Britain's new-build nightmare

New Statesman​

6 days ago

Illustration by James Clapham
As the bohemia of Camden fades, its land value has spiked. The north London borough – once home to Amy Winehouse, Alan Bennett alongside his Lady in the Van and the very last of the Mohican-topped punks – has become a wonderland for property developers. Over the past decade, new-build housing has saturated the postcode like a Beck's-sodden beer mat. From 2014-15 to 2023-24, 5,634 new builds have been built in Camden, compared with a local authority average of 5,450 in the same period in England. The din of construction is now the signature sound of a borough that once echoed with Britpop.
On a residential street of grand townhouses is 53 Agar Grove. Built in 2018, the low-rise block of seven high-ceilinged flats attracted affluent buyers like Alexandra Druzhinin, 51, a jewellery designer who spent £900,000 on what she considered a deluxe duplex, and Dan Bruce, 41, a tech entrepreneur who sold his start-up and spent his life savings on an £850,000 split-level property.
Shortly after moving into Agar Grove in March 2019, however, the two neighbours discovered their new homes were not what they seemed. They found mould and damp, rotten boards in ceiling cavities with black water gushing out of them into the flats from the roof. Constant leaks. Cracks in the interior and outer walls. Misaligned brickwork. Rotting structural frames. Sodden concrete and chipboard. Gutters failing to drain. Gaps in fire doors. Untreated timber frames. Decaying bike sheds.
When I visited, the smart pale brickwork and cocoa-brown cladding looked dazzling in the sunshine. But inside, the intercom was broken, and warped pigeonhole doors dangled open (post is constantly stolen). The lift had been broken since 2020. Three of the seven flats sat uninhabited, their condition was so poor.
Stumbling up the uneven stairs, I was hit by the sweet musk of damp that permeated the block: a stench so pungent on the first floor of Bruce's flat that his master bedroom and en suite were out of use. The building was so crooked that a number of his windows were trapped shut. I could fit my whole hand through cracks in the brick facade from his terrace. Sitting down to talk on the big brown leather sofa in his living room, I even felt the building sway when a lorry thundered past.
A structural engineer they hired concluded that the block should be demolished. Their brand-new, near-million-pound luxury flats are unmortgageable, valued at £0 each. The residents have spent £400,000 in legal fees. The building's developer in 2024 said that 'whilst the building is clearly deteriorating' it was working to find an 'acceptable solution'. In 2023, the then housing secretary Michael Gove visited and promised to take 'a personal interest' in their case. The following year their local MP, Keir Starmer, became Prime Minister. But nothing has changed in six years. They are stuck in unsafe properties worth nothing, with no end to their troubles in sight.
New-build buyers should have minor defects and structural issues covered for the first couple of years after the purchase. But in this case, and so many others I've come across, owners' complaints seem to count for nothing against an opaque tangle of warranty providers, loss adjuster, building inspector, contractor and developer – all with top lawyers, and each other to blame.
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Agar Grove's residents have also tried the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Building Safety Regulator and even the London Fire Brigade. None could help. It feels to them that in Britain today, you have more consumer rights when you buy a toaster than a house.
'This was supposed to be my dream home; this is not how I imagined my life working out,' said Bruce, who has lost patches of his hair and suffers from psoriasis flare-ups from the stress.
'I feel financially and emotionally abused,' said Druzhinin, who has broken out in hives, lost sleep and experienced shooting chest pains. 'The social contract's broken. What is the future of this country if you can't give people safe homes?'
Starmer came into government on a promise to 'get Britain building' 1.5 million houses and up to 12 new towns. Yet in his own backyard, new flats are falling down. Correspondence I've seen from his office with the residents in question pleads that 'Keir's constituency team is a small one' and directs them to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (from which Starmer's constituency office merely requests a 'clear statement of what MHCLG can and cannot do to step in here and assist').
In opposition, Starmer was strident – he called on the same department to 'ensure that my constituents are put back in the place they should have been had their homes been built correctly', arguing that they should 'be able to rely on a warranty that they believed promised to put things right'.
