‘There are five of us living in a two-bedroom flat, the children fight all the time, there is no space for them to do their homework, I sleep in the living room … it is too much’ a woman told me at my councillor surgery last week. I have lost count of the number of families I have spoken to who live in similar circumstances, and it is therefore no surprise to read that a new study of 16,000 British homes, published last week in the journal Building Research and Information concludes that Britain has the smallest homes in Europe. When measured by floor space instead of the number of rooms, over half of homes fail to meet the enhanced minimum guidelines set out in the London Housing Design Guide, which is widely considered to be the industry standard. When analysed by the number of occupants, one in five homes is too small, though this figure is distorted by the rising number of single person households, so the situation for families is in fact significantly worse. One third of people are unhappy with where they live.
This study is important for a number of reasons. It demonstrates once again and in a different way the flawed and unjust nature of the bedroom tax. In addition to the cruelty and indignity of forcing people to move from homes they have lived in for many years, the lack of compassion and understanding of family needs, and the financial hardship that we know the bedroom tax is causing, this analysis demonstrates that calculating the appropriate size of a home on the basis of the number of rooms is deeply flawed. The research finds that if the bedroom tax was calculated on the basis of the amount of floor space per person rather than the number of rooms, only 19 per cent of households currently losing housing benefit could be considered to have more space than they need.
Second, this study is important because it provides evidence of the scale of an issue that we know makes a significant contribution to deprivation. According to Shelter, children living in overcrowded accommodation are one third more likely to suffer respiratory problems and ten times more likely to contract meningitis than their peers who do not live in overcrowded homes. Overcrowding has a detrimental impact on the quality of relationships between parents and children, and it has an impact on education – children living in overcrowded homes are unsurprisingly less likely to have a quiet place to do their homework than their peers and miss school more frequently for medical reasons.
The government announced the introduction of a new national set of housing standards in March 2014. There are good reasons to do this – the variation in housing standards between local authorities, and the multiple layers of policy framework (planning policy, building regulations, code for sustainable homes) does create uncertainty and inefficiency for house builders. But the government’s proposal to introduce ‘a national space standard to be available to councils where there was a need and where this would not stop development’ is far too weak. If we are to build successful, sustainable communities, where families can grow and where people can put down roots, we must build homes where the quality of everyday life is not continually undermined by the paucity of room sizes and lack of storage space, and where children are not disadvantaged by ill health or by having nowhere quiet to study. We will only achieve this if a national standard is adopted as policy rather than guidance and enforced through the planning system. The impact of consistent and simplified national standards in the round will deliver efficiencies for housebuilders – absorbing the marginal costs of an increase in space standards, in order to ensure more successful places cannot be too much to ask.
The Labour party has a good track record on this issue. It was a Labour Mayor who introduced the London Housing Design Guide in 2011, setting standards that are 10 per cent more generous than the original Parker Morris standards for council homes, established in the 1960s. It was a Labour government that established the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) to advise and facilitate good design quality for new development. However, this report shows that without better national leadership, our tendency in Britain is to build properties that are too small to be proper homes. Labour has already pledged to address the housing crisis by building a million new homes. We can leave a legacy of which we can be truly proud by ensuring these homes are also large enough to be sustainable.
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Helen Hayes is Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Dulwich and West Norwood and is a chartered town planner
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