Covid lockdowns have made us value space more – particularly in our homes

While we are doing the best with what we’ve got, the challenge is to build better in the future, writes Hamish McRae

Many people have adapted their homes in order to facilitate working (PA Wire)

Our homes are too small. One of the lasting changes to our lifestyle as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic will be that we will value space more.

This is not simply a question of people working more from home and hence needing a home office, though that is certainly part of it. Nor is it just that if you are going to have more home-based leisure time, that base has to be nicer. It is something wider.

For many people there has been a rethinking of how we spend our leisure time, the importance of home in our lives, the value of having a garden – a whole string of changes, some subtle, some radical, in how our post-pandemic world will be different from our pre-pandemic one.

Our homes have been getting smaller, in the sense that new-build homes have less space than older ones. Back in the 1930s, the average size of a new house was 68.3 sq m. Then new homes got steadily larger until the 1970s, when they were 83.3 sq m. Now they are back to 67.8 sq m.

They are also small by international standards. Our average size of 72 sq m is less than half the size of homes in Canada, which average 150 sq m. The US average is 130 sq m, Italy 108 sq m, and France 80 sq m. True, Hong Kong homes are tiny, the smallest in the world at 32 sq m, but that is not really a helpful comparison given land prices there.

So what’s to be done?

Well, people are voting with their feet. The great property movement of the past 18 months has been for people to move a little further out of town because they get more space for their money. There is also a home improvement boom going on, with £110bn spent on making existing homes bigger and better. Some 5 million people have redecorated rooms, 1.5 million have built an outhouse in the garden, and more than 1 million have built extensions and home gyms.

While we are doing the best with what we’ve got, the challenge is to do better in the future. There are several ideas around. One is to give greater scope for increasing home size with extensions and loft conversions, by streamlining or eliminating planning controls. Obviously we cannot allow extensions that are unsafe, but this is a building-control issue, not a planning one. Increasing the size of the existing stock is probably a faster way of boosting the living space of the country than building new stock.

Another idea is to encourage people to build their own homes – by buying land and commissioning the house of their choice on it, rather than having to buy one of the standard designs run up by a developer. In Germany, 55 per cent of new homes are built in this way, whereas in the UK it is about 8 per cent. The government has just got the results of a review from the Tory MP, Richard Bacon, that looks at ways of boosting this figure.

These include encouraging local authorities and housing associations to sell plots too small for development by a builder to people who want to build a single house. They would also encourage self-building, where the owners do a lot of the work themselves. This way the country should get more diverse and more interesting homes, and perhaps it would encourage less opposition to development generally.

There is also the question of how homes should be built, with prefabrication the norm in much of continental Europe and North America, but rare in the UK. The “prefabs” built during and just after the Second World War – tiny, shed-like bungalows – gave the concept a bad image. But actually it is easier to control quality if you make parts of a building in an enclosed factory and assemble them on site, rather than building the traditional way in the open air when the weather allows. There is a push to encourage prefabrication, so-called “modular construction”, to increase the number of homes that can be built.

Most of all, though, we need a change in mindset: rationally, our new homes should be better built than the existing ones. It is a dreadful indictment of generations of planners, architects and builders that we should prize older houses – ideally Victorian or Georgian – and pay a premium for them. So we don’t only need bigger homes, though we certainly need that. We need nicer ones, too.