Why our homes should be built to last

From the first foundations to fixtures and fittings, new homes should be well made

When 35-year-old Catriona Bright and her husband John, 37, bought a brand-new house in Bolton, Lancashire, they thought it was going to be their dream home. ‘We visited the show home and fell in love with the high quality of the finish, fixtures and fittings. But the difference between what you see and what you get is stark.'

Instead, a seven-months-pregnant Catriona, John and their two-year-old son, William, moved into a house with a much lower quality of finish and a host of problems.

Catriona's isn't an isolated case. Around 185,000 new houses are built in the UK every year. The Government wants to increase that by another 35,000 annually - or 100 a day - so that by 2020 there'll be an extra three million new homes in Britain.

Yet, according to the Office of Fair Trading, almost one in four people who buy a newly built home complain of serious quality problems. A survey for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors that looked at snagging (defects in the structure and finish of buildings), found the average number of snags in a new home was 60, and one five-bedroom house had 389!

From the first foundations to fixtures and fittings, new homes should be well madeWhat's more, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, which advises the Government on architecture and urban design, says four out of five private housing developments built in England in the last five years weren't good enough.

‘The quality of 29 per cent of these new developments was so low that they should never have been granted planning permission in the first place,' explains Matt Bell, Director of Campaigns.

All this begs the question that, as a high percentage of the houses we're constructing are sub-standard, should we really be considering building more in such vast numbers?

Houses built as recently as the 1950s and 1960s are already being pulled down because they were put up in a hurry and are just not good enough. Will we be repeating the blunders of the past if we continue to build as quickly as we are?

House Beautiful welcomes the initiative to build three million new homes. Every day we hear from readers who are struggling to get onto the property ladder or are anxious about the home-owning prospects of their children.

But we don't support the point of view that pushes build-it-quick-whatever-the-cost. So we're launching our Built To Last campaign, in which we are calling on the Government's Housing Minister Caroline Flint, and Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Yvette Cooper, to introduce four very clear reforms which would transform housing in this country.

To read more about the House Beautiful Built to Last campaign, click here...