I have asked No 10, Starmer's constituency office and the housing department whether the Prime Minister has softened his position since taking office, and if the government has the power to help.
'The situation faced by the innocent residents of Agar Grove is deplorable, and the pace of progression in this case is unacceptable,' said a government spokesperson. 'We are pushing those responsible to meet their obligations swiftly and will continue to ensure these leaseholders are supported.'
'If Starmer can't fix this, who in the United Kingdom has the power?' asked Bruce. 'He can't promise 1.5 million new builds and ignore that he needs to protect people buying them. It's negligent.'
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In the twilight lands of Britain's new builds, a man's home may not so much be his castle than his feudal plot, leased from a distant nobility of dodgy housebuilders and their timid court of regulators and town halls. Successive governments have juiced demand through policies such as Help to Buy, which offered cheap loans exclusively for new-build properties, shared ownership schemes and lifetime ISAs with no regard for quality or community. Margaret Thatcher's dream of a 'property-owning democracy' has soured into a desolate corporatocracy.
There is little true competition: we effectively have a monopoly of a few big-name housebuilders, which benefit from a deficit of 4.3 million homes by constructing cheap, identikit new builds at volume and selling them fast to buyers whose choices are limited after decades of wild housing inflation.
But it's not all about a runaway market. Local authorities, which have been drastically defunded since 2010, are under pressure from national housing targets to build at speed and keep costs to a minimum. Council-built homes aren't necessarily better quality than those driven purely by the market. Balconies on a new-build estate called Weavers Quarter, a 2019 project run by Barking and Dagenham Council's own housing company, collapsed onto the pavement at the end of 2023.
Since the Thatcher era, building control – the inspection process once run by councils – has filtered into the private sphere, where there is less transparency and commitment to the local area. These private inspectors are often appointed by the developer itself.
'When you're employed by the company, the bosses tell you what to do,' said John Cooper, who set up his snagging company, New Home Quality Control, seven years ago after encountering so many new-build 'horrors' as a contract manager. His inspectors receive millions of views on TikTok, shaming housebuilders for the wonky walls, cracked tiles, waterlogged gardens, non-compliant fire doors and butchered woodwork they find on new-build sites. 'I've seen customers crying on doorsteps because they were seeing things that were so horrific.'
Skills and recruitment gaps have built up in the construction workforce, which is under-trained and over-reliant on migration: pipe welders, bricklayers, roofers, carpenters, joiners and stonemasons are currently on the government's 'shortage occupation list' (which loosens visa requirements to bring in foreign workers).
'The quality tradesmen are just not out there, and neither is the education of apprentices,' said Cooper. 'Developers are crunching down on prices so much that quality tradesmen won't do the work for the money – so they have to get second-rate labour in.'
Pressure from government housebuilding drives developers seeking 20 per cent profit margins and a lack of adequate labour reduces quality. 'The mindset of being on site isn't great – nobody cares about each other's trade,' one carpenter with experience on new builds told me. 'You're getting drilled down on [saving] money, the person before you hasn't done their job correctly, so you do your job incorrectly just to get it to pass standards. It's a massive downhill slope.'
Contractors I spoke to told me they had found bottles of urine, takeaway boxes of chicken bones and cigarette packets in cavity walls. Quality is so patchy that the last government had to establish a New Homes Ombudsman in 2022 to try and help new-build owners rectify problems. The industry-standard warranty should cover ten years, but politicians are increasingly hearing from constituents unable to get their new houses fixed.
'I'm finding it's all dependent on the developer's goodwill,' said Michelle Welsh, the Labour MP for Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, who called a debate on new-build construction standards after hearing from so many distraught constituents. 'We need to say to developers: 'We expect you to build good-quality housing, and if you don't, you won't be building any housing.''
She has spoken to ministers about beefing up protections for buyers. 'If you increase the number of houses, the chances are there's going to be a lot more people affected with poor housing,' she warned.
In a country already feeling ripped off by everyone from water companies to dentists, shoddy new builds could bring political implications. Welsh pointed out that the affected buyers are often 'people who worked all their lives, mainly in a manual job, and this [home ownership] was their dream. And it's absolutely devastated them.' Her neighbouring MP, Reform's Lee Anderson, has also picked up the cause, calling for neglectful developers to have planning applications rejected: 'That is the only way to stop these people.'
