would overwhelmingly invest in a house rather than own company shares. Housing is the root cause of malaise in the economy. Take away the incentives to own a house by building more homes, increasing mortgage rates and eliminating government policies helping people to buy & this country would just become much better