Four Babies Born for Every New Home Built in the Past Five Years in Huntingdonshire

Four babies have been born for every new home that has been built in Huntingdonshire since 2012, deepening the St Neots housing shortage.

This discovery is an important foundation for my concerns about the future of the St Neots property market - when you consider the battle that several people face daily in order to buy their first home and get on the St Neots property ladder. This is particularly ironic as these St Neots youngsters’ are being born in an age when the number of new babies born to new homes was far lower.

Furthermore, this also means the babies being born now, who will become the next generation’s first-time buyers, will come up against an even bigger competition. This is unless we move to long term fixes to the housing market, i

nstead of the short term fixes that successive Governments have done since the 1980’s.

This graph shows the most updated data for the area covered by the Huntingdonshire Council, the number of properties-built versus the number of babies born together with the corresponding ratio of the two topics …

It can be seen that in 2016, 3.79 babies had been born in Huntingdonshire for every home that had been built in the five years to the end of 2016. Interestingly, that ratio nationally was 2.9 babies to every home built in the ‘50s and 2.4 in the ‘70s.

Our children, and our grandchildren, will be placed in an unbelievably difficult position when wanting to buy their first home unless effective action is taken. Additionally, It doesn’t really help that the life expectancy is growing every year, as this too is also placing excessive pressure on the availability of homes.

Owning a home is something many Brits aspire to achieve. The only long-term measure that will help is the building of more new homes on a scale not seen since the 50’s and 60’s, which means we would need to aim to at least double the number of homes we build annually.

In the meantime, what does this mean for St Neots landlords and homeowners? Well the demand for rental properties in St Neots in the short term will remain high and until the rate of building grows substantially, this means rents will remain strong and correspondingly, property values will remain robust.