England prides itself on the idea that one’s home is one’s castle. The trouble is, there isn’t enough land for everyone to have one near where they would like to live. So we build flats. If we want to live near opportunity, most of us have to share land. It’s how towns work.
Flats are, in principle, a brilliant bargain. We share the expensive bits: the land, the staircase, maybe a caretaker, and perhaps a shared garden – but you have privacy where it matters behind your own front door. Across the world, this is a normal setup. It is also, in a literal sense, the infrastructure of urban life. It is the form of housing that lets nurses, teachers, and bus drivers live within reach of the places that need them.
People have a natural tendency to come together. Economists call it agglomeration. Businesses come to where the customers and workers are, and vice versa. Restaurants open next to other restaurants. Families settle next to other families. Artists move next to other artists. It’s a fact of life, marked clearly in many towns. In Leeds, university students live in Hyde Park but avoid Burley despite both being mere streets away. In Manchester, curry restaurants open on the Curry Mile despite rents being cheaper elsewhere. In Cambridge, multinational pharmaceutical firms pay eye-watering amounts in rent despite having the whole world to choose from. The agglomeration effect is almost a pull of nature, an almost impossible force to avoid.
The housing lesson from this is that there is only so much land within a 30-minute commute of your preferred school, pub or workplace. So we build up where that need is great.
And Britain has a special reason to understand that logic: in high-demand places, so much of the value of our homes sits in the land rather than the bricks and mortar. The structure matters, of course, but land and location are king. Land now accounts for three-quarters of the total value of UK housing and buildings only one-quarter. The UK has some of the most expensive land for housing of any country where data are available. When land is this valuable, sharing it is what makes life affordable. That’s exactly what flats allow you to do.
Other countries make much better use of land in towns. They build densely, but not too oppressively. They have a tradition of building the “missing middle” of housing. The six, seven, eight-storey apartment buildings that are pleasant from the street, but large enough to split the cost of the land between the dozens of households to make a central location affordable.
Britain has its own tradition of this. Look around at the (once) middle-class mansion blocks of Marylebone, or the great progressive contribution of London County Council’s estates. These buildings are the ideal of many urbanists. Dense but friendly. They are buildings that encourage neighbours to mix, create a density of customers for thriving high streets and place workers within easy commute of workplaces.
Yet British flat prices fell by 0.5 per cent in December, led in part by a major drop in property prices in inner London. So if flats are so essential then why are flat sales down and flat prices under pressure? Because in England, buying a flat has become a great unknown.
In much of the country, modern flats have been exploited as a second-class form of ownership: leasehold. In theory you “own” your home. In practice you can be locked into opaque charges and unaccountable management, with a freeholder sitting above you. For years, much of that system fairly existed. Recently however, there has been a huge rise in exploitative industry practices. Ground rents have become a reliable income stream. Service charges are now an avenue for rent-seeking. For many, flats have become a financial product with a front door. The incentives driving this are obvious. If building homes is hard, why be a builder when you can be a rent-seeker?
This is where England’s regulatory culture becomes absurd. We are a country that micromanages the homeowner and indulges the rent-seeker. You can require permission to change your front door or put up a bike shed yet when it comes to the governance of millions of flats, we have tolerated something close to the wild west. We regulate the nitty-gritty, often loading cost and delay onto small builders and buyers, while a system that is meant to protect flat owners from mismanagement and extraction has been too weak, too slow, and too easy to game. There are plenty of rents to extract from mismanagement. Take multiple-occupancy buildings insurance. A 2023 Financial Conduct Authority report found broker pay rose by 40 per cent between 2019 and 2022. The post-Grenfell sales market was a bonanza for many brokers, with inflated premiums and commissions flowing to third parties including to flat owners’ own managing agents and freeholders.
The building safety crisis was a source of stress, and despair, for many flat owners. The failure wasn’t that the government acted to make buildings safe – that is an obvious necessity. The failure was allowing unsafe buildings to be put up in the first place, and then creating years of uncertainty about who pays, how much, and when. These are questions that really matter for the hundreds of thousands of residents in buildings with unsafe cladding when MHCLG put the cost for cladding remediation at anywhere between £11.8bn and £22.7bn, or for the millions more that got caught up in higher insurance premiums and market disruption. For ordinary owners, the problem isn’t just that costs can be high. It’s that the liability is unpredictable. You can’t budget for it. You can’t price it. And if you can’t price the risk, lenders hesitate, buyers hesitate, insurers reprice, and the market seizes up. We are left with a depressed flat market with too many owners trapped in limbo.
That is the heart of the death of the English flat: not a sudden cultural turn against apartment living, but a collapse of trust in the system that comes with it. When buying a flat feels like purchasing a bundle of unknown future liabilities, run by a rent-seeking industry, and regulated by a failing political system, people do the rational thing. If they can stretch to a house, they do. If they can’t, they wait, or they move further away, or they give up.
And this has consequences far beyond the property pages. Flats aren’t a lifestyle option for urban types; they are central to the functioning of Britain’s most productive places. If we can’t build and sell flats at scale, we can’t house the workers those places depend on. We can’t grow without pushing people into longer commutes. We can’t protect the countryside while meeting housing needs. We can’t keep talent in our cities if we turn them into playgrounds for inherited wealth.
The solution is straightforward in principle: make flats safe to buy, fair to run and easy to build.
First, we need a tenure system that treats flat owners as real owners, with real control. That means moving decisively toward commonhold or resident-controlled models, with strong consumer protections and clear rules. Second, we need to fix block management including transparency by default, easy routes to challenge charges, and genuine power for residents to appoint managing agents. Third, we need to end the regime of unpredictable, hard-to-price liabilities landing on ordinary leaseholders.
Finally, we need to build better flats and more of them. Importantly this means the missing middle – not skyscrapers or bungalows but the mid-rise, street-based homes that families can live in, built to decent standards of space, light and design. And we need more builders delivering them, not a handful of volume players working a system that is too complex for challengers to enter.
The English flat isn’t dead. It’s on life support. The question is whether we save it or let the country drift into a two-tier system: castles for the rich, and liabilities for everyone else.
[Further reading: Please let me rent your house]
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