Recent reports suggest that Britain has a Shortage of affordable housing. Although the reports are recent the actual cause of the problem stems back to the 50's and 60's when mass produced concrete buildings were erected in an attempt to re-build the housing stock that had been destroyed during the war.
These mass building schemes led to the unsightly and unsustainable housing that have blighted our cities for years. Because of their poor design and construction they soon became maintenance nightmares for local authorities. Housing that was to last for generations started to become health hazards and uninhabitable in some cases in a short period of time.
Each government who has been in power ever since has been able to sweep the problem under the carpet and manage to cobble together a fix it for now plan, but no long term solution. It has now been laid heavily on our current government to find a permanent long term remedy for this most amazing farce of modern history.
At the end of 2007 the government pledged £8billion to go towards new housing. They want 3million homes built by 2010. This seems pretty realistic until you realise how much it costs to build.
Without architects, surveyors, land, materials and plant costs; labour alone is going to suck many a zero off that £8billion. At present tradesman whether brickies, plumbers or sparks are all demanding at least £150 a day.
Now your new building site has 20 tradesman working a 5 day week each earning £150 a day, for roughly 6 to 8 weeks per house. Do the maths, this is just one site in the country. And that's labour only remember.
Each developer will want to make a profit so the houses built will be of a quality that maximises that profit margin. The people who will be eventually living in these houses will get no say as to how they were built.
Self Build In Britain The Way Forward.
Imagine if you will a forward thinking in touch with the people Housing Association. This HA applies for it's share of the £8billion budget, say it gets £250,000 to spend (probably a bit optimistic but hey this is imaginary). Instead of turning the project over to a developer they hand it to a architect and a group of people in housing need, who will design and build their own homes.
Once given this opportunity you got to decide how do you intend to build. Are you going with what has become to be known as traditional build, bricks and mortar, or you going to go the even more traditional (even though it died out it was used extensively in this country and some dwellings are still standing after 400 years) post and beam method.
Lets take bricks and mortar first.
Once you have your plot of land you will have to clear it, level it and then dig foundations. Depending on the soil type you may have to reinforce your footings with wire cages. You then fill these trenches with concrete, build walls to ground level, lay more concrete for oversite slab (this'll be your ground floor) build the walls to roof height add roof start on the inside of house. This is a very sparse over view of what is typically a skilled trades job. For the novice it's a nightmare.
Post and beam
You mark out the area of your house on the plot. Scrape back the topsoil. Your foundations are between 12 -18 2' holes filled with concrete and topped with a concrete slab.
Frames are constructed out of timber. The frames are then lifted in turn into place with their feet sitting on the concrete pads. Floor and roof joists are added to secure the structure and the roof is then put on. The frames are infilled and cladded adding windows and doors as you go. Decide how you want to divide up the living space (no internal walls are load bearing all loads are transferred to the posts and then in turn to the foundation pads) add electrics, plumbing etc.
This style of build can be done by anyone who has a basic knowledge of DIY. And if you don't have the basics it can be learnt in next to no time compared to bricks and mortar style builds.
Well if our imaginary HA is as switched on as we hope it will come to the conclusion that if they go with the bricks and mortar option they're not going to get many houses for the £250,000 government handout. More than likely if they were to go down this road they are going to end up sub contracting labour to tradesman, or they will have to limit the scheme to people who can lay bricks and plaster walls etc, which defeats the object if you want to have a group open to everyone in housing need.
The above is not completely imaginary. During the late seventies Lewisham's (South London) switched on council actually sorted out one of these schemes and followed it up with another a few years later.
Everyone involved were either unemployed or on low incomes. Yet they all got financed for the scheme.
So if the government gets it's finger out and invests the money in the people and not the developers it could quite easily see the 3million homes by 2010.
Here's a couple of Stats:
A quarter of a commercial builds cost goes in the skip as waste.
70% of the land in this country is owned by only 1% of the adult population.
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