Building smaller homes could solve the housing crisis and help save the planet

In our opinion: Robin and Patricia Silver, The Home store, Salts Mill, Saltaire:

It’s less than a week to the general election and it’s reassuring that some of our concerns are now being considered alongside the overhanging question of Brexit.Parties and their individual candidates are addressing the NHS, education, crime, policing and investment in transport, just as they always do but they now have a stronger focus on climate change and environmental issues more generally, as well as proposing solutions to the housing crisis. These are seen as the way to capture the attention of younger, new voters.Look for a moment at these last two areas together. One proposal is to replace gas boilers in new homes from 2025 with low-carbon heating systems. But why not go further and do away completely with central heating? With better insulation, careful use of other building materials and intelligent, improved, sustainable design, so called “Eco” homes or “Passive” houses with ground source heat pumps don’t need boilers at all.

Put on a jumper

Alternatively, if residents could be persuaded to accept that houses will be somewhat colder in the most severe winters (as houses used to be, not so long ago, when they had no insulation, single glazing, draughty doors and only a tiny coal fire to huddle around) then they wouldn’t require heating installations at all. After all, you can always put on another jumper or a pair of woolly socks and some people advocate that abandoning central heating in bedrooms brings other health benefits as well.More seriously, however, the environmental improvement that can be achieved in the housing sector really is very simple. Make houses smaller. The Parker-Morris space standards for a two-storey, two-bedroom home for four people that were adopted in 1961 and lasted until 1980, recommended an area of 775 square feet but the National Home Builders Federation increased this in 2008 to 882 square feet, an increase of almost 14 per cent.

Growing pains

The overall average size of homes in the UK is now 981 square feet and this follows the last few years’ construction of many smaller flats in large city centres. In comparison, the average house size in America has increased from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,329 square feet in the past 40 years, a whopping growth of 44 per cent and in New Zealand over the same period, the increase was even more, at over 46 per cent.Just as important, is the number of people living in a single home. In 1850, the UK average was 6.8 people per household but by 2000 this had fallen to only 3.5 per household. In the next 20 years it’s estimated that there will be over 10 million people living alone in the UK, many elderly, and today there are already almost one million living alone just in Scotland.Smaller homes will not only be quicker and cheaper to build but will also use less building materials which, in turn, will reduce the carbon emissions by manufacturers and the environmental cost of the transportation of these materials to site and reduce deforestation as less timber will be used.Smaller homes will also allow for a greater density of homes in areas where land prices are high or allow building plots to be just as large and accommodate more tree planting and create additional green space.If ecological requirements and demographic and social change are to be taken seriously by whichever party wins this election, then these are ways that can be easily and quickly adopted by any government with relatively speedy results.