Letters | 16 February 2017

Living room

Sir: Sajid Javid is quoted as saying that the biggest constraint on building more houses is the ‘lack of land’ (‘Javid’s home truths’, 11 February). While he is right to call for government intervention, I don’t agree with this view. We may live on a small island in relative terms, but that doesn’t diminish our actual land mass. For argument’s sake, let us say the average house takes up 100 square metres. This means that you could fit 10,000 houses into a single square kilometre. To put that into perspective, the Isle of Wight, with an area of 380 km², has the capacity to accommodate 3,800,000 houses.

Obviously, housing estates require much less land. Singapore (twice the size of the Isle of Wight) can accommodate most of its 5.6 million residents in high-rise flats.

Farmland, amenities and public infra-structure must be accounted for, too. But the UK does not have a shortage of land.