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'We're told from a young age that home is safety, to buy your own home – and the government encourages people to buy new builds,' Dan Bruce said, as he sat on the edge of his sofa in his box-fresh, broken flat. 'I did everything you're supposed to do – worked hard, paid tax, started a business and used it to buy my first home. A new home. And now I'm trapped.'
Keir Starmer's government has promised to build 1.5 million new homes. Photo byWhat lurks outside Britain's new builds is as troubling as the problems within. On modern estates, a sense of place and belonging can be an afterthought. I saw this at Millers Field, a tarmac tendril near the town of Sprowston in Norfolk, completed in 2019. Behind rings of high fences were grids and grids of boxy redbricks, with wholemeal roof tiles and narrow-eyed windows reflecting their identical neighbours – an aesthetic now almost invisibly familiar in the limbo between satellite towns and arable expanses across the UK. Beneath the drone of surrounding roundabouts, there was little activity beyond the modern-day agora of a Tesco Extra car park.
In an hour of wandering around, I discovered just two deserted playgrounds and a primary school. A resident told me of her longing for 'just a little shop to pop out to'. I finally found the start of a cycle and footpath, but after following it for a few metres, it led without warning to the edge of an A-road. Car parks and bin sheds dominated the quiet closes within the estate where you might expect benches, flowerbeds and trees. Along what I assumed were walkways leading to the front doors, signs euphemistically warned cars to 'slow down: shared surface'. In other words, a road.
'This is just one of many thousands of similar suburban, edge-of-city, Nowhereville-type places dominated by car-parking, without facilities and amenities properly integrated, not walkable,' said the architect Matthew Carmona, a professor at UCL's Bartlett School of Planning who specialises in public space. He has audited the design quality of hundreds of new estates across Britain.
Residents across the country are finding that GP surgeries, cafés, nurseries, pubs, shops and other local services promised by developers are often missing from modern housing estates, according to a survey by the Community Planning Alliance for the Independent last year. 'You can't tell one road or one development from another and that does create these really boring, really anonymous, soulless places,' said the architect Alan Jones, when he was president of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2020. '[It] is really damaging in terms of creating a sense of belonging.'
In the architectural critic Ian Nairn's 1955 work Outrage – a journey through the UK's postwar urban sprawl – he wrote of 'Subtopia': 'a mean and middle state, neither town nor country' creating a 'new Britain… [where] the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle; the parts in between will look like the end of Carlisle or the beginning of Southampton'.
What lies behind today's Subtopia? There are three main culprits. The first are the housebuilders themselves, who 'overbid', paying above the market rate for sites in the expectation that rising prices will pay for the public-realm improvements that make a proper place, according to Carmona. All too often, the value doesn't rise enough for them to maximise their profit margin, so they skimp on the 'goodies' they've promised. Second are council planning departments, which lack the resources and expertise to ensure well-designed places – underpowered after the austerity years, which cut their core funding almost in half. And third are the highway authorities, which put car parks and roads above all else.
'We as a society haven't routinely prioritised the quality of the built environment. It's a short-term mentality we've got into in this country,' said Carmona. 'Developers see the need for profits over the need for places with long-term value. We're building often very poor-quality environments, which over time will only get worse.'
A cautionary tale for Labour's potential 12 new towns is that of Northstowe, a new town north of Cambridge – Britain's biggest since Milton Keynes. The first 9,500 homes in Northstowe were given planning permission in 2007, but by the summer of 2023 the town still didn't have a single local shop, café, doctor's surgery or sports facility.
[See also: Things will only get incrementally better for Keir Starmer]
The story of Britain's new-build failure is a contested one, however. After their hometown was deemed 'soulless' in the press, residents of Northstowe told the Daily Mail they loved the place. Locals I spoke to in Millers Field enjoyed taking their children out to enjoy nature in nearby woods, and knew and liked their neighbours. Social media accounts like 'Shit Planning' on X, which mock 'noddy box' new-build estates with photos of the worst offenders, have been accused of snobbery.
