The Guardian view on shoe-box Britain: space is good for us. Let’s have some | Editorial

Homes are becoming ever smaller. It’s time to bring back and update the minimum space requirements that were done away with by Margaret Thatcher

Housing is the defining domestic political issue of the day. It’s the nearest that most voters get, personally, to the wider economy. The latest research shows that many families are cramming into new homes that a generation ago would have been thought too small to live in. Despite televisions getting bigger, living rooms are a third smaller than the 1970s. While no celebrity chef is without a runway-sized island to prepare meals, kitchens are 13% smaller than in the 1960s. According to the LABC Warranty study, homes are now being built not just with smaller rooms, but fewer of them. If true, families have less space for children to study in and less room to dissipate the strains of relationships. What is agreed is that England has the smallest homes by floor space area of any EU country. It’s also not in doubt that extreme overcrowding can have profound effects on family health and social cohesion.

So it is bizarre that the UK is one of the few western European nations to have no mandatory minimum space standards for housing. Little wonder that other nations have bigger homes while the UK gets shoe boxes. Ministers did introduce voluntary space standards for new homes in 2015, but as these could be ignored they only gave the appearance of solidity to pure wind. When this ruse was called out in 2016, the government said it would review how these were operating. Nothing has appeared. Part of this is to do with a rightwing legacy: Margaret Thatcher got rid of rules that set a reasonable internal size for public housing. Reintroducing legal standards in the interests of society is the right thing to do. It would also be a repudiation of a Thatcherite legacy, and is at odds with the direction of travel in housing.

Continue reading... April 10, 2018 at 11:14PM