Build. More. Houses.

Everywhere you go in Europe and the UK, people complain about the lack of affordable housing. Especially in major cities like London, Paris, and Madrid, the supply of houses has become so low compared to demand that younger people often can no longer afford to get on the property ladder without some help from ‘the bank of mom and dad’. Bad luck if you don’t have wealthy parents.

Of course, this is increasingly a political issue, which is why the European Commission published an extensive study of the investment needs in housing markets across the EU. The key chart is the one shown below, which assesses the need for new housing investments as a percentage of the existing housing stock.

Housing investment needs from 2025 to 2034

The areas with the largest investment need are the two major Spanish cities, Madrid and Barcelona, Luxembourg and Vienna in central Europe and Gothenburg and Stockholm in Sweden. Note also that housing investments are particularly large in much of Ireland, where more than 2% of the existing housing stock needs to be built to alleviate the pressures.

And that points to an uncomfortable fact. The UK is no longer in the EU, so the study ignored the UK housing needs altogether, but the data from Ireland makes you wonder if investment needs are as high in the UK as they are in Ireland.

While I don’t know of any detailed study of the regions in the UK, I do know that we have funding for an additional 700,000 homes and the government’s (unrealistic) ambition for an additional 1.5 million homes to be built. Given our existing housing stock of 30 million homes, that equates to an additional housing investment of 2.3% to 5% of the existing stock. Hence, the UK would likely be coloured in dark blue on the map, just like much of Ireland.