One household in three has two spare bedrooms

Nigel Williams, 27 February 2014

Most of England’s households have at least one spare bedroom. Among owner occupiers, which is two-thirds of the housing stock, half have two or more spare rooms. That is 7 million owner-occupied houses with at least two spare bedrooms. Another 5 million have a single spare. While property prices are reaching levels that preclude all but the richest first-time buyers, a little-noticed finding of the English Housing Survey reveals that the country is massively under-using its housing resources.

Of course it is easy to find reasons why we need the extra space. My own spare bedroom is currently stuffed with the contents of a flooded cellar, (which makes me very grateful both to have it and for the efforts of the Environment Agency and the Met Office to stop that problem getting any worse). However, it raises questions about whether the nation’s housing problems can only be solved by more building. The cliché about investing in land is ‘They’re not making any more of it’ and present excessive rainfall is actually taking away some that we thought we had. There are sound reasons why many places without houses on them have not already been developed. Some estates on flood plains are only there, daft as it seems, because everywhere else was either worse or prohibitively expensive. New Labour moves to build on brown-field sites quickly turned into a charter for concreting over anywhere with a garden, which has its own implications for flood-planning.

I suggest three things are causing so much under-use of the nation’s housing. One is choice: space is a pleasure to have, and a human tendency to accumulate stuff always requires space to put it. Two things are more demographic: a nuclear family makes permanent use of bedrooms whereas family breakups needs rooms only temporarily. If a couple with children split up and then have children with their new partners, they will wish to have rooms for all the children, even if they only stay part of the time. Keeping families together eases the strain on housing and helps them afford somewhere decent to live. Then population-aging encourages people to stay in large houses after the permanent need for all the rooms has passed. Again, there are clear reasons: a house accumulates memories and makes it easier for grandchildren to visit.

Keeping families together and finding suitable accommodation for older people are easier said than done. There are concerns over loneliness and paying potential care-bills. The need to sell a family home, however under-occupied, is regarded as the ultimate sign of failure to care.  However, instead of providing assistance to help people get larger places, with Help to Buy or Housing Benefit, easing people into somewhere smaller could achieve more and free up the supply for other people. Some suggestions come quickly to mind:

• Make stamp duty payable only on buying larger places, not for people down-sizing.
• A real difference in council tax bands between the smallest and the largest, currently only a multiple of three.
• No inheritance tax relief on property subject to a pre-nuptial agreement – if the wordly goods weren’t ’till death us do part’ you can hardly expect the taxman to keep his distance afterwards.

With upwards of twenty million extra bedrooms, there should be plenty of room for manœuvre.