How small is your house? My guess is you think it is too small. You probably also think it is very small relative to the houses people in other countries live in. If it's a new-build, you're probably right.
As Matthew Lynn notes, strict planning laws combined with some other factors (the difficulty developers have in financing infrastructure, for example) mean our new houses are among the smallest in the world, at an average of 76 sq m (818 sq ft). In Ireland, it's 88 sq m. Go to Spain, and it's 97 sq m. Cross to Denmark and you'll get an airy 137 sq m.
At first glance you will see another manifestation of the UK's great housing crisis. But it is more complicated than that. The size of households in the UK is falling fast. In 1961, an average of 3.1 people lived in every UK house. By last year, with 29% of houses occupied by singletons and 28% by child-free couples, that had fallen to just 2.3 people.
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
What's more, the average UK house is clearly bigger than the average new-build. If you use the number Matthew gives for this 95.7 sq m things suddenly don't look so bad: everyone's got 41.6 sq m of space each.
Still, what we need are numbers we can compare across countries to see just how badly off we are. The best I can find come from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and aren't particularly up to date (2002). But they give a sense of the problem with the idea that the UK offers much less living space than anywhere else in Europe.
On the RICS data, the average UK house (old and new) is 85.84 sq m. The average French house is only a bit bigger at 88.9 sq m, as is the average German house (87.88 sq m). The Spanish average is about the same size as the UK, and both the average Portuguese and Greek houses are rather smaller.
Look at space per person (dividing total floor space by average household size) and you find there isn't much difference. In the UK, we have 37.32 sq m each about the same as the Germans the Italians have 33.65 sq m, and the Spanish have 33 sq m.
Look at it like this and there isn't much to complain about. Our problem is not the size of our houses on average, it's the way we share them out too many older, single people in the bigger ones, and too many families in the smaller ones, something encouraged by our capital gains tax regime.
Everyone in the UK buys as big a house as possible and stays in it whether they need it or not, because it's the only way to make leveraged tax-free gains.
This is not to make light of Matthew's point. Our new houses are generally small and nasty in a way that new houses in the rest of Europe aren't houses are getting bigger pretty much everywhere except for here and in Sweden.
It's just to say that the problem is as much in the distribution of bigger, older houses as in the mean building size of new ones. Something for the new housing minister to think about.
-
Christmas at Chatsworth: review of The Cavendish Hotel at BaslowMoneyWeek Travel Matthew Partridge gets into the festive spirit at The Cavendish Hotel at Baslow and the Christmas market at Chatsworth
-
Tycoon Truong My Lan on death row over world’s biggest bank fraudProperty tycoon Truong My Lan has been found guilty of a corruption scandal that dwarfs Malaysia’s 1MDB fraud and Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto scam
-
Beat the cost of living crisis – go on holidayEditor's letter As inflation rages, energy bills soar and the pound tanks, what’s a good way to save money this winter? Go on holiday, says Merryn Somerset Webb.
-
How capitalism has been undermined by poor governanceEditor's letter Capitalism’s “ruthless efficiency” has been undermined by poor governance, a lack of competition and central banks’ over-enthusiastic money printing, says Andrew Van Sickle.
-
Don't be scared by economic forecastingEditor's letter The Bank of England warned last week the UK will tip into recession this year. But predictions about stockmarkets, earnings or macroeconomic trends can be safely ignored, says Andrew Van Sickle.
-
The biggest change in the last 17 years – the death of the “Greenspan put”Editor's letter Since I joined MoneyWeek 17 years ago, says John Stepek, we’ve seen a global financial crisis, a eurozone sovereign debt crisis , several Chinese growth scares, a global pandemic, and a land war in Europe. But the biggest change is the death of the “Greenspan put”.
-
The wolf returns to the eurozone’s doorEditor's letter The eurozone’s intrinsic flaws have been exposed again as investors’ fears about Italy’s ability to pay its debt sends bond yields soaring.
-
Things won't just return to normal – that's not how inflation worksEditor's letter You might think that, if inflation is indeed “transitory”, we just need to wait and everything will return to “normal”. But this is a grave misunderstanding of how inflation works, says John Stepek.
-
Car hire and the strangeness of the post-pandemic economyEditor's letter A global shortage of hire cars and unusually high hotel occupancy rates sum up the post-pandemic global economy in a nutshell, says Merryn Somerset Webb, with enhanced demand meeting restricted supply.
-
Why we need to get a grip on our governmentEditor's letter Our government is trying to do too much, enacting policies that are destructive to the private sector. It needs to drop the the feel-good nonsense and create policies that lead to long-term wealth, says Merryn Somerset Webb.
