YP Letters: The dire need for a construction revolution

YOUR Editorial (The Yorkshire Post, March 3) refers to “the worst housing crisis in half a century”, with fewer and fewer young people able to afford to buy an house, and many therefore condemned to a life of renting.

There is a simple and obvious reason for this; housing construction remains in the Stone Age. A new house should cost far less than a motor car.

The house is a very simple object; the motor car by contrast is highly complex. The car should cost far, far more than the house, but the application of inventive technology to a problem of worldwide demand has brought about repeated transformation, improvements and cost reduction.

I would suggest that the worldwide demand for the sort of highly-advanced yet cheap housing which inventive manufacturing could produce would be even greater than the demand for the motor car, and this could give birth to a manufacturing revolution.

Unfortunately neither agencies, such as the RIBA or even the building unions, are at all interested.

One would have thought 
that a series of competitions could be mounted at modest cost in order to explore possible ways forward.