Summary
Some supporters of the ‘we must build more houses’ consider that England should emulate France in increasing the house building rate. Comparing UK house-building rates in terms of the gross % change in relation to total stock it is stated “The UK ranks towards the bottom of this list, seeing only 1.9 per cent growth in the number of homes every year, much less than France with 2.3 per cent annual growth in housing stock, and West Germany and the Netherlands on 3 per cent growth in housing stock every year.” [ Watling, S, Breach, A, February 2023,Centre for Cities, The house building crisis, The UK's 4 million missing homes.]
If we look at the data on households compared to dwellings, we find that the countries of the UK all have more dwellings than households and that the figure for France is higher. The most recent data suggests that whereas in England there are 6.4% more dwellings than households the figure for France is 8.6%. The Netherlands appears as an anomaly here, a high growth rate yet it appears not to have a surplus. Figures for a range of European countries are shown in Table 1.
| Households | Dwellings | Surplus | Surplus |
Country | N | N | N | % |
Austria | 4.068 | 4.952 | 0.9 | 21.7 |
Belgium | 5.055 | 5.514 | 0.5 | 9.1 |
Denmark | 2.8 | 3.2 | 0.4 | 14.3 |
France | 31.05 | 33.721 | 2.7 | 8.6 |
Germany | 40.9 | 43.1 | 2.2 | 5.4 |
Netherlands | 8.043 | 8.046 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Norway | 2.581 | 2.67 | 0.1 | 3.4 |
Portugal | 4.14 | 5.968 | 1.8 | 44.2 |
Spain | 18.886 | 25.793 | 6.9 | 36.6 |
Sweden | 4.832 | 5.096 | 0.3 | 5.5 |
England | 23.42 | 24.928 | 1.5 | 6.4 |
Northern Ireland | 0.769 | 0.814 | 0.0 | 5.9 |
Scotland | 2.529 | 2.67 | 0.1 | 5.6 |
Wales | 1.347 | 1.472 | 0.1 | 9.3 |
Cornwall | 250 | 285 | 0.035 | 14.0 |
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