'In every community across the UK, class divides are expressed, understood and lived through housing aesthetics: council estates or detached houses, new build versus tasteful Victorian terrace, AstroTurf garden with faux olive trees versus bohemian rewilded garden to help the bees,' writes the sociologist Dan Evans in his 2023 book about Britain's new petty bourgeoisie, A Nation of Shopkeepers.
'Elements of the left are justifiably angry about housing, but… it is also often these very same people who love to ridicule and define themselves against the petty bourgeoisie, whose tastes and aspirations they clearly find utterly alien. They are apparently desperate for housing, but ugh, not a new build!'
In a move last year to remove the 'beauty' planning requirement for housebuilding, the Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner, remarked: 'Beautiful means nothing really.' On the Conservative right, there is a long-running fixation with 'building beautiful', nostalgia for historical styles and enthusiasm for kitsch revivals, such as the much-derided faux-Georgian village of Poundbury (a project started by King Charles in the Nineties). Gove, when housing secretary, said he would try and block 'ugly' new housing developments.
Yet left-right divides have been blurred in recent years by the rise of the Yimbys ('yes, in my back yard!'), a movement chiefly of young activists across political lines who lament planning obstructions – including the subjective need for 'beauty' – to desperately needed new housing. The British public appears to be leaning towards this view. A poll conducted by Ipsos last month found that 46 per cent of Britons support more homes in their locality, while 25 per cent oppose them.
Tastes, after all, change. Victorian London was a generic disappointment to Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote in his 1847 novel Tancred that 'it is impossible to conceive anything more tame, more insipid, more uniform. Pancras is like Marylebone, Marylebone is like Paddington… your Gloucester Places, and Baker Streets, and Harley Streets, and Wimpole Streets, and all those flat, dull, spiritless streets, resembling each other like a large family of plain children, with Portland Place and Portman Square for their respectable parents.'
Three miles from Millers Field, and completed in the same year, is Goldsmith Street. A distinctive terrace of a hundred inner-urban council homes – all asymmetric roofs, undulating brick curvature and front doors of spearmint green and poster-paint red – it won the Stirling Prize for architecture in 2019. I barely noticed bins or parking amid birch-shaded public walkways and generous grassy stretches with benches and wooden animals for children to play on. Two girls on roller skates giggled in one of the picnic-table-lined alleys, a couple picnicked under a tree and a barbecue sizzled in a back garden.
The Goldsmith Street estate is often cited as proof that even places in economically challenging circumstances can be designed well. 'This was the housing department of Norwich Council wanting to deliver good-quality social housing for their tenants, commissioning an excellent architect who designed an amazing scheme,' said Carmona. 'Places like this can be delivered in different ways, sometimes by the market, sometimes by the public sector, often in partnership. It can be done.'
Yet even among the communal idyll here, I found frustration – plumbing so poor that loo roll couldn't be flushed, broken windows that had never been fixed and noise pollution. 'It looks lovely, and for families this layout might be great, but for those of us who are single or disabled or working nights, it's kidmageddon, it's too loud,' one resident told me. Perhaps no amount of architectural imagination can stop Britain being a nation of disgruntled neighbours, ever complaining about fireworks, lawnmowers and overgrown hedges.
As the government's housebuilding drive intensifies, more and more Britons will find themselves in the new-build trap, stuck in shoddy houses and neighbourhoods that have been erased by design. 'Stay clear, it's not worth the risk,' warned Dan Bruce, from his failed dream home in Agar Grove. 'Go and buy something that's stood for 80, 90, 100 years.'
Yet the shortcomings of new-build Britain are ultimately a reflection of its chronic housing shortage and neglected existing housing stock. We have the oldest, poorest-maintained and worst value-for-money homes of any advanced economy. Brand-new homes should, and can, function better than the leaky, damp and drafty Victorian townhouses seen as aesthetically superior by what Dan Evans labels the 'professional-managerial classes'. The closest thing we have to a British Dream is home ownership, but thanks to a policy vacuum and exploitative market, the choice for Britons today is between decrepit period properties and a new-build quality lottery – if they can afford a home at all.
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