New homes vs inferstructure

[Spartacus]

The Government has set an ambitios target to build 1.5 million new homes bu the end of this 4 year term. Possibly unachievable due to various issues in the building industry but ambitious none the less. 

What they seem to have failed to plan for, which was brought home by this year's drought, is adding more inferstructure including Reservoirs, power lines and sewerage treatment centres. 

Ate they setting us up for more problems in the future? 

[malumbu]

How long is a piece of string?  Depends whether you are building 'new towns' or brown field urban sites.

I expect developers, planners and builders know far more than we do.  Where are you getting your information about infrastructure from ?  Your comment on new reservoirs seems more relevant to population expansion and/or climate change.

[Spartacus]

There are "plans" to build more reservoirs, with physical work yet to be started, with the first hoped to be completed by 2036, and a second by 2040, then time is needed for them to fill so add at least another 12 months on. However, if the 1.5 million homes are built by 2028, each averaging 2 people occupying them.(some will be more, some will be less) then thats 3 million people showering, bathing and using water. 

Therefore there is a massive demand that will strain our current inferstructure between 2028 and 2037 (nearly ten years) plus all those homes will need electricity, as the ambition is to phase gas usage out, which will take just as much time to reinforce the network to cover, let alone add in the ability to cope with green production electricity that needs to be moved from wind and solar farms to where it is most needed. 

Therefore, is the current plan to build more homes, regardless of where they are,  potentially going to have serious ramifications on already creaking networks ? 

[WomblingFree]

There’s an interesting discussion to be had on the need for infrastructure generally and on bottlenecks in specific areas, as noted above.

However on new houses specifically, I’ve never understood the infrastructure argument. The people to go in the new houses already exist and are already using infrastructure. Thanks to twenty years of under-building we’ve got millions of adults stuck living with parents, living in house shares, paying a fortune to rent cramped flats etc - that’s what a housing crisis is. They’re presumably all using road/trains, showering and weeing whilst doing so. Building them houses doesn’t necessarily increase the need for infrastructure much, if at all.

The Abundance Agenda podcast is a great listen if you’re interested in this stuff.