Interesting article by Geoff Beacon on the possible return of plotlands and prefabs, and the background to how we got into the current house price mess stoked by the planning system:
Just imagine, as we do in the York Plotlands Association, that individuals could buy a plot of land for, say, three or four times its a agricultural value (e.g. £2,000), be given planning permission for that plot and put a home of their choice on it. For the individual that would cut out the £50,000 to £100,000 planning gain that ends up on the price of their new home.
Hope they’re are a bit better than the plotland building where my wife and her two sisters were born in Laindon. No electricity, outside toilet and a tap by the back door. The council house they moved to in Basildon must have seemed like a palace.
One point of plotlands development is to give the planning gain (typically £50,000 to £100,000) to the new home owners – not to the land banks. The new owners can then build by brick or buy a ready-made home to put on it. The planning gain is typically about the same cost as building a house
The production cost of a new site-ready home from Legal & General is rumoured to be about £30,000 – as first movers they may be sold for more. This model of housing,on a site prepared under the DCLG’s schemes to sell prepared plots could bring the price of new homes down substantially, to, say, £50,000.
York Plotlands Association, thinks that aiming at £20,000 for a new home is possible – but that’s a longer discussion.
The plotlands house that I grew up in, had none of the privations of your wife;s early years. I looked up a valuation on Zoopla recently. It was just over £400,000.The upper end of the market in Kent’s Medway Towns. You can see it under construction in 1946 at bkuk.com/housing
You can also see my father in the roof with my uncle Ern and uncle Tom. ..
I currently own and live in a detached, freehold, 3 bedroom 2 bathroom “palace” – and I hate it! To me, the building is cold and has no character or soul. I yearn for my former plotland home in Hockley every day but, sadly, it no longer exists and the area around it has been gentrified and destroyed by the construction of too many oversized “luxury” eyesores. Not everyone has the same opinion of what constitutes a palace, and not everyone is happy living in a modern property even if it does have all mod